REVIEW: On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen
The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay To Be Good
Executive Summary: A feminist thesis that evaluates the modern, middle-class, white, American woman’s experience through the lens of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, anger, lust, gluttony, greed, envy, sloth.
Content Warning: A few cuss words, some allusions to adult sexual behavior, some pretty on-the-nose comments about sexual assault. Further, the chapter on gluttony does mention eating disorders. I would give this a PG-13.
Star Rating: I gave this three stars on GoodReads. I think it was an interesting read but, truly, there was nothing revolutionary in this text for me. Elise Loehnen is a middle-aged woman. She, along with many other young Generation X members or “elder Millenials” is beginning to learn and stomach lessons that younger Millennials and Generation Z women have been taught our entire lives.
Review: In the wake of the Barbie movie a la Greta Gerwig (age 40) comes this text from Elise Loehnen (age 42). Their ages do not matter to me whatsoever other than highlighting that there is about a 14-16 year difference between these women and myself. I found the Barbie movie lacking in nuance. I believe On Our Best Behavior stumbled through the same pitfalls.
First, Loehnen’s writing voice was absolutely caustic for the first 75 pages of the book. There is a pent-up level of rage with the systems of patriarchy and consumerism that bled profusely from the opening pages. I had to set the text down and walk away from the sheer heat emanating from the pages. I have since learned that Loehnen has spent a majority of her writing career ghostwriting for celebrities. That helped to contextualize the raging bonfire of her independent writing voice.
However, this was a manifesto against a capitalist patriarchy that felt, essentially, snatched from The Second Sex. Loehnen spends her text establishing a thesis that the Seven Deadly Sins (pride, sloth, wrath, lust, envy, avarice, and . . . gluttony! I could not remember gluttony. Whoops. Time to go grab my fro-yo from the freezer to help jog my memory!) are essentially fanfiction from the Bible.
While this is an interesting perspective (Could—and will—write all about Dante’s Inferno being revenge porn.) , it fell very flat for my religious mind. Loehnen is not a professed member of any religion, which is completely fine. I did not follow why she then spoke with such authority about a faith system she herself does not belong to.
Now, I think her framework for viewing a moral valuation system descended from Puritanical Protestantism is fascinating (and worth a read if you can, like me, rent this manuscript from your local library), I think there is a major flaw with her work as a whole.
Loehnen does not acknowledge that, perhaps, evangelicalism is the root of the problems women experience in society today. Instead, she spends a deal of her text railing against Evagrius Ponticus for “creating” the seven deadly sins and, in turn, creating the problems that American women experience in trying to advance in a system that does not treasure ambitious, successful, curvaceous, restful, wealthy women.
In raging against a harmful dichotomy, in my view, Loehnen seems to construct an equally harmful one. Her chapter on sadness, though, was my favorite in the entire book and I wish I had a physical copy of the text to re-read that section specifically.
At the end, she concludes that women—and men—would benefit by living out the mean between pride and false humility, sloth and overwork, wrath and allowing injustice, lust and shame, envy and desire, avarice and induced poverty, gluttony and restriction.
Which, again, are lessons that I learned from treasured friends and family within the context of Catholicism itself.
Author’s note: I struggle as a twenty-something to find deeper meaning in texts written by older Millennial individuals. I don’t know if this means that I am an elder Gen-Z, but maybe I am coming to realize that this categorization makes more sense to me. Idk.