Life Uncut - No more good girl - Uncut with Elise Loehnen

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Elise Loehnen is the host of the podcast  “Pulling the Thread”  and is the co-author of 12 books, 5 of which were NYT best sellers. But then she wrote her first book under her own name “On our best behaviour. The price women pay to be good,” which was also a New York Times Best Seller. Before all of this Elise was the right hand woman to Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, she hosted the Goop Lab TV show and Goop podcast, and was Goops Chief Content Officer. In this episode we take a big deep dive into WHY we seem to be so impressed by 'the hustle' and how rest has been branded as lazy and sloth-like. We speak about how women in particular struggle to 'switch off' and delegate the mental load of their families.We also spoke about jealousy, envy and why women try to tear each other down. Elise speaks about utilising feelings of envy as a driving force to show us what we actually want in life. She explains how we've been conditioned to suppress anger and the scarcity mindset placed on women. You can find all of Elise's work, her podcast, book & newsletter here!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Darug Wollamutta land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany. And we have a cracking interview for you today.

You guys might have heard of Elise Lowen. Now, if you haven't heard of that name, you might know her as Gwyneth Paltrow's ex-right-hand woman. And I say ex because she did end up leaving, but she was CEO and worked alongside Gwyneth Paltrow at Goop for a very, very long time. She's also incredibly successful in her own right. She's the host of the podcast, Pulling the Thread, and is the co-author of 12 books, five of which were New York Times bestsellers. She then finally wrote her first book under her own name, which was called On Our Best Behaviour, The Price Women Pay to Be Good, which also turned out to be a New York Times bestseller. I absolutely loved this conversation with Elise. The thing that's so interesting about this, and it is very much a feminist slanted book,

but the way that it's describing this concept is it leans into the idea of the seven deadly sins, right? As much as they are religious ideology, the book itself has nothing to do with religion. So the seven deadly sins are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. And now we don't have the time to unpack all eight of them, but we do really deep dive in gluttony. We deep dive in sloth and envy. And the concept behind this is how, when as women, we engage with these behaviors, it is the guilt that we feel for it.

for example, one of the things that Elise spoke about is that we have all been brought up within this gluttony, this diet culture and how diet culture has permeated our lives. It's permeated our body image, how we approach food. I don't think that there is a single woman who has never been affected by diet culture in some way. And the guilt that we feel also on top of this, we speak about envy, touching on this idea that for women in high positions of power, for women who are successful, there are often less positions available. The pie is smaller. And so we do in some industries have this tall poppy syndrome where there is this tearing each other down. And now is this a result that women are just bitchy towards each other? Or is that the result

of the scarcity of which we face in terms of within our industries, within the workforce and within opportunities? Yeah. But just on top of that, Laura, it's not just people in high positions. It's not just people in power that are competing for a small amount of jobs at the top. envy hits everybody in every level and every tier of life whether it's just between your friends it could be someone they're dating something they're doing somewhere they're going it could be a job position but it's the idea of unpacking that feeling of envy why you're feeling it because at the end of the day is it showing you what you want in life is that why you're feeling that and that's something that Elise brought up that really got me thinking that feeling of why we feel these

feelings of jealousy and envy. But I do think one of the things that I found really interesting was something you just mentioned, Laura, and that is when you're at the top of your game in anything like Elise was, working alongside Gwyneth Paltrow to develop one of the biggest companies that there is. Everybody has heard of Goop. To have everything at your feet and then wanting to step away from that because you realise that maybe the hustle culture isn't all that we thought it would be. And it's something that I often think about because I personally am always thinking, oh I need to be doing more if you have any time free you think what can I be filling this time with what can I be achieving what can I be achieving you feel lazy like you feel like

you're not doing enough and that's because hustle culture is literally bleeding into our society that you have to be doing more working more staying back longer hours for no pay starting businesses on the side like if you are not run off your feet busy then you're not successful that's the idea of this hustle culture but I think it leans into this idea of guilt right and that's the common thread that runs throughout these seven deadly sins. And it's something that Elise comes back to. It's the guilt that we've been made to feel. It's how we've been conditioned throughout history to behave as a good girl. Elise, welcome to Life Uncut. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us.

