SFA_Elise NOAD.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

SFA_Elise NOAD.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Missy Modell:
Welcome to sorry for Apologizing. I'm your host, Missy Modell, activist, strategist, and recovering chronic Apologizer. In this podcast, we'll explore all of the ways women have been conditioned by society to play small, whether it's being expected to have children tolerate chronic pain or accept gender inequities. From orgasms to paychecks. This season, we'll work to challenge the cultural beliefs that brought us here and discuss all of the reasons why we should be asking for forgiveness rather than permission. It is time to stop apologizing. Sorry for apologizing. What does it mean to be a good girl? Nice, pious, hardworking, not too slutty, and not angry? I want to be good. It also looks like I won't be enough if I don't do enough. This is something I've regularly grappled with in my life, that my worth is somehow dictated by my output and my achievement. So what happens if I fight that impulse? Why do I even have that impulse at all? I wanted to ask one of the most brilliant women I know, my friend Elise Lunin. She's the creator and host of my favorite podcast, Pulling the Thread, and the author of New York Times best selling book on Our Best Behavior. She writes about the seven deadly sins and the expense women pay for each of them. And I wanted to find out how we can actually break free from this and work towards our fullest expression of self. What if we don't want to be good all the time? Welcome to sorry for apologizing.

Elise Loehnen:
Thank you for having me. How are you doing? I'm well. How are you?

Missy Modell:
I'm good. I mean, before we got on, I was showing you how excitedly I've been devouring your book. Thank you. And in a funny way, I didn't mention this. I was on the subway holding it with a lot of conviction. Like, I felt very proud to arm it and hold it very boldly.

Elise Loehnen:
I don't know, there's something.

Missy Modell:
About it that made me feel.

Elise Loehnen:
Really powerful. Oh, good. Use it. You whack people with it, you get them out of your way. Yes, exactly. I mean, I'm.

Missy Modell:
So excited to dig in, and I feel like your book is literally what this podcast is about. And I feel like I could do an entire series just with you, like decoding every chapter. But just firstly, the title of the book is on Our Best Behavior The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be good. So just firstly, what does it mean to be a good girl? What does good mean to you?

Elise Loehnen:
That's sort of where I started. Was wanting to excavate or understand the ways in which I would police myself. And then as I came to understand police, other women around, my goodness or my badness, and it was I mentioned the seven deadly sins are a part of the there's sort of the superstructure of the book. But just to be clear for listeners, I was not raised in a religious house. It's not that I believe in sin and run my life according to a confessional at all. But when I started to deconstruct or try to understand what these voices in my head were that were continually telling me that I was bad for eating the breakfast burrito, or not thin enough, not smart enough, not enough on on any level. When I started to actually think about those voices, not just listen and abide by those voices, but think about them and recognize, oh, these are bigger than me. These aren't actually coming from me or my parents or my husband. These are big. This is a big cultural boombox that I hear in my head that other people hear. When I started to write down all of the messaging where I arrived, is that a good woman in our culture, is never tired, has no need for rest. A good woman is very content to subjugate any all of her wantings to other people's needs. A good woman has no real want or desire or appetite. A good woman has no need for recognition, praise or affirmation, or attention.

Elise Loehnen:
And a good woman is never upset about any of it. And when I really started to write those down, codify them, look at them, interrogate them, I realized that they mapped to the seven deadly sins, which are pride, envy, sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, and anger. And this was sort of a wild aha for me, because I felt like suddenly I could see the matrix. I could see this system of goodness that runs our lives and keeps us constrained and contained. Because the meta thesis of the book is that women are conditioned for goodness and men. It's not really about men, but men are conditioned for power. And what this means is that in being conditioned for goodness as a woman. The greatest harm we can suffer is reputational. Why the witch hunts were so successful against women. It's this idea, like the worst thing you can do to a woman is to say that she's bad, a bad mother, a bad friend, a bad or toxic coworker. That she is ambitious, greedy, mean that's enough to cancel a woman to send her sort of fleeing off stage. Meanwhile, men can suffer all sorts of reputational slights. They can. We can think that they're terrible, truly horrible human beings, criminals. They can be criminals. And as long as we perceive them as powerful, they rise and rise again. There's just the weakness for men is the corollary of badness for women.

