On Our Best Behavior

How can you stop living under the weight of shame and still act with integrity? In On Our Best Behavior, Elise Loehnen argues that the Seven Deadly Sins have been repurposed as a cultural operating system that trains women to police themselves—keeping behavior legible and power consolidated. Loehnen contends that these sins—sloth, envy, pride, gluttony, greed, lust, and anger—are not fixed moral laws but social technologies that shape which emotions and desires you’re “allowed” to have. To reclaim freedom, you must understand how these categories traveled from monastic psychology to mass culture and then reframe them as inner signals instead of cudgels.

Loehnen starts with the genealogy. In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus described eight “logismoi” (troubling thoughts) as tools for spiritual discernment. Centuries later, Pope Gregory I collapsed and reworked them into the seven that persist. Medieval teachers—Dante, Chaucer, Aquinas—dramatized them so vividly that they seeped into secular life. Because the sins are subjective (“too much” pride, “too much” appetite), they function as a whip without a rulebook: you never know when you’ve crossed the line, so you keep yourself small. For women, this subjectivity has consistently mapped onto expectations of modesty, purity, and service.

Key Idea

“The attempt to avoid these sins corrals women and diminishes the potential fullness of our lives…The Seven Deadly Sins are primary threads of this sticky web.”

How shame gets installed

Loehnen shows how churches, courts, classrooms, and media translate theology into everyday scripts. Consider Mary Magdalene: although canonical gospels cast her as first witness to the resurrection, Pope Gregory later conflated her with the “sinful woman,” turning her into a convenient emblem of female vice (Karen King and Jean-Yves Leloup help Loehnen unpack this). Such interpretive moves matter: they set the tone for eras of witch hunts (Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum), dress codes that blame women for men’s distraction, and cultural sayings like “Pride goeth before a fall” that become reflexive self-checks.

What the book actually does

Part 1 reframes each “sin” as a site of reclamation. Sloth becomes a lens on your right to rest in a culture of overwork (from Martin Luther’s Protestant ethic to factory clocks). Envy becomes a compass for desire rather than a mark of meanness. Pride becomes “healthy narcissism” (Craig Malkin) that lets you own your gifts despite the likability trap. Gluttony expands to body politics: fatphobia, diet culture, and trauma’s imprint on appetite (Aubrey Gordon, Roxane Gay, Geneen Roth). Greed separates legitimate security from hoarding while surfacing women’s scripted discomfort with money (Sallie Krawcheck, Lynne Twist).

Part 2 braids sexuality, boundaries, and justice. You learn why arousal doesn’t equal consent (Meredith Chivers), how fantasies can be tools rather than literal wishes (Michael Bader), and why consent culture must center clear yes/no rather than compliance (Melissa Febos’s “cuddle party”). Anger gets reframed through needs (Marshall Rosenberg) and relational science (John and Julie Gottman). Grief—pushed off Evagrius’s list—returns as necessary work (George Bonanno, Nora McInerny), anchored by Loehnen’s loss of her brother-in-law Peter. Across these threads, Loehnen names “himpathy” (popularized by Kate Manne; Loehnen notes its cultural use) as a force that shields perpetrators and erases survivors.

From policing to integration

The book closes by revisiting early Christian and Gnostic currents to suggest that these energies were once treated as climates to integrate, not demons to exile. Rehabilitating Mary Magdalene, embracing both “Divine Feminine” and “Divine Masculine” (Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson), and reading Evagrius as a psychologist rather than a mere moralist, Loehnen invites you to turn shame into information. That move requires inner discernment (meditation, journaling, “The Work” of Byron Katie) and outer action (policy for rest and childcare, accountability for sexual violence, economic equity).

In short: the Seven Deadly Sins became a casing around your aliveness. Loehnen’s project peels that casing off. By seeing how power engineered these categories and by learning to translate each “sin” back into a healthy human capacity—rest, wanting, self-regard, nourishment, security, erotic agency, righteous anger, and shared grief—you recover a steadier inner compass and help build a culture that no longer needs shame to keep order.

What if the Seven Deadly Sins aren’t private moral failings but a cultural operating system that keeps you small? Elise Loehnen argues that pride, sloth, greed, envy, anger, gluttony, and lust migrated from monastic warning labels into everyday controls on women’s ambition, appetite, sexuality, and voice. Because the line between virtue and vice is vague—how much is too much?—you self-police to avoid accusation. The result is chronic vigilance: you strive to be likable, tireless, accommodating, thin, sexually modest, and financially undemanding, hoping goodness equals safety.

Loehnen’s own wake-up call—panic, therapy, and the question of what was sitting on her chest—becomes a template: moral scripts are embodied, not abstract. A therapist’s blunt read (“you’ve been trying to be saintly”) names a pattern many women feel. The book invites you to notice where the sins live in your body and calendar—and to recover the capacities they’ve distorted: rest, desire, pride, money, anger, and grief.

How the scripts were installed

The story starts before Sunday school. Archaeology suggests Paleolithic partnership and fluid gender roles (Çatalhöyük graves with women hunters); then agriculture, property, and conquest restructured power. Women became “the first property of the patriarchy,” and religion supplied a legal-moral superstructure. Pope Gregory recast Mary Magdalene as the penitent prostitute and linked her “seven demons” to the Seven Deadlies, branding female spiritual authority as suspect. Monastic catalogs (Evagrius Ponticus) morphed into simplified sin lists that medieval and modern culture use to discipline behavior, especially women’s. Witch trials then criminalized women’s care networks through terror and spectacle. The net effect: an inner cop that sounds like conscience but mostly enforces compliance. (Context: Gerda Lerner argues patriarchy requires women’s cooperation.)