Okay. Be honest. Was this the most chaotic podcast start you've ever had in all your podcasting experience? This was exciting. I mean, it's a real party and I love seeing you two tethered together by some old school headphones. So what Elise is talking about, we rocked up this morning. I mean, look, it's been chaos. It's been frantic. It's also been joyous. Basically, we have one headphone that's linked into the computer and Britt and I are sharing it. We've got one earphone each, kind of like when you share your headphones on a plane. There are so many parts of this that we are so excited to get into, but we don't want to skip over something that we do on every episode and that is our accidentally unfiltered story your most embarrassing story at

least you're not getting away from it she shot to the very end i was telling them before we started that i of course i pooped my pants i had food poisoning but still it wasn't in public i was pregnant alone you know i had to choose guys but i mean one story that for whatever reason i'm really quite comfortable around celebrities i never lose my shit and i'm not particularly impressed by anyone. And I will say that I had a humiliating encounter with Reese Witherspoon because I said to her, hi, Elise, I'm Reese. And because our names rhyme. And she looked at me, she was so confused. And there were people in the same room and were like looking at me. And I was like, no, my name is Elise and she just and was she cool she was confused

she's like can you please take me to the boss you're like that's me she might have thought you were like taking the piss out of her no no no like as in like if she didn't know who you were she may have thought that you were like purposely trying to be I don't know undermining or I don't know how you would respond no I think she thought she'd had a few drinks before breakfast. She was just confused. Understandable. I would have been confused too. And then I just exited. I just went outside. I was like, I can't speak. So I don't know how to claw my way back to making any sense in this. I'm just going to leave her alone. I love that. Elise, can you tell us, I mean, I find something so interesting about how you've just been in your

own hustle, writing this book and, and coming out the other end of it, doing a book tour, but also part of you wanting to hop off the wellness train and leave group was because of the intensity of work in that time of your life. Can you tell us before we get into all of that, what was it that kind of got you onto the trajectory to end up working for group? Like what was your education like? And also like, how did you end up there? Who is the real Elise? So I grew up in Montana, which is a rural state in a small town in the woods with horses and books. And I went to the small hippie alternative school. I definitely was really interested in culture.

I'm in my early 40s. So it was the time of magazines and supermodels and the beginning of MTV, although we didn't get cable. And I was just very interested in culture, but felt myself extremely outside of it. And I ultimately went to boarding school on the East Coast. And then I went to college on the East Coast and I moved to New York. My brother was a book editor. I knew I wanted to work with words, and I ended up getting a job.

It was a very tough time economically in the States. 2002, after 9-11, there were really no jobs, but I ended up getting this freelance editorial assistant job at Condé Nast at this shopping magazine called Lucky. I was just packing samples. I mean, it was a deeply unglamorous job. I was doing the sweepstake rules for the sweepstakes in the back of the magazine, but I just did what I could to stick by doing anything that anyone asked me to do and meanwhile you know I went to Yale I was considered myself sort of an academic intellectual snob and you know I was at

this magazine about shopping and I loved shopping but I felt like I can't work here. Was there a part of you that just thought oh I've just left Yale and now I'm literally at the back of a shopping magazine doing sweepstakes like this isn't what I thought I was doing front page glam or from you know culture was there a part of you that's like I have to stay here and do my dues to work it up or were you just like I'm out no I mean I desperately needed a job and I was sort of couch surfing and fracking up debt so I was equal parts grateful to have a job and then desperate to find something permanent because I was still freelance and something at the New Yorker or Vanity Fair or Vogue or something that felt like it had more heft. And everywhere I interviewed,

essentially, they said, like, stay where you are. You're in a much better position to actually do things rather than just fielding phone calls or being in charge of someone's schedule, which was very much like the Condé Nast assistantship that was available at that time. And so I stayed in part because I didn't have a choice, but it ended up becoming the best. And it was such an incredible education. Ultimately, I ended up with a full-time job there. I stayed for eight years and it was such a, not only a rigorous education and writing tight, short, revelatory captions, but it also punctured a lot of my snobbery and the way that I would have clung to intellectualism as a way to separate myself or create an idea of superiority. I mean, I don't think I was a

horrendous snob, but that definitely took it out of me in part because our readers were so smart, funny, and just wanted like a handbag guide or wanted a boutique list for the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Like fun. It just reminded me like life can be fun. There was such an instinct and it still exists, but to sort of say like you could be a smart, serious woman or you could be someone who cares about lipstick and mascara. And at Lucky, it was both. And it really put me into conflict with the way that we culturally deprecate things that we typically sort of code as feminine or light. And that was really important, I think, for me to see early on in my career. How was it that you then made the transition to working at Goop?