Missy Modell:
And I just thought, and I it just occurred to me that there's a lot of dichotomy in a lot of these or just like contradictory elements. So, for example, lust, we're expected to be sexual and kind of grooming ourselves to be desired. But we can't be sexual. We can't have our own desire.

Elise Loehnen:
Yes. So lust, for example, is I go into the work of Deborah Tolman, who writes about how girls and women are conditioned to be desired, desirable, but never desiring and chosen, but never choosing. And we recognize how we're sort of trying to push against this bumble as a move against it, but it's often then contextualized within a context of safety rather than like sexual liberation and desire. Right. It's more of a I say when I say who vibe. And that's because our culture, as we know, is incredibly unsafe for women. The legal system is not working in our favor. The stats around sexual assault and the rate at which I mean it's rare to meet someone who hasn't been sexually assaulted. But these things are very rarely, very rarely litigated or taken to court. At which point, like the woman's honor is questioned, she's always you're always sort of co-equal and responsibility for whatever happens to you. Women are girls are set up as the more responsible party men, and boys cannot control themselves. And it is your fault for inspiring their desire. Therefore, you bear some responsibility for keeping yourself safe, and if anything happens to you, it's somewhat your fault. We know this. We see this everywhere in our culture. And then to get to your final point, what happens to, I think the way that we've all been coached, it's a very fine line, right, between provoking your own demise by what you're wearing and sort of being the driver of your own sexuality. And I don't know that any of us really know what that is. So you see this I see this particularly with younger women and girls, and in some ways I'm like, yes, wear whatever you want. Of course, like it's your body. I really very much believe in bodily autonomy.

Elise Loehnen:
And it fills me with alarm. For all of these reasons that so often when something happens to a girl when she's assaulted, the questions are, what were you wearing? Were you drinking? Why did you get in the Uber again? That is that application of responsibility to the girl to keep herself safe. Because boys, they just can't be expected to. And so what you see, I think and I certainly did this when I was younger is you see girls who learn how to be sexy long before they understand what it is to be sexual. And so you see what I think is like projection of sexiness and the participation and the objectification of their own bodies. And I get it. Like that level of attention is compelling and it feels good and we're all instructed. That's what we're supposed to do, be desirable. Yeah. And so you see this projection of sexiness. But my guess because this was my experience, I don't know of any of those like 16, 17 year olds and like the crop tops and the sweats or whatever. Every a fashion now just I don't understand it, but I don't know. I think if you ask those girls friend to friend said to one of those girls, like, do you have a vibrator? Do you know what feels good? Do you know how to tell your partner what you like and what you don't like? Do you, like, experience? Pleasure? I mean, they would probably look at you with, um, disgust would be my guess and horror shock. But to me, I'm like, that's the you don't teach anyone girls or boys like what it is to drive the pleasure of your own body. It's all a projection, ultimately. And ah.

Missy Modell:
It it's funny. Aren't rates of the frequency in which people have sex going down in younger generations, but yet they appear more sexualized?

Elise Loehnen:
Yes. It's very interesting.

Missy Modell:
Yes. I mean, even in your book, you talked about how you had a pixie haircut and were very precocious. But regardless, we're deemed like a Lolita esque character or person. But you weren't attempting or trying. It was projected on you without your will.

Elise Loehnen:
So some of that was real. Some of that was Nabokov. When was that book published? Some of that was like a cultural idea at that moment in time. But some of that was also I don't think that we understood particularly then. And this is I write about this, but this is the time of the Woody Allen, this idea that, um, memories could be implanted in children's head and innocent parents could be sort of maligned by ex-husbands and wives. Right? We all sort of understand. Then it was like, oh, he's going to marry his stepdaughter. Oh, that's weird, but he's still Woody. Whatever. So that was all happening at this time, where there was this assistance in the innocence of children and that we were all none of us really understood what was happening anyway. And meanwhile, like, there wasn't really a complex conversation happening around energy and, and like the feeling of people's energy or interest or intent. I'd like to think that our culture is better at that now at saying like, some people might freak you out and that's okay. And some people are just like, really like talking to kids. And that can also be innocent. But for me, it was more that I just experienced all incoming energy and attention, in part because of experiences that I'd had as like somewhat scary or malevolent or overwhelming. And so my instinct was to shut that down.