Ambiguity as a control feature

Because sins are squishy, they’re easily weaponized. Is your assertiveness pride or leadership? Is your nap sloth or recovery? When rules are ambiguous, external authorities—churches, bosses, social media—get to decide. That keeps you anxious about belonging and hungry for approval. Loehnen catalogs how each sin mapped onto her life: shame at wanting money (greed), fear of being “too much” (pride), overwork to avoid sloth, compulsive thinness (gluttony), suppressed anger, and sexual self-doubt (lust). The cumulative pressure narrows your life.

Core framing

“The Seven Deadly Sins…are primary threads of this sticky web.”

From damnation to diagnostics

The pivot isn’t moral anarchy; it’s moral literacy. Loehnen points to the Gospel of Mary (via Jean-Yves Leloup) where Jesus names “seven powers” like Desire and Ignorance—energies to balance, not crimes to punish. When you treat the sins as cues instead of verdicts, you notice what’s underneath: fear, scarcity, shame, or systemic failure. Sloth becomes a signal to rest in a burnout economy; greed points to unmet needs for safety; pride asks you to steward real gifts; gluttony reveals body shame and trauma; lust calls for consent-rich embodiment; envy shows direction; anger indicates boundaries; sadness asks you to grieve. (Note: This mirrors contemporary therapeutic lenses—from Nonviolent Communication to trauma-informed care—that see emotions as information.)

A body-first, culture-aware approach

Your body becomes the dashboard. Neuroscience (Srini Pillay) shows rest improves creativity; Anna Lembke maps dopamine’s need for balance; Meredith Chivers’s lab proves arousal ≠ consent. Somatic therapy reveals trauma lodged in muscle and breath; Loehnen’s own jaw tension and sexual dissociation testify to how scripts live in flesh. The book pulls in frameworks—Enneagram, Gottman conflict research, Harriet Lerner on anger—to translate feelings into needs and boundaries.

From personal shifts to public change

Personal unlearning requires political scaffolding. Busyness pays an economic order that relies on unpaid care; reproductive control and legal gaps around sexual violence (Kate Manne’s “himpathy”) secure male power; wealth hoarding distorts philanthropy and starves safety nets. The book refuses either/or: you practice new habits—rest, money talk, consent culture, boundary language—while advocating paid leave, childcare, and survivor-centered justice.

What you’ll learn next

You’ll trace how patriarchy took root; revalue sloth as rest; reclaim appetite and pleasure from gluttony and lust; disentangle pride, envy, and money; and wield anger and sadness for repair. Along the way, you’ll confront sexual violence as a tool of power, not desire, and learn to name, believe, and respond. The throughline: discernment over dogma. When you stop letting a centuries-old script define “goodness,” you recover bandwidth, agency, and a life aligned with values—yours, not theirs.

Loehnen grounds her argument in history: patriarchy isn’t destiny; it’s a design. For most of human time, small bands survived through partnership—women’s gathering, caretaking, and social glue balanced men’s hunting and defense. With agriculture (c. 10,000–3000 B.C.), land, herds, and surplus made hoarding and inheritance possible. Property needed protection; war scaled; hierarchy hardened. In this material shift, women’s bodies and labor were absorbed into property logics—“owned” to guarantee lineage and consolidate wealth.

Religion as a force multiplier

Monotheism, Loehnen argues, often erased competing myths that once honored feminine divinity. Genesis retells older Near Eastern stories (Joseph Campbell’s comparative myth lens appears here) but centers an Adamic lineage in which Eve catalyzes “the fall.” This narrative meets institutions: councils (like Nicaea) decide canons, suppress gospels (the Gnostic texts), and elevate certain theologies. Pope Gregory’s conflation of Mary Magdalene with the “sinful woman” is a case study: a revered disciple gets rebranded as a sexual warning. The result is moral authority fused to male leadership and a spiritual grammar that reads female desire as disorder.

Witch hunts and the isolation of women

As communal structures thinned, policing intensified. The Inquisition and witch hunts—guided by manuals like Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum—targeted midwives and healers, shredding intergenerational networks of female knowledge. Terror separated women from one another and installed internal surveillance: you learned to question your own instincts. Gerda Lerner’s thesis is pivotal here: patriarchal systems endure partly because women, under pressure, enforce respectability and participate in their own subordination. Loehnen is careful—this isn’t blame; it’s a diagnostic of how culture trains complicity.

Why this history matters to you

Seeing patriarchy as contingent frees you to imagine change. If hierarchy rose with material and ideological shifts, it can diminish through new arrangements: equitable laws, care-centered economies, and narratives that honor women’s authority. Loehnen brings in the frame of “Divine Feminine” and “Divine Masculine” energies—available to every person—to argue for integration rather than reversal (no longing for a matriarchy). The task is strategic: identify the levers patriarchy used—property, religious story, legal code, fear—and work them in reverse.

Key Idea

When you map how stories and structures co-produced patriarchy, you stop mistaking it for nature—and you start dismantling it as policy, practice, and personal reflex.

From stories to systems to self

Loehnen connects the mythic (Mary Magdalene’s recasting) with the systemic (witch trials) and the intimate (your shame around appetite or pride). These are not separate spheres. When a school bans “suggestive” clothing rather than demanding boys manage themselves, you meet a modern echo of older logics: women must curtail their presence to sustain male order. Understanding this through-line is empowering. It lets you name a pattern and choose differently—in your home division of labor, in workplace norms, and at the ballot box.