Yeah. So I worked at Condé Nast until 2011 when it was clear that the company was not going to really be making a transition to digital. I knew I wouldn't have a job. Like I had to sort of get off that ship. And I moved to Los Angeles to work for a big internet company to learn about the web, which sounds so silly, but I wasn't learning any of that in New York. And at that time, a friend of mine had gone to work for Goop when it was based in the UK and she moved back and so did Gwyneth. And I went over just to talk to Gwyneth about what the potential was for the brand. Because at that point, it was just a newsletter, which is still, I would say, besides podcasts, one of the most powerful ways of reaching people. so i shouldn't say like justa because i think yeah newsletters i mean we're newsletters are back baby yeah we've been talking about it ourselves which is why we look at each other we're like yeah it's such an underused resource that connects you with your community so instantaneous like even from i have another business and i can't overstate for small businesses how valuable newsletters are in reaching your audience the most important owning people's email addresses also sounds bad but you have access to a list of people who you

can deliver to in their inbox and the amount of energy that we've all spent trying to read. I mean, podcasts are similar, but then you're trying to reach people on social. It's a losing game. And if you leave, you don't get to take them with you. So start a newsletter. Everyone should start a newsletter. And that's really what Goop was. It had a website, but almost barely. And this was in 2013, but it had an incredibly engaged, interested newsletter list. And so I joined then because of just the potential and the wide variety of sort of interests. And I thought it was fascinating. I thought that the fact that it was so polarizing was so fascinating because inherently it's like, why? And so it just seemed both fun, creative, and an opportunity to watch

culture being made and participate in that. I stayed for seven years, I think I left in 2020 and it, you know, went from a newsletter to a full website and product lines and e-commerce and goop lab, Netflix show. Yeah. Podcast. Oh, it's huge. It went huge. It just exploded. I think this must've been such an incredibly exhilarating time in your career, watching a company that you have joined and helping to build that going from something which you say was essentially a newsletter and a website that wasn't functioning optimally to being such a globally understood known and loved brand and with its controversies but I also think that that's what makes the brand such a household name as well yeah you speak so much about how that period of

your life was also fraught with an intensity that comes with burnout this intensity of never being able to sit on the couch never being able to stop because you have to keep on moving and achieving what do you think it was in yourself that was driving you to feel like you had to keep pressing on constantly I mean just this endless and you get into a startup and you two probably understand this well too there's always more that can be done yeah and rather than asking anyone else to do it why wouldn't you just do it yourself like that has a lot of toxic potentiality for someone like me like I'm already a kind of workaholic and then I just start going and I'm like, oh, and this and this, but it starts so young. And I have to be very careful with myself

to this day working for myself because my tendency is to just go way too hard. In part, I think just from this idea, which I'm not alone in feeling, which is that security and safety is right over there. It's right over this turn in the road. I will reach a point. I will cross a finish line where I will feel like I'm safe, that I have enough money, that I've done enough, that I'm a good enough mother, that I'm a good enough partner, I'm a good enough woman, and I will find safety and security there over yonder. You speak about this good girl mentality and part of the book, I mean, it's structured around this framework of the seven deadly sins, which I think for anybody who comes from a religious background, they'll understand what that is.

But for anyone who doesn't, can you give me a bit of an understanding of why those seven deadly sins were so important to the storytelling, but also as somebody who isn't religious themselves, why that framework was one that you lent on? Exactly. I didn't grow up in religion. These are not ideas that I subscribe to or have subscribed to in my life. In fact, before I started working on the book, I would have struggled to list them all, you know, and I mainly recognize them from the movie Seven.

and the way they've popped up in culture. And what was so fascinating to me, though, as I worked on this book and all this good girl programming, the main thesis is that women are programmed for goodness. Men are programmed for power. The worst thing that you can do to a woman

is reputational damage, saying she's a bad person, bad mother, bad coworker, toxic, mean, ambitious, et cetera. Whereas men can do all sorts of bad things. And as long as we perceive them as being powerful, we'll continue to revere them.