Missy Modell:
Yeah. And I mean, since we're on the concept of lust in this chapter, which, I mean, I loved all the chapters, but for me, lust, because it's so complicated and you had a beautiful way of just breaking it down. It just I don't know, this is it's coming up a lot for me. And I think even just me being a woman and a creator, and I noticed, like a lot of the comments have to do with my sexuality or my appearance, and it's just it's very it's just interesting to reflect on, especially after reading. But you talk about slut shaming and how there's actually not a name for a male slut, so we have to.

Elise Loehnen:
Fuckboy.

Missy Modell:
Fuckboi. But that's almost positive. But it's almost like hot, I think fuckboy, I think, oh, he's like a hot guy.

Elise Loehnen:
And again, this goes to this idea that we sort of venerate these bad boys, right? We venerate the boy who has a lot of sexual conquests and who gets what he wants, meanwhile, to for the women, the opposite is true, right? Like she's easy. She's will give it to anyone. There's no prize there. Anyone who wants her can have her. In a way that is so deeply disempowering and gives absolutely no credit to a woman or girl driving her own sexual journey or appetite. And, you know, talk a little bit about Ian Kerner, who's a sex therapist, PhD, and he talks about how there are three types. There's sort of three categories of sex. There is procreative, recreational and relational. And women are shamed from recreational sex. That is the sort of provenance of men. Obviously they need female participants or male participants, but that that's that's revered culturally. And for women, if it's not ideally it's procreative sex. It has a purpose. You are you're going to have a baby. And for otherwise it needs to be relational. There needs to be love present. You better be in a committed relationship. Like we recognize how all of this stuff is true. Yeah. And I don't know, it's sort of it's one of those things where it's like these chapters are so complex and like, I could have written a book and said, oh, I'm just going to write a book about how we all need to be more lustful, gluttonous, greedy, etc. that's not what the book is about. It's about bringing our lives into balance, and for women to stop suppressing and repressing and denying all of these impulses, these hungers, these basic desires that are a massive part of our humanity and our lives, and that we have to bring them up and reconcile them and experience them, like, really be here, right? Rather than pretending that we're not human.

Elise Loehnen:
And because I think about something like sex, it's not about it's not a chapter about sort of uninhibited sexuality or that being sort of the guiding light, but it is about understanding our own innate sexual energy, which is also our creative energy, and letting that sort of rip and run through our bodies. I have sort of a dissociated pelvic area. It's like that part of my body. I've done a lot of work just from trauma and from like just anxiety around projecting that energy. And but that's like living at half mast. And so one of the things when I think about recreational sex, I think we all, many of us are really I'm a relational creature, and I learned early on I don't actually really like recreational sex. I this is not my jam. So it's not also saying like everyone needs to be having endless recreational sex. It's just let's like understand the way that our culture shapes our reality, where for men, this is something that they're pushed toward and women are shamed from. And let's like, bring all of that into balance, because I do think sex is quite sacred, not in like a purity vow way, but in a like it's different way of experiencing yourself. And it matters.

Missy Modell:
And I love at the end of the chapter you wrote about creativity. Like you aligned it with that because it's so true. And it's our roots, right? The root, the root chakra. Yeah. Yes.

Elise Loehnen:
It's the basis of it all. It's the source of our energy period. In many ways it's our key. And like understanding how to run it, how to use it, what it is to let it sort of light you up inside is far more important or sort of revolutionary than just like really knowing how to work it between the sheets. That's just a small, I think, part or extension of it, but most of it is how we bring ourselves to life.

Missy Modell:
I mean, thankfully, I think we're hopefully moving past the days of Cosmo, where it's nine ways to drive him wild and things like that. And now it's there are so many female founded vibrator companies and like, owning that. So I do think there's a shift, but I think there's a lot of disconnect still.

Elise Loehnen:
Obviously I think it's different. I think we're finding our way there. But as we very much know, we're in more of a we're in sort of culturally a performative phase where a lot of it and it might be that this is how we learn and this is how we sort of train ourselves or entrain or normalize sort of the next step that we take. But it does also feel like we're in this. Now we're sort of we. Some of us are still performing our sexiness. Some of us are now performing our sexuality. There's something about the way that we move things and culture where we're like, let's go and like be really intense and expressed on the external around these ideas before we can sort of make them just something that we do, you know what I mean?