(Note: Loehnen aligns with feminist historians like Lerner and cultural critics like bell hooks who insist patriarchy harms men, too—by cutting them off from sadness, care, and vulnerability. Integration is a liberation project for everyone.)

Patriarchy didn’t descend like weather; it was built. Loehnen sketches a timeline that moves you from partnership societies to property regimes and finally to religious codification. The goal isn’t antiquarian trivia; it’s leverage. When you see how norms were made, you stop mistaking them for nature and start asking what else could be true.

From partnership to property

Early foragers likely organized around flexibility and mutuality. Archaeology at Çatalhöyük and newer analyses of burial goods challenge rigid hunter/housewife myths. The hinge is agriculture: surplus enables private property, conquest rewards male violence, and women become spoils—“the first property of the patriarchy.” Lineage and inheritance laws prioritize control over women’s fertility.

Religion as legitimizer

Monotheism offered divine backing to male intermediaries. Genesis reframed older creation myths: Eve becomes the emblem of temptation; the serpent, a cautionary tale. Over time, the church edited the cast. Pope Gregory folded Mary Magdalene into a “sinful woman” archetype and even associated her “seven demons” with the Seven Deadly Sins, downgrading a likely apostolic witness into a repentant model. This editorializing served institutional order more than historical accuracy. (Note: Suppressed Gnostic texts, including the Gospel of Mary, present women as bearers of esoteric knowledge—a rival epistemology.)

Violence and spectacle

Law and terror consolidated the hierarchy: Hammurabi’s codes, inquisitions, witch hunts (Malleus Maleficarum) targeted women’s informal power—midwifery, herbal medicine, and communal eldering. Public executions and forced confessions broke solidarity and recast female authority as demonic. You inherit not just stories but absences—erased lineages of women’s care work.

The cooperation trap

Gerda Lerner’s sober point looms: patriarchy endures by conscripting women’s cooperation. Social rewards—praise for modesty, sacrifice, and care—train you to enforce the code on yourself and each other (think gossip, likability policing). This is why the sins work so well as levers: their ambiguity and moral heat make them perfect tools for horizontal surveillance.

Why origin stories matter

If a rule has a date, it can be updated. Seeing how patriarchy was assembled frees you to disassemble it—piece by piece.

What you can do now

Audit inherited injunctions—about sex, money, food, and anger. Ask who benefits when you obey them. Reclaim erased models (Mary Magdalene as teacher, not temptress) to widen the imaginary of what women can be. Then pair inner shifts with outer demands: childcare, paid leave, survivor-centered justice, and economic policies that decenter unpaid female labor. History becomes a pry bar; you use it to lift what culture keeps pinned.

Loehnen takes on “sloth” to expose a cultural bait-and-switch: you learned to equate virtue with relentless productivity. From Martin Luther’s sanctification of labor to the Industrial Revolution’s timecards, modern life moralized output. “Time is money” migrated from factory floors to your calendar; idleness became a character flaw. This script is gendered. Women shoulder the second shift—waged work plus unpaid domestic and emotional labor—yet feel guilty for any pause.

The engine of overwork

Loehnen folds in cultural shorthand—“You can sleep when you’re dead”—and family lore (mothers up at 4 a.m.) to show how busyness becomes status and self-worth. Brigid Schulte’s and Heather Boushey’s research grounds the economics: one income rarely covers a family, so women’s paid work rose out of necessity, not pure liberation. The catch? Domestic governance didn’t rebalance. Even high-earning women often manage logistics, social calendars, and care. No wonder so many of us feel like “synchronized swimmers”—calm atop, legs thrashing below.

Key Idea

Rest is not indulgence; it is the precondition for creativity, political participation, and long-horizon thinking.

The brain on rest

Neuroscience backs what your body knows. Srini Pillay and others show that unfocused states—daydreaming, naps, aimless walks—activate networks critical for insight and problem-solving. When women are denied rest, they lose the bandwidth for civic engagement and leadership. Exhaustion protects the status quo: if you’re too tired, you won’t organize for paid leave, childcare, or fair pay—the structural equivalents of rest.

From private practice to public change

Loehnen pairs boundary work with policy. Privately, you renegotiate the division of labor, stop “anticipatory caretaking,” and set hard stops on hours. You track actual tasks (including mental load) to make the invisible visible. Publicly, you back policies—paid family leave, universal childcare, living wages—that make rest a right, not a luxury. These levers multiply one another: personal boundaries reclaim energy to fight for systemic fixes; systemic fixes make personal boundaries sustainable.

• Try this: Audit your week for unpaid labor; redistribute 20% immediately, then revisit monthly.
• Say it: “I’m taking rest because I’m human, not because I’ve earned it.”
• Support it: Vote and advocate for care infrastructure; it’s civic scaffolding for everyone’s nervous system.

When you stop equating worth with output, sloth dissolves as a moral threat and reveals its buried wisdom: every living system cycles between effort and recovery. Your life deserves the same rhythm—and so does your society.

Sloth, recoded as a woman’s cardinal flaw, is the moral fig leaf that covers a 24/7 economy. Loehnen argues that calling rest “lazy” keeps you producing, caregiving, and apologizing—often to your detriment. Reframing sloth as strategy gives you back time, health, and the power to choose where your energy goes.