Goodness doesn't really matter. So as I was trying to trace this in myself and codify this list, where I landed is that good women are never tired and have no need for rest. They are more than happy to subjugate their wants to other people's needs and don't really have any needs of their own. definitely don't have any wants, no appetite, no desire, no need for praise, attention, affirmation, and they never get upset about any of it. And I could recognize like that checklist as something that is in me. And when I traced it back, when I simplified it and reduced those ideas to a list, they map back to the seven deadly sins, you know, which are sloth, envy, pride, greed, gluttony, lust, and anger. And I also include sadness because it was on the original list. Because as I sort of dug into it to sort of explore where they even came from, the sins, where they were in the Bible, I realized they don't appear in the Bible, not as a set like that.

It wasn't until 590 that they were turned into the cardinal vices. And before that, they came out of the Egyptian desert in the fourth century at the same time that the New Testament was being assembled. And there were these eight distracting thoughts, essentially. But then in 590, Pope Gregory said, these are the cardinal vices. He assigned them all to Mary Magdalene and turned her into a penitent prostitute. This all happens in the same homily. And that's when they're essentially assigned to women. That is such an interesting part of, I mean, for anyone who knows that religious history, I was brought up in the Catholic church and you're brought up to kind of just know that she was this like sinner and she was an ex-prostitute and then she was

saved. And then when you actually go back through the literature, it was all implied over time, but there's no actual proof of this in, it was just a way in which to make women more subordinate within the storytelling. Yeah. Speaking of the seven deadly sins, and I don't think we will be able to touch on all of them in depth, but for you, when you were writing this book, which did you think was the most important and the sin in which we as women internalize the most and it affects us on a day-to-day level the most? So they have sort of gradations, one, in their visibility in our lives, and then two, in their perniciousness. So I think the most visible sin for all of us is gluttony and the way that we police our bodies and police ourselves around

food and moralize about whether we're good or bad or who has a good abiding and conforming body and who has a bad one. And it's all wrapped up in our whole culture, our fat phobic medical culture here in the US laws where it's completely acceptable to discriminate against people on the basis of their appearance, except for in maybe one state. So I feel like gluttony was in some ways the easiest to write, the most accessible, the most obvious. Same with lust to some extent because girls were acculturated to be desirable, but not desiring. I think we all recognize that. Be chosen, not choosing. Be sexy, but not sexual. And then I don't know if it's as bad in Australia and the US, but the prevailing idea that what we're taught as women

is you are the more responsible party and you are responsible for the actions of rapacious men and boys who cannot control themselves. So if anything happens to you, it is on you to keep yourself safe. And if anything happens to you, then you are a co-conspirator in your own assault. You share some burden of the blame, etc. So that one's also very culturally evident here. And sloth, you know, because all the social research suggests that women are doing far more work in the house and often outside of the house as well. And that there's just complete lack of equity within genders. So those were in some ways were the easiest. I'd say that anger was really hard and the one that I still struggle with. And greed was hard to write about because we're living

on the brink of environmental collapse. It's hard to make a case for greed. Although the book isn't, It's not stunty like that. It's not like, let's all be greedy and lustful. It's saying everyone needs to allow these basic human instincts, desires, appetites, needs come up. We need to reconcile them. Women need more money. We're really good with money, and we need more of it. But then I think pride, envy, those sins are more subtle. But in many ways, I think what keep us from full expression of our gifts in the world? What keep us from getting on side with each other and actually supporting each other rather than just paying lip service to it? In some ways, I think, Harold, are deeper wounds. What do you think is the solution to it? I mean,

in terms of like how we all internalize the patriarchy, but what do you think is the antidote to the behaviors that we internalize? Awareness. Because I think that in our culture, we've taken them in and then internalize them to the point where we think that they're sort of our own independent battle and that we can take these feelings of unease and like locate them in our family of origin or on our partner or that it's like on us in our own small nuclear family to attend to them. And I felt this way where I was like, screw my husband. I do so much more than him. I'm the primary breadwinner. I do most of the childcare, yada, yada, yada. And then he has no problem relaxing. He watches so much TV, yada, yada, yada. And then I realized, I was like,