Missy Modell:
Yes. And I also feel like it's all of the sins are performative sloth. Yeah. It's almost you have to put on this costume, this performance. And I love what you wrote. If I don't do enough, I won't be enough. You're performing that you're okay. So how is that obviously that's impacted you directly. But how does this contribute to women's exhaustion, diluting of self. Just this idea of not feeling like you're enough. Ever.

Elise Loehnen:
I write about the work of Carol Gilligan, who wrote this book, called In a Different Voice, and she's in her 80s now, but just one of those psychologists that's so formative for how other psychologists understand people. Like she studied the creation of morality and boys and girls. That's what she studied. And she has a couple of amazing. She's a lot of amazing insights, the way that In a Different Voice is about how girls and women become dislocated from our voices, often moving up into even higher registers of speech. Right. Like we we disconnect. And but she writes about, in studying the way that these boys and girls see themselves, boys see themselves in the world, while the girls that she studied saw themselves in service to the world. Which makes sense considering our patriarchal culture. She has another line in a more recent book where, oh, that just killed me. Along the same lines, where she's what I saw was the introduction of the word don't into the vocabulary of boys and girls. And for girls it became, I don't know. And for boys it became I don't care.

Missy Modell:
It's so real.

Elise Loehnen:
This is sort of what growing up in our culture, that dislocation again from for women and girls, from our knowing and from for boys, from our hearts, from our caring, it's how we sort of come to survive and sometimes thrive in this world. But what we owe sloth. Yeah. No, I mean sloth, laziness. This idea that there's always particularly for parents, for moms and moms who work. I mean, even if you just work inside the home or outside both, that there's always more doing that needs to be done, that it's theoretically like all that service work, all that care, we're convinced, should be assigned to women. Still, we don't understand that these are qualities that are in all of us, regardless of gender. And so there's always this feeling chasing you, this cattle prod that you could and should do more. There's just no end. There's no moment, at least for me, where I say like, oh, I've really done enough. That's a productive day. Everyone's great. I'm just chased by my own anxiety around not doing enough for other people, primarily, but and as I worked on this book, and as I've come to understand too, is that my productivity, my doing, the fact that I can't watch more than 20 minutes out of of TV without reaching for my computer to sort of start multitasking and making that time more productive is also because I'm just so uncomfortable. I've never learned to sit with that sort of void, with that emptiness, with that, those feelings of just, it's okay, just be here. Just breathe. You don't need to be doing two things simultaneously and or even one thing at all. And so what I find is that my rush to sort of get up and do things, there's no external taskmaster. It is in me. It is. And it is a way of self-soothing my own anxiety, even though it drives a terrible, not virtuous circle where I'm trying to soothe my anxiety. And by doing that, I just create burnout and resentment and exhaustion.

Missy Modell:
And it's almost like what happens when we have that silence? I think we're scared of what's inside and what's going to come up for us.

Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And even just the recognition, I mean, I this was that was my insight unfortunately was like as I'm my husband works as well, but I'm the primary breadwinner. I'm also the primary parent and he's a great dad. But he there's a lot of learned helplessness on both sides of our relationship. But his I would say is better. Like I can't install a wireless router or fix anything. This is very gender typical, I know, but this pre-exists him when we. I started dating, I couldn't had never been able to set up my wireless router. And so when he came to my apartment in New York, I had a 30 foot long Ethernet cord and I would drag it all over my apartment. The first night he spent the night, he set up my wireless router for me. But he locked it in. I locked it in, he locked it in. There's just not as much need for his skill set. Whereas I'm highly organized and on top of it and a neat freak and all of this stuff and but I would feel all this anger, resentment, irritation, like, this is not fair and fuck you and all of this stuff. And then I was like, but wait, hold on, I'm putting all of this on him.