How rest became a sin

The Protestant work ethic (Luther, then Weber’s analysis) sanctified labor and thrift. The Industrial Revolution turned minutes into money via the factory clock. In this blend, idleness signals moral failure. Digital tools made it worse—phones drag the office into bed and the playground. Women, meanwhile, shoulder a second shift at home even when fully employed. You end up performing two jobs under one metric: never stop.

The costs you pay

Chronic vigilance depletes bandwidth. Neuroscience (Srini Pillay) shows unfocus unlocks creativity; Anna Lembke’s work on dopamine urges balance to avoid burnout. Loehnen’s vignettes—typing in a five-square-foot office, her son thinking she “sleeps at work,” mom equating worth with constant activity—mirror cultural data: women report more stress; mothers absorb more unpaid care; and workplaces still penalize them for caregiving.

Who benefits from your exhaustion

Worn-down workers don’t organize. Tired parents don’t protest. Exhaustion is a feature, not a bug, of systems that resist redistribution. Loehnen links the vetoed Comprehensive Child Development Act (1971), flimsy leave policies, and surveillance-style management to a wider economy that monetizes your attention and devotion.

Reframe to remember

Rest is not indulgence; it’s infrastructure for clarity, creativity, and collective action.

Practices that reclaim time

- Audit work that truly needs you; delegate or drop the rest.
- Schedule tech-free micro-breaks and real leisure (not “catch-up” time).
- Replace “I’m so busy” virtue signaling with curiosity: What am I protecting by staying tired?

Pair with policy: advocate paid leave, childcare, and reasonable hours. Inside relationships, use Gottman-style dialogues to redistribute domestic labor. The pandemic’s forced stillness proved unsustainable habits weren’t destiny; you can keep some of that recalibration.

Why this is moral work

Calling rest holy reclaims a body that capitalism and patriarchy would colonize. It lets you choose long-term contribution over short-term performance. And it frees the anger, grief, and vision needed to change the structures that made you so tired in the first place.

Loehnen makes a simple, liberating move: rather than treating envy and lust as damning, treat them as data. Envy, she insists, is a compass—information about what you want but haven’t allowed yourself to claim. Lust and arousal, meanwhile, are not moral verdicts; your body can respond without your consent or desire. Together, these reframings let you own wanting while protecting your boundaries.

Envy as a map

Distinguish jealousy (a triangle; fear of loss) from envy (one-to-one; she has what I want). Culturally, women are shamed for envy, then trained to police other women’s shine. Loehnen shares her reaction to Tina Brown’s Women in the World conference—envy that later became fuel for her own projects—and cites Brené Brown, Lori Gottlieb, Rachel Simmons, and Glennon Doyle: confident girls are often punished into self-silencing. The antidote is to find “expanders” (Lacy Phillips’s term)—models whose success proves possibility.

Key Idea

“Follow your envy. It tells you what you want.”

Arousal isn’t consent

Meredith Chivers’s lab work shows genital arousal doesn’t necessarily match subjective desire, especially for heterosexual women. Loehnen’s own assault at sixteen—she orgasmed under coercion—becomes proof of this disconnect and a source of long-held shame. Therapy and science reframed it: the orgasm was a fear response, not consent. Michael Bader’s clinical lens on “ravishment” fantasies further clarifies that fantasy can be a tool for negotiating safety and surrender—not a wish for real violation. Jaiya and other educators emphasize that enactment must be anchored in explicit, enthusiastic consent.

From shame to strategy

To work with envy, write down who triggers it and isolate the element you want: freedom, money, time, voice. Then find expanders, study their paths, and take one small analogous step. To work with sexual desire, separate physiology from permission. Practice verbal yes/no, and honor your “no” even when social pressure pushes you to comply (Melissa Febos’s cuddle-party scene reveals how easily compliance masquerades as consent). Desire is not the problem. Unexamined shame and blurry boundaries are.

• Name envy privately; convert it into a plan with dates and steps.
• Use consent rituals; “no” is a complete sentence you don’t have to defend.
• Treat fantasies as information; explore only with explicit, revisable agreements.

(Note: Loehnen’s stance echoes Esther Perel’s differentiation between erotic imagination and ethical action; the gap between thought and deed is where responsibility—and freedom—live.)

Gluttony and lust have long policed women’s bodies—what you can eat, enjoy, or want. Loehnen dismantles diet moralism and sexual shame, then rebuilds a body-first ethic grounded in science and consent. Appetite, she argues, is not a vice; it’s information. Your job is to listen wisely, not to punish.

Food, shame, and the arrival fallacy

Diet culture moralizes eating and idolizes thinness. Loehnen’s family stories—dad policing weight, mom swinging between restriction and indulgence—reveal how shame gets served at dinner. Research shows diets rarely sustain weight loss; antifat bias remains one of the last acceptable prejudices and intersects with class and race (Aubrey Gordon, Paul Campos). A Yale Rudd Center survey found nearly half of respondents would trade a year of life to avoid being “obese”—a window into cultural toxicity. The antidote isn’t performative body positivity; it’s neutrality and curiosity: hunger is a signal; trauma sometimes drives coping; your body’s story deserves context and care.

Sex, arousal, and consent

Augustine helped equate desire with sin; modern purity culture still echoes him. Loehnen counters with science: Meredith Chivers’s lab shows women’s genital arousal often fails to map neatly to subjective desire. A wet vagina or even orgasm doesn’t mean consent; the body can protect itself under threat. Loehnen’s own teen assault included orgasm—a fact that buried her story for decades until she learned that physiological response can be trauma-linked. Uncoupling arousal from consent dissolves shame and clarifies ethics: only an embodied yes counts.