he's not asking me to do any of this. And he has no expectations of what this needs to look like. He's not asking me to cook nutritious homemade meals five nights a week. He's not asking me to keep our house perfectly clean or to respond to my children's teachers within four and a half minutes. These are cultural stories. This is cultural programming that I am enacting on myself. The cattle prod is internal. It's not external. It's not coming from him. I'm just enacting it and then being mad at him. And I'm not saying that he can't and shouldn't do more. And he actually does more when I don't do it. That's the other great learning. When I just wait a couple minutes wow he signs a permission slip too yeah it's often the case that you like you get on the

front foot with everything but then in the same instance by doing that you end up doing everything but also for some women at the same time you know who may do everything they look around the house on the moments that they're not and literally nothing has been done and it's like no one else has noticed you know that that it's chaos around them where do you think that this internal drive comes from this, you know, when we speak about doing it all and having it all and this constantness of trying to be better or achieve more, what do you think is that driving force? And I know that we say that it's that this societal expectations on us, but have you in your own experience pinned it down to where that comes from for you? Yeah, it's so interesting. And obviously it's a really

amazing and complex question because some of it's like, it's only getting worse, I think, because of social media and comparison culture and what we see sort of shown to us daily as all of us being like, look at what a great mom I am, like this shield of performative parenting. I think, too, what happened, and I would imagine that the economics in Australia are similar, but we have been sold the story here that really women should probably be at home with their kids, everyone would do better. Men should be away at work. The reality is that was economically possible for most families for a decade, I think, the 50s. And since the 60s and 70s, you can't do that and have a middle-class existence in America. Women have had to work,

and most families have had two-income parents. But then we've been told, and it persists today, that that's a choice, that we've chosen sort of our own ambition and to have these bigger lives, side of the home to the detriment of our families. But we better not fuck it up. You can go out there and work, but your children better not pay the price for that. Rather than just saying, oh, this is a reality. In my family, we both have to work. There's no version of one of us making enough money. But there's still a hangover culturally where it's like women have just chosen to upset the natural order. So we carry, I think, that responsibility with us in very unconscious ways that we've chosen to do this. And so we need to make it up across the board.

Did you ever yourself, I mean, I think every single parent and mom feels, I shouldn't say all parents, but the mom guilt when you're trying to do everything in terms of work, but work then takes you away from giving face-to-face time with your kids, which often it does when you're a working mom. How did you reckon with that feeling? Oh, it's big. I think that that's huge. And then I think it's like what I've observed with my kids too, is that then they get confirmation from culture that they should feel aggrieved about it. So my oldest will give me grief about whenever I travel and I don't travel nearly at the rate at which I used to. But when I'm gone, I'm like, does anyone want to FaceTime? What's happening? Does anyone need anything? Nobody wants to talk

to me. No one cares. No one misses me. But I want to complain about it when you're back. Yeah. You weren't here. He wants to complain, which is interesting to me because I think part of what he's giving into is like that there is something to complain about, that there's something wrong. Meanwhile, like it eats me up. I hate it, but I actually enjoy it too. I'm always homesick before I've even left the house and feeling a tremendous amount of guilt and anxiety. and then the minute I leave and I'm like oh no one cares and I can sort of relax it's so refreshing hearing you say this as well because I think about this from my own experience I said the same thing just on the podcast the other day I have little kids they love being with their dad as well and

I'll go away for work and they're not like where's mom they're like see ya as I walk out the door and it's not because we don't have an incredible relationship but I think that we've been sold this almost expectation that like everyone should be bereft if you're not there but they have quite a quiet independence about their you know security with their dad as well but I think it's so important to have these conversations where you can talk about it's okay to have the mum guilt and it's okay to want to like be clocked in as a mum but it's also okay to really fucking enjoy working as well and to have the independence and go away and do those things alongside each other like it's a very duplicious experience and both of them are valid. It's also, I find when my

husband is away that there's, it's like joyful to be, I wouldn't want to be without him for a long period, but it's also like, I don't have to confer with anyone. There's no question about who's going to drive the kids to school. There are just fewer decisions to be made. And I think my husband really likes his time when it's just like boys town, you know, have a great time. at least you said something a little while ago about pride you mentioned pride and i'd love to know what your opinion on pride is in the way we view it in men and women because i know in australia i'm going to say it's very different in the us but in australia we have a huge cultural issue with pride and bragging about an achievement we have a tall poppy syndrome in australia is