Elise Loehnen:
I'm putting my standards, which are that my house needs to be tidy all the time, spotless to some extent, that we shouldn't be ordering food we should, or eating simple things. I should be making really nice nutritious meals, etc. like all of these standards for how I wanted my life to be or thought I my life should be. I was putting on him as the enforcer and not the helper. And so part of the revelation was like, oh, he doesn't give a shit like he isn't. It's not really fair for me to say I don't like clutter. Therefore you take care of that like I then if that's something that bothers me, then I need to take care of it and not blame him. For not taking care of it. Does that make sense? Like, it's one thing to sort of be like, let's break up. We we share school drop off duties and all of that. He goes to the grocery store when I ask him, etc. or he'll just go. But there were a lot of things that I was enforcing in myself and blaming on him, even though he could give a shit.

Missy Modell:
Do you think that falls under the anger category? I mean, partly.

Elise Loehnen:
They all Venn diagram into each other. Yeah. And yeah, that's my a lot of that. The anger chapter is was a really hard chapter to write and there's a lot in there. But part of it was about how it's so undesirable for a women woman to be angry. We have no cultural tolerance for it. We that we have a million epithets for angry women. We have a few epithets for angry men. This is Harriet Lerner's work. But those words just blame them again. Blame the woman. So like bastard, son of a bitch, etc. which is funny. Yeah. I think ultimately everyone's terrified of women's anger. Yeah. And Carly and sort of the destructive goddess energy. But that chapter is at least partly about me needing to acknowledge how angry I am. Although mine very rarely comes up, it comes up more as irritation, impatience, resentment. Like, I don't really let it move. And and I think that our tendency with anger, with all of these emotions that we perceive as bad, is to then project them onto other people, blame other people or other situations for making us angry. We're not good at owning our emotions or doing that essential emotional hygiene.

Elise Loehnen:
And certainly it's easier to just say, this person's irritating me. Like, this person cut me off. Of course, I'm that instead of saying, what's the deeper need here? Where are you actually feeling violated? Or. And that's Marshall Rosenberg's work who wrote Nonviolent Communication. But this is this. I think part of it is we get angry. We don't know where to put it. It feels we recognize. I don't know that it's right to blame you or blame myself. Right. Or blame the situation. Like not owning it, displacing it. Also I think feels. Kind of wrong. And so he teaches he calls it emotional liberation. But the work partly is sort of go beneath it and say, what am I needing? And so instead of saying, Rob, like, you're such a slob. No, Rob, I'm angry because I am needing the calmness that I get from an organized house. What I'm needing is for you to not leave eight drills in our living room. Because then he can actually hear it as a need. That's not him being blamed. This is real, by the way. We have drills.

Missy Modell:
It's like what drills.

Elise Loehnen:
He.

Missy Modell:
Builds.

Elise Loehnen:
He just makes stuff just great. But there's a carport. Get it out of the living room.

Missy Modell:
But I think all of these just being a woman today, we all have repressed needs. That's all of these things are. And I just wonder what happens holistically when women aren't living their fullest expression of self, when we're dampening, when we're repressing, what happens.

Elise Loehnen:
It all has. It gets stuck in our bodies. Yeah, I think it builds to a boiling point. I think it makes us sick, makes us physically ill. I mean, they talk about sort of anger turned inward is in some ways can be depression. It can be these things need expression. They need to be mixed, metabolized, moved. And the whole envy chapter is essentially about because we're so wary. Envy is such a horrible word. It sounds so malicious and gross. None of us own it. Jealousy is different. It has actually a different meaning. It requires a third being jealous of sort of someone who's trying to take your boyfriend or your boyfriend's ex girl, whatever. That's jealousy. But MV is 1 to 1. It's much more intimate, and usually it comes because someone has something or is doing something that you want for yourself. But because women are so dislocated from our own wanting, most of us have no idea what we want. When we see someone, a woman who has something we want or is doing something we want, the feeling of discomfort that can inspire is so unsettling Unmooring disturbing that we suppress it, repress it, and then usually project it onto her and say things like, I don't like her. She rubs me the wrong way. Who does she think she is? I think her podcast sucks and we're never looking at it for information of, oh, she's just actually pushing on on my dream. This is what I want to be doing. Instead. It's this like, let's deprecate her, because in part, we're also going to the way these sins collide, our ideas of scarcity around greed, that there's not enough to go around. If there's one in the room, there will only be one, maybe two. But if Missy has something that I want, or is doing something that I want in order for me to have that again, this is not conscious just to remind people, this is not conscious. I need to dethrone her. Destroy her. Get her out so that there's any possibility for me.