Fantasies as intelligence

Michael Bader reads fantasies as safety-engineering for surrender, not confessions of literal desire. Jaiya notes many cis women fantasize about being taken; within consent-rich play, this can offload guilt rooted in cultural scripts about “good girls.” Treat fantasies as maps to needs—structure, trust, novelty—then build safe containers with partners. Pleasure, in this framing, is a spiritual and creative force (the “maternal matrix”), not a moral hazard.

Reclaiming appetite

Your hunger—for food, for touch, for rest—announces what’s alive. Shame starves life; discernment feeds it.

Practices for a kinder body culture

- Shift from control to communication: track hunger, satiety, and triggers without moral labels.
- Pursue trauma-aware somatic work when needed (Loehnen’s MDMA-assisted therapy is one example; always seek qualified care).
- Build consent culture: explicit yeses, renegotiation, aftercare.
- Challenge fatphobia and purity narratives in your circles; center structural fixes (food access, healthcare, sex education).

If you were taught that pride is the root of all sin, you likely learned to shrink. Loehnen shows how the “likability trap” punishes women who claim space. Public examples abound: Anne Hathaway’s Oscar-era backlash for seeming “too eager,” or Janet Jackson’s blacklisting after the 2004 Super Bowl. The lesson is clear: be excellent, but not proud; visible, but not too much. Loehnen counters with psychology: you need a balanced, reality-based self-regard to do your work in the world.

Healthy narcissism vs. echoism

Psychologist Craig Malkin maps a spectrum: destructive narcissism on one end, echoism (self-erasure) on the other. Many women, terrified of appearing narcissistic, default to echoism—downplaying wins, deflecting praise, giving credit away. But “healthy narcissism” is the middle path: feeling special enough to take risks, withstand criticism, and lead, without disconnecting from reality or empathy. Oprah’s admonition to Glennon Doyle captures it: playing small isn’t noble; it steals permission from others to be whole.

Key Idea

Balanced pride is not vanity; it’s fuel for contribution, resilience, and creative risk.

The cost of under-claiming

Under-claiming compresses careers. Loehnen recounts boardroom dynamics: men claim credit loudly; women say, “It was the team.” This asymmetry shapes raises, promotions, and reputation. Cultural messages about “good womanhood” keep you apologetic for authority, and those habits cascade into structural inequities. If performance reviews reward boldness, then self-effacement quietly taxes women’s advancement.

Practice claiming

Loehnen recommends graduated exposure. Start by naming small wins out loud. Keep a “brag file” that logs outcomes and praise so evidence is at hand. In teams, normalize women’s assertiveness—do not sand it down for palatability. When someone says “you’re intimidating,” translate it: your competence disrupts a gender script. Hold steady. Over time, pride becomes less a spike of taboo and more the steady hum of accurate self-knowledge.

• Share one accomplishment per week with a trusted circle; ask them to share theirs.
• In meetings, state your contributions plainly once; do not dilute with nervous qualifiers.
• Redesign feedback norms: evaluate ideas and impact, not “likability.”

Claiming pride rebalances a centuries-old distortion. You’re not meant to live muted. You’re meant to be accurate about your value—and then spend it in service of work that matters.

Sexual violence isn’t about uncontrollable desire; it’s about control. Loehnen names rape as a social tool that keeps women anxious and compliant, then indicts a culture that sympathizes with perpetrators over survivors—what philosopher Kate Manne calls “himpathy.” To change the script, you must tell the truth about power, bodies, and law.

The numbers behind the fear

One in five women experiences rape or attempted rape; up to 20% of Americans report childhood molestation. Nearly half of murdered women are killed by current or former partners. Indigenous women face staggering rates of sexual violence, amplified by jurisdictional loopholes that let non-tribal perpetrators evade justice. These are not rare misfortunes; they’re patterned realities.

Why survivors go silent

Loehnen’s teen assault—an attack by “Greg” that ended with orgasm—took decades to name as rape. Cultural myths equate bodily response with desire, and communities punish girls who speak (boarding-school whisper networks, reputation damage). Most assaults come from known men; the “stranger in an alley” story misdirects prevention and legal focus. Of 1,000 assaults entering the system, roughly 975 perpetrators walk free; reporting often means retraumatization and character assassination.

Himpathy in action

Think Brock Turner: media framed a swimmer’s lost future instead of a woman’s stolen safety. Himpathy steers attention to men’s reputations, jobs, and families, and teaches women to protect those above their own healing (Rebecca Traister’s #MeToo reporting echoes this). Reproductive control laws (post-Roe restrictions) extend the logic—policing women’s bodies while absolving male responsibility.

Centering truth

“Rape is not about insatiable lust…It’s about power, dominance, and control.”

What changes the culture

- Update sexual literacy: arousal ≠ consent; orgasm under duress does not absolve violence (Meredith Chivers’s findings matter here).
- Shift reflexes: believe, support, and avoid reputation-protection scripts; notice himpathy in yourself and institutions.
- Reform systems: survivor-centered processes, better evidence protocols, and accountability that doesn’t rely on victims to carry all the labor. Close legal gaps that shield perpetrators, especially in Indigenous jurisdictions.
- Teach consent early and often; normalize yes/no negotiation and repair.

Reclaiming sexual agency requires both inner clarity and outer change. When the culture stops excusing abuse as “misunderstanding,” survivors stop paying with their silence.