absolutely rampant and you are almost dislikable if you say hey guys won this award like how amazing is that people like gross. Yeah. You almost have to say, and we're guilty of it too. You almost have to preface it with God only knows how guys, like someone was drunk when they voted, but we won. So you have to preface any achievement with this sentence, this sentiment. And I don't know if you have that in the US, but I also feel like in Australia, we do view it a little bit differently between men and women. What are your thoughts on that? Well, that's my question. Do you think it's gendered in Australia? Cause I know about tall poppy. Yeah. It's a small amount. We don't like looking at it in men either, but we don't give men the same grief. So if there is a man

that is too cocky in Australia, it's a turnoff. Like if they're too braggy, we want them to achieve. We don't want them to overly talk about it. But I would say women would cop it way worse than men for having the same achievement. Yeah. I'm trying to think of overt bragginess in men and how that's perceived. And this is where the sins start sort of overlapping and Venn diagramming between envy, pride, and scarcity. And it's interesting, this might be the distinction too. Here, we will celebrate a woman who's nascent and on the rise, and we will get excited about a new celebrity, a new musician, a new athlete, a new female founder. We will just pile it on, press, adulation, etc. And then they hit a certain point of relevancy, or we just

collectively decide that they're, yeah, they maybe are a little too full of themselves, a little too big for their britches. And then we need to put them in their place fast. And we are merciless and the schadenfreude, the sort of joy plus harm and seeing them brought down or cut down is rampant in America. And you can look at almost any female celebrity. We don't do this to men, but you can look at, and this is, I think is why Taylor Swift has like an army of fans who are ready to like dox you if you come after her in the slightest way is in response to this and civilian women can say like ah they deserve it or this has nothing to do with me but it's a playbook for all women you know it's why one of my closest friends was just promoted to president of

a company cultural company that we care about she herself does not keep a high profile for various reasons. And I was like, is there a press release or a party? And she said, I don't want it to be announced. I don't want anyone to know. That's the same thing for a civilian. There is no upside in being seen, celebrated, or to be perceived as big because you will be made small. Alyse, I actually got goosebumps when you said that because I was like, oh my God, you fucking took the words out of my mouth. We were speaking to Chloe Fisher recently. She's a big Australian personality she has a podcast herself which is called Darling Shine and she has been really vulnerable talking about her fertility journey and her infertility we had

her on the podcast recently if anyone wants to go back and listen to that episode but she spoke to us off mic and she was saying you know everyone gets behind you when you're relatable everyone gets behind you when they think that you know they can see themselves in you and so then it's like this mass love and you become popular and then when you become popular you're no longer relatable and then your life instantly it's like oh well we're not happy that you've had this achievement we now think you've gotten too big for your boots like you're not the person we thought you were it's all gone to your head and then the audience flips but it is the exact same thing that happens here and it happens across all female personalities and I do think that that is why so many women

especially when they have big achievements under sell them because nobody wants to have someone else's well I shouldn't say nobody but like most people don't want other people's successes constantly reinforced to them because it shines a mirror up to the things that we don't have ourselves I think for Chloe for this girl in particular it also comes off the back of her husband is a world famous DJ very very successful and she's still so down to earth but I think a lot of it comes off that as well an inbuilt jealousy of I want your life and I'll never have it yeah and so she has said many times I'll trade every dollar that I have to be able to have a baby because her fertility struggle is is just astronomical I think of also Jennifer Lawrence

you know in the states like when she was this very relatable like girl next door type public figure and then she absolutely got catapulted into the stratosphere and then all of a sudden people were like picking apart the gossip around the bits of her personality traits that we didn't like or that she was faking her falling over it's like somewhere along the line the things that you love about that person instantly flips and then they're portrayed negatively within the media and then public perception starts to to change yeah and you see it it's like a rinse and repeat cycle that happens with prominent celebrities as they rise up from being held up to being pushed down yeah her ascension jennifer lawrence's ascension when she won the academy award for silver linings

playbook and was like bumbly and falling and funny and self-deprecating and sort of at her peak lovability was juxtaposed against the same Oscar ceremony where Anne Hathaway won at the peak of her Hathahaterism. Yeah, they were called Hathahater. And she could do no right. The internet was like coming for her. Those two, like right at those moments, it's like Anne was on the descent. Jennifer was on the ascent. Now, Jennifer, you know, it's wild. This is just this repeatable playbook. And again, like we can say, ah, they're celebrities who cares because we're convinced that money protects everyone from having feelings and hard times and money might protect you from security lines at the airport. And it's certainly nice to have money, but it doesn't save