Missy Modell:
And also, society loves to pin women against each other, so we're conditioned to do this. Yes. Every magazine cover is like X is fighting with X or X stole this person's boyfriend. I feel like that's almost what we're inherently told to be and exist as. But it's so true. I feel like you taught me this, that when you feel envy or I've read it somewhere that you wrote, it's actually like a really cool sign. Yes. And maybe it's awakening something you didn't even know you wanted.

Elise Loehnen:
It's amazing information. Amazing. And it's your soul saying, pay attention to this person like they're pay attention, they're full of information for you and what can happen. And men are really good at this. They have do not are not governed by this myth of scarcity, the way that women are. When you say, and this is Lacey Phillips, this is to be magnetic. This is expander world. But you say, oh, she makes me uncomfortable. There's some information here. I am going to use her as an expander. I am going to if she can do this, then I can do that too. She is like showing me everything that's possible. And I am going to study her. I'm going to watch her. I'm going to follow her. Maybe not do everything in the same way, but like I'm going to use her as a beacon of possibility and learn from her rather than destroy her. Yes, and that is so much more. It feels so much better than when we offload those bad feelings that someone's inspiring in us. And then we feel kind of shitty. Pretty shitty for talking, for deprecating another woman. I do want a caveat that you can. Certainly not everyone's going to be your flavor, and not everyone is full of information for you and the way to tell the difference. Like, I don't look at Lauren Boebert and say, oh my God. My dislike for her harmful and hateful policies is envy. No, you can always locate the behavior. You can even, you know, you can be like, that woman's so rude to you can always figure out exactly what it is that the person is doing. That is. Behavior. But when you find that the person just their very essence is triggering you or rubbing against you, then there's information. That's the difference. I never think about Lauren. It's not like I see Lauren Boebert and I'm magnetized by it.

Missy Modell:
No, I wouldn't say I am either.

Elise Loehnen:
Yeah, I don't care. I don't care about Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think what she's doing is harmful, but I that's what I can react to. Not like her as a person. She means nothing to me.

Missy Modell:
A really good point, though. Pay attention to the type of reaction you're getting. Yeah.

Elise Loehnen:
And I think that this is like when I think about this weird moment in culture to the way that we conflate behavior and people, it gets and going again to like reputational damage to women and like you are ad person, bad woman. Like we have to move out of that binary because we need each other and we're all learning and we're all evolving. And this idea that we're going to be perfect in our behavior for all time, particularly as cultural norms continue to shift, that we're going to be perfect in our allyship, that we're going to always, quote unquote, say the right things. That's something that I think is part of this goodness prison that women need to be really conscious of, so that we can not be so wounded by it and become more durable and more willing to sort of stay in the fire, even when people come for us.

Missy Modell:
Is there any are there any of the sins that for you felt feel the most daunting or complex or challenging to personally navigate in your own life?

Elise Loehnen:
Yeah, I mean anger. I'm still working on accessing my anger. That one is really tough. Gluttony's I think for every woman, a lifelong battle between the way that we moralize and talk to ourselves about our body and our behavior. I was bad last night and now I need to be good. All of that. I'm still interrupting all of that programming around goodness and a conforming body and pliant body and blah blah blah, but it's pretty clear some of these are so well shaped and well formed by culture that it's easy to understand. You can just see it, you know it, and then and same with sloth. It's so present for me that it's just going to be lifelong work to stop policing myself around my productivity in that way.

Missy Modell:
Do you feel like also lust and aging? Like I feel like there's also a fear, like what happens when I'm not seen as desirable anymore? Yeah.

Elise Loehnen:
No. And I think that there's it's interesting. I've been thinking about this a lot actually, in terms of menopause culture and how happy I mean, I'm still a few years from being perimenopausal and then farther from being menopausal, but the way that one, I'm thrilled that there's more conversation about it and that we're sort of normalizing it. And I have a lot of I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like it's being commoditized and commercialized and becoming another big way to sell things to women that they don't necessarily need, perhaps. Yeah. And I don't want it to be pathologized. And then I think we're missing this bigger cultural conversation around actually, these are we've made this particular segment. We've made our crones. I say that with love, uh, invisible. But these are like the elder women in our culture. They are the wisdom keepers. They are the most powerful. And I think things happen to the menopausal brain. It's like you, there's some, like, extra power in an old woman. We've chosen to deprecate old women, turn them into witches and hags and screeching shrews. But if we could regenerate them, I think we could also, in some ways, start to rebalance our culture. And so that's very interesting to me.