“Gluttony” becomes, in Loehnen’s hands, an x-ray of how we instrumentalize and shame bodies—especially women’s. Family weigh-ins, diet talk, and medical moralizing make appetite suspect and thinness a virtue signal. But this is not just personal neurosis; it’s a social script propped up by bias, commerce, and a reductionist health narrative. Loehnen invites you to move from control to care—treating appetite as intelligence and the body as an ally.

Fatphobia as moral theater

Aubrey Gordon (yrfatfriend) and cited research show explicit anti-fat bias remains widespread and socially tolerated. We frame weight as personal failure, ignoring genetics, environment, medication, trauma, and poverty. People report they’d trade years of life to avoid fatness—a window into a panic that hijacks reason and licenses discrimination. Health becomes a fig leaf; punishment masquerades as concern.

Key Idea

“Fat-phobia is the last bastion of acceptable bias, disguised in the morality of health.”

Trauma, appetite, and armor

Roxane Gay’s Hunger reframes eating as protection—a body made bigger to feel safer. Loehnen shares somatic work (including MDMA-assisted therapy) to show how unprocessed feeling lodges in muscle and habit. If food is soothing or control is numbness, “gluttony” is a coping strategy, not a sin. The project is not to swap one moral for another, but to listen: what is hunger trying to regulate? What does fullness protect you from?

From control to embodiment

Loehnen pushes past binary slogans—neither shame-driven diets nor performative positivity suffice. She points to Geneen Roth’s eating presence practices and James Gordon’s body-based healing: slow down, taste, track hunger and satiety, and notice emotion-body links. Neutrality—“my body is”—often beats forced adoration. Over time, you rebuild trust: appetite signals become readable and reliable, not enemies.

• Pause before meals; breathe and ask, “What am I hungry for—food, rest, comfort, company?”
• Replace weight talk with function talk: sleep, strength, stamina, mood.
• Advocate for weight-neutral care: request evidence-based treatment beyond BMI.

When appetite is no longer a battlefield, the body can stop bracing and start informing. That shift—from control to conversation—is the difference between living at war with yourself and living at home in yourself.

Three scripts—pride, envy, and greed—conspire to keep you small, apologetic, and underpaid. Loehnen disentangles healthy self-regard from arrogance, turns envy into a steering tool, and reclaims money as security rather than sin. The net effect: you can want, ask, and receive without self-betrayal.

The likability trap

Women who shine are punished. Anne Hathaway’s earnest Oscar speech drew outsized scorn; Janet Jackson absorbed career damage for a Super Bowl incident her male counterpart skated past. Visibility carries liability when female pride reads as arrogance. Psychologist Craig Malkin’s “echoism” describes people—often women—who fear taking up space. He prescribes “healthy narcissism,” a grounded sense of specialness that fuels resilience and contribution (see also Marianne Williamson and Robin Wall Kimmerer on ego in service).

Envy as compass

Lori Gottlieb’s nudge—“follow your envy”—turns a taboo into data. Loehnen noticed irritation toward women like Tina Brown and Glennon Doyle, then realized it signaled her own latent ambitions (she launched conferences and projects instead of sniping). Distinguish envy (I want that) from jealousy (I fear losing what I have). Use “expanders” (Lacy Phillips) to normalize possibility; practice radical generosity to retrain from scarcity to abundance.

Money without shame

Religious teachings once challenged avarice even as institutions amassed wealth; today, philanthropy can launder reputations while preserving power. Against this muddle, women are socialized to equate asking with greed. Sallie Krawcheck highlights the gap: women negotiate and invest less, compounding inequality. Loehnen’s family anxiety (the “bag lady” fear) shows how scarcity haunts even the relatively privileged. Reframe: money is safety and choice, not virtue or vice. MacKenzie Scott’s unrestricted, large-scale giving offers an alternative to prestige philanthropy.

Practical shifts

Talk numbers; learn investing basics; ask for the raise; define enough; align giving with power-building, not just praise.

Put it together

Practice receiving compliments without deflection. Translate envy into a plan. Treat earning as building resilience—time, healthcare, rest—not as moral contamination. Then demand policies (pay transparency, parental leave) that make individual confidence stick.

Anger and sadness—emotions women are trained to mute—are the very signals that protect boundaries and metabolize loss. Loehnen repositions them as tools for dignity and connection, pairing somatic awareness with relational skills and a wider social critique.

Anger as information

Jaw pain, migraines, clenched shoulders—your body broadcasts anger. Loehnen’s chronic clenching (compounded by being “tongue-tied”) embodied muzzled protest. The Enneagram’s Type One lens (anger as resentment) helped her name it. Culture mislabels women’s anger as hysteria while valorizing men’s rage (Brett Kavanaugh, John McEnroe). Suppressed anger corrodes—Gabor Maté links chronic suppression to illness.

From blame to need

Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication reframes: “I feel angry because a need of mine isn’t met,” not “because you’re awful.” The Gottmans’ research on conflict patterns (criticism, defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling) gives couples a map to interrupt doom loops. Harriet Lerner reminds you that boundaries carry risk—people may leave—but avoiding risk usually means losing yourself. Courage is tolerating short-term wobble for long-term self-respect.

Sadness as teacher

Early monastics exiled sadness as spiritual distraction; modern culture echoes them, urging quick “closure.” Loehnen’s grief for Peter—a brother-like friend—shows the real work: organizing a funeral on autopilot, then weathering non-linear waves. Seeking meaning (including sessions with medium Laura Lynne Jackson) didn’t erase pain but kept love connected. Nora McInerny’s wisdom—grief and joy can co-exist—normalizes living forward with loss. Men, especially, suffer when sadness is forbidden; Terry Real’s “covert depression” often looks like addiction or workaholism and ends in isolation or suicide.

Hold this line

“You can’t heal what you can’t feel.”

Practices for repair

- Track anger in your body; name the need beneath it; make one small boundary.
- Use scripts that own needs (“I need predictability, can we agree on X?”) instead of blame.
- Ritualize grief: memorials, check-ins months later, shared storytelling; expect waves, not stages.
- Model vulnerability for boys and men—sadness as courage, not failure.

Armed with anger’s clarity and sadness’s depth, you become harder to manipulate. That’s not just personal healing; it’s a template for cultural repair.

Greed has long been condemned, but Loehnen asks you to tease apart hoarding from legitimate security. Early ascetics like Evagrius prized radical poverty. Later, Pope Gregory’s framework helped rebrand avarice as a sin remediable, ironically, through almsgiving to the very church that amassed wealth. The larger lesson: moral language often launders power. Today, billionaire fortunes (Bezos, Musk) and exceptional philanthropy (MacKenzie Scott) revive the paradox: can private largesse fix structural extraction?

Women, money, and mixed messages

Historically excluded from capital, women were trained to be consumers, not owners; caretakers, not claimants. The “mommy tax,” wage gaps, and unpaid labor entangle money with dependence and shame. Sallie Krawcheck and Lynne Twist note a pattern: women often give generously yet negotiate timidly. Scarcity narratives—“there’s not enough”—keep you grateful for crumbs. Loehnen argues this isn’t personal pathology; it’s programming.

Key Idea

Your desire for financial safety is moral; hoarding resources at others’ expense is not. Know the difference—and act accordingly.

Define “enough,” then build it

Loehnen’s practical move is deceptively powerful: write down your needs, wants, and “enough.” Build a budget that funds security first—savings, insurance, buffers—then allocates for joy. Treat money conversations as hygiene, not taboo. Transparency shrinks shame and grows agency.

From individual fixes to collective fairness

Personal agency matters, but it can’t replace justice. Loehnen links women’s financial wellbeing to policies: paid family leave, universal childcare, equitable pay, and tax codes that don’t penalize caregivers. When care work is socially invisible, women subsidize the economy with their exhaustion. Elevating care infrastructure is not “women’s policy”; it’s economic common sense.

• Complete a net-worth snapshot; revisit quarterly with a friend for accountability.
• Practice one bold ask (raise, rate increase) per quarter; document outcomes.
• Back candidates who center care economics; track their votes, not their slogans.

Reframing greed gives you permission to pursue safety and sovereignty without apology—and to challenge concentrations of power that hide behind moral smoke screens.

From childhood, girls are taught to be “nice”—hug relatives on command, smile through discomfort, comply rather than disappoint. Loehnen shows how this early conditioning compromises bodily autonomy. Melissa Febos’s “cuddle party” vignette dramatizes the gap between policy and practice: the organizer requires verbal yes before touch, yet men bristle when denied, revealing an entitlement that culture often excuses. You learn to manage others’ comfort at the expense of your no.

Compliance is not consent

Consent is not the absence of resistance; it’s the presence of a yes. Social scripts often invert this. Corporate dress codes warn women not to “distract,” rather than expecting men to regulate themselves. Courtrooms interrogate survivors—What were you wearing? Did you fight?—as if women are custodians of male behavior. These habits teach you to preempt harm by shrinking yourself, and to second-guess violations as “miscommunications.”

Key Idea

A culture of consent starts with explicit asks and honored nos—and holds boundary violators accountable, not their targets.

Relearning touch

Practice is the pivot. Role-play asking and receiving nos until the flinch fades. Narrate your choices to kids—“I’m saying no to a hug right now; I’ll offer a high five”—so they internalize autonomy rather than performance. In partnerships, make consent ongoing and specific; revise agreements as states change. In communities, codify norms (clear policies, reporting channels) and enforce them consistently.

• Adopt a “verbal yes” rule for any nontrivial touch; no guessing.
• Teach alternatives: handshakes, waves, fist bumps as normal refusals, not rudeness.
• Audit institutional codes for victim-blaming language; replace with behavior standards for everyone.

(Note: This chapter pairs with the arousal/consent science in Desire Without Shame; together they dismantle myths that physiology or politeness equals permission.) The payoff of boundary literacy is profound: your body becomes a site of choice, not a stage for performance.

Loehnen insists you look squarely at sexual violence—not as isolated incidents but as a system that protects men’s futures over women’s safety. Katherine Rowland’s statistics anchor the claim: one in five women experience rape or attempted rape; nearly half of murdered women are killed by intimate partners; Indigenous women endure staggering rates (56% experience sexual violence). “Himpathy” (a term popularized by philosopher Kate Manne; Loehnen uses its cultural meaning) names the reflex that centers perpetrators’ potential while erasing survivors’ pain.

How silence is manufactured

Most assaults involve acquaintances (RAINN estimates ~80%), which muddies categories and discourages reporting. False report rates are low (roughly 2–8%), yet cultural narratives fixate on them to justify doubt. Media and institutions rehearse familiar moves: slut-shame, minimize, or treat the accused man’s promise as the highest good (think Brock Turner, whose athletic potential eclipsed his victim’s harm in public discourse). Deborah Tuerkheimer’s legal lens helps explain why so few reports lead to consequences.