Elise Loehnen:
And then I would also say, like, what's happening with the menopause conversation and who knows how I'll feel. But there is this impulse to sort of re sexualize older women, which sure, I think people should have sort of the sex life that they want. But again, it gets into this performative sexuality. Martha Stewart and Sports Illustrated that where I'm like, what the fuck? First of all, sure. Second of all, why are you greasing like an institution that needs to just not exist and should have no cultural value anymore? It's such a weird thing. The Sports Illustrated. Then I'm like, if I'm another, if I'm a 70 year old woman, it's really Martha. Now we're like, creating standards for 70 year old women. Let me live. And then why? It's just so odd to me, really. We have to now. We're going to perpetuate this and make it so that you better be aging extra sexy again. This objectified sexiness. Yeah, I'm not really here for it. I think like, older women are some of our most. For women. I just I don't think that we need to be putting pressure on them to be sex objects, or any woman for that matter. That whole concept needs to die.

Missy Modell:
I completely agree, and that was the first thing that I thought of Martha, because it's you're right, it's creating yet more stress and pressure. It never ends.

Elise Loehnen:
It never ends. It's like kind of a Rorschach test. Like some people are like, that's so empowering. And it's I don't know, I don't not I didn't find it that way, like in. Sure. But I just found it. Oh, God. Let's just let this thing die. I know, like, we don't need the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. No, it's already irrelevant. It just felt like this. Like reaching for relevance. It's just let it go. Like the Victoria's Secret Angels.

Missy Modell:
The podcast is called sorry for apologizing. And I feel like truly, we touched on so many ways women apologize. But I'd love to hear from you. What are you sorry for? Apologizing for? God.

Elise Loehnen:
That's such a heavy question, right? I'm trying to think of the last thing that I did apologize for, which was probably this morning. What am I sorry for apologizing for? I'm in some ways sorry for apologizing for my emotional state. And I'd say that there's a line between what I've started to sort of get comfortable doing. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago where I felt this pocket of rage, and again, I'm really working to get in touch with my anger. And I was like, this is alive in me. And I'm instead of repressing it or denying it, I'm just going to let it be coexistent. And I said to my kids and I said to my husband, I'm feeling really angry. It's not at you or about you. It's not personal in any way. I don't actually really know what it is if some theories, but just feeling kind of pissed off. And if you feel that edge. I'm sorry. No, but I just it's. Please don't take it personally. I'm just kind of like in a little bit of a mood. And it was fine. No one cared. Yeah, but I think previously it would have been sort of like, again, sort of policing myself for being myself.

Missy Modell:
And just showing you that acceptance of these things of anger specifically is essential to gaining balance.

Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And I think the more we can say, hey, I'm just kind of pissed. It's not about you. You haven't done anything. It's not at you. But I'm just going to be sort of a fire over here.

Missy Modell:
That's incredible. Where can people find you, which they undoubtedly will want to following the show?

Elise Loehnen:
So the book is called On Our Best Behavior The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, available wherever you get your books. And my podcast is pulling the thread and I'm on Instagram at Elise Lunen, which Missy helped me with. Um, thank you, thank you. And then I also have a Substack, Elise Lunin Substack. Com and which is also called theoretically called Pulling the Thread. But if you just go to my name, you'll find me. And yeah, so that's where I am. That's where I'm hanging out online social medias.

Missy Modell:
Thank you so much. Honestly, this was so great to have this conversation with you, especially as I've been digging so deeply into this book. It felt really special to have the author give me a one on one deconstruction of it. I feel very honored.

Elise Loehnen:
Thank you for having me.

Missy Modell:
Thank you. You're incredible. And for anybody listening, make sure to send this podcast around and rate and subscribe at your leisure, and we'll see you soon. Thank you for listening to sorry for Apologizing. Brought to you by Rescripted. If you enjoyed this week's episode, be sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our amazing guests. To stay in the know, follow me at mrmobile, on Instagram and TikTok or head to Rescripted. Com and don't forget to like and subscribe!

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