Key Idea

When institutions prioritize men’s reputations over women’s safety, impunity is not a bug; it’s the system working as designed.

Race and jurisdiction

Intersection matters. Post–Civil War stereotypes painted Black men as rapists to rationalize terror, which complicates reporting for Black women who risk community backlash. For Native women, jurisdictional loopholes historically let non-Native perpetrators evade tribal prosecution, producing crisis-level harm. Sexual violence thus operates as both patriarchal weapon and racialized control.

Shifting the center

Loehnen’s charge is practical. Believe survivors without demanding they fit tidy scripts. Separate physiology from consent (see Meredith Chivers’s research). Challenge himpathy in conversation and policy: focus on harm done, not on the man’s forfeited prospects. Advocate for trauma-informed processes, statute reforms, and resourcing for survivors. Culture changes one assumption at a time—and through laws that back those assumptions with teeth.

• Replace “What was she wearing?” with “Who chose to harm?”
• Support Indigenous-led legal reforms to close jurisdictional gaps.
• Track institutional outcomes: reporting rates, case closures, survivor satisfaction—not just statements.

If you want a safer world, move attention from men’s promise to women’s personhood—and build systems that make that shift enforceable.

Anger and sadness—so often gendered opposites (men allowed anger, women allowed tears)—both get distorted by culture. Loehnen argues anger is an alarm about unmet needs, not a sin to muzzle, and grief is a crucible, not a detour. When you metabolize them, they become fuel for clarity and connection; when you suppress them, they morph into jaw pain, resentment, and despair.

Anger: from explosion to information

We lionize men’s fury as passion and dismiss women’s as instability. Rebecca Traister captures the bias: men’s anger stirs; women’s grates. Loehnen notices her own clenched jaw—an Enneagram Type One tell that anger has been tucked under “shoulds.” Harriet Lerner’s counsel and Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication offer a path: translate “I’m furious” into “I’m needing safety/respect/reciprocity.” John and Julie Gottman’s research warns that contempt and stonewalling corrode bonds; naming needs prevents escalation and builds repair.

Key Idea

Anger points to a boundary. Grief points to a bond. Both, honored, restore relationship—to self and others.

Sadness: the lost honor of mourning

Evagrius’s early list flirted with “sorrow” as a demonic trap, and later culture coded sadness as weakness—especially for men. Loehnen tells of her brother-in-law Peter’s sudden death and how grief arrived in waves, not stages. George Bonanno’s research shows that smiles in mourning predict resilience; Nora McInerny models public grieving that makes room for long arcs and blended emotions. Terry Real and bell hooks argue that suppressing sadness fuels toxic masculinity—self-harm turned outward.

Practices that transmute

For anger: pause, locate the need, make a clear request, and set consequences you’ll actually keep. For grief: ritualize remembrance, expect ambivalence, and return after the first week—anniversaries matter. Model both for children so they inherit fluency rather than fear. In public life, remember that righteous indignation (think Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr.) has always powered justice; the work is to aim it without burning down your nervous system.

• Translate anger into a need statement before you hit send.
• Create a grief calendar—check in monthly with the bereaved; send a note on key dates.
• In teams, normalize “repair meetings” after conflicts; track learnings, not blame.

When you reclaim anger and sadness, you stop treating your emotional life as a moral test and start using it as a navigation system.

Loehnen ends where the tradition began: with inner work. She revisits Evagrius Ponticus to suggest the “sins” were once tools for discernment—climates to notice and integrate. In some Gnostic renderings (including the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, as translated and interpreted by Jean-Yves Leloup and studied by Karen King), the famous “seven demons” are energies cleansed, not character stains. Read this way, the project is not suppression but return: from shame to rootedness.

Rehabilitating Mary Magdalene

Mary stands as an archetype for misreading and recovery. Canonical texts make her the first witness to resurrection; later sermons branded her a prostitute. Reversing that slander is symbolic and practical: it restores women’s spiritual authority and encourages you to trust your inner teacher rather than external scolds. If the “sins” are really capacities mis-aimed—rest, wanting, self-regard, appetite, security, erotic power, righteous anger—then integration, not denial, is the point.

Key Idea

Treat each “sin” as a signal. Ask what need it reveals, what boundary it marks, what story it challenges—and act from that clarity.

From polarity to partnership

Drawing on Jungian thinkers Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, Loehnen imagines a next cultural phase that honors both “Divine Masculine” (direction, order) and “Divine Feminine” (care, creation) without mapping them onto biology. Integration rejects both domination and sentimental reversal. It looks like leaders who can be decisive and tender, organizations that prize results and rest, and families where power is shared, not hidden in chore charts.

Inner methods, outer commitments

Practically, you cultivate discernment: meditation to notice craving without panic; journaling to decode envy; Byron Katie’s “The Work” to question punishing beliefs; somatic practices to hear your body’s yes/no. Externally, you commit to systems that reflect integration: care infrastructure, consent-centered institutions, and economic rules that reward collaboration over extraction. Loehnen highlights women of color who transmute rage into organizing as models of integrated power.

• Daily check-in: Which “sin” is loud today? What is it asking for?
• Weekly act: One boundary honored, one rest period protected, one ask made.
• Civic step: Back one policy that makes individual integration easier for all (leave, childcare, pay equity).

Integration is the through-line of Loehnen’s book. When you retire shame as your operating system, you don’t become selfish; you become sane. From there, culture can, too.