you from pain and public humiliation. Yeah, those two are sort of perfect examples, textbook examples. I mean, this is history. Princess Diana, Billie Holiday, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, on and on and on. Lizzo, this is sort of the trajectory. And now it's not to say that these people don't do anything that is deemed wrong. I'm sure that there are things, there are fractures in the things that they do, but it's because they've almost been put on this incredibly ridiculous pedestal that the second they do something wrong it's like society goes we fucking got you yeah you're a bad person and everything you've done before it no longer is relevant because you've shown who you really are and we will hold on to

that and we will bring that up for years to drag you down yeah where do you think that that quality for people who do it and maybe don't even realize that we do it to other women because it's not men doing it to women it's women doing it to women do you think that this just comes back to pride do you think this comes back down to envy? Like which of these seven qualities do you think is the instigator of that type of female on female rivalry almost? Well, again, it comes down to like you can assault someone's goodness just by sort of reputational damage by saying that they're bad or that they behaved in a bad way, even if they haven't actually done anything or done things that are human or you know maybe learning moments that's enough to take a woman down so you see

it's like even chris brown can beat up rihanna and he's still relevant culturally it just doesn't stick these aspersions of like that's a bad person we just don't care it's like oh louis ck can sexually assault women oh but he's back who cares the expectation that it's male behavior yeah Yeah. Yeah. So there's that. And then I think you mentioned envy and I write about envy. It's second in the book and I write about it as the gatekeeper to the other sins because I think it is the reason that there's so much animus against women by other women. Lori Gottlieb is this psychotherapist who wrote a great book called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. She has the smallest side in her book saying that she tells her clients, pay attention to your envy. It will

show you what you want. And when I read that, I was like, I couldn't get it out of my mind because I was first, I was like, Ooh, envy. Like I don't have any envy. I had such an immediate reaction to it. Like I don't gross bad. And that second, I was like, I don't know what I want. I have no idea. Like I had just sort of put myself in service to other people's dreams, kind of doing what I wanted, but through their vehicles rather than my own, because I couldn't own my wanting. I couldn't say, Oh, I really just want to write books and host a podcast. That's what I want. It took me 43 years to get there. But I took those words and I sort of reverse engineered it for myself. And what I found, and this I think is what we all do,

is that whenever I would encounter a woman and find myself saying things like, I just don't like her. She rubs me the wrong way. Who does she think she is? She's really not all that. I didn't think her book was not good. Whenever I found myself deprecating another woman, sometimes I'm not saying you have to like everyone. And sometimes women engage in behaviors that we cannot like. That's different. But when I found myself just sort of feeling discomfort towards a woman and then blaming her for my discomfort by saying like, she sucks, I realized that there was envy there, that she was doing something or had something that I wanted for myself. Maybe it was like a slamming body. Maybe it was really well-behaved kids who love to read. Maybe it was a best-selling

book, but she was full of information. It really had nothing to do with her. She was just reflecting back to me what I want. And I think for these women, women who we accuse of being prideful, what they're showing us is like, this is what it looks like to have a dream and go after it. This is what it is to be celebrated for your gifts. This is what it means to be seen. And I think in many ways we all want that we might not want to fill a stadium and saying I don't want that but like there's certainly elements to these people's lives of like living big and being visible that I think touches on something that maybe many of us want for ourselves I think that that is the most beautiful way of encompassing it because I don't think that there would be many

people who would listen to the word envy and say oh yeah because there's a difference between jealousy and envy jealousy it's usually like you're jealous of someone else who is encroaching on something you already have for example like you're jealous of the affection your boyfriend's giving to some other girl whereas envies you want what someone else has but it feels almost shameful to admit that and so we push it down so much but I would say that there's very few people who haven't experienced envy in some way and the way in which it does normally come out is exactly as you said it is this like unqualified hatred towards someone or this feeling of that they're not deserving of the things that they've achieved because you can poke holes in their accomplishments

and therefore like oh my god why are we celebrating her like she's actually so fucking annoying or she's so this or she's so that and it's those comments which we can all be guilty of which is where it lies that to me is fascinating yeah and like we can deprecate whatever they're being celebrated for or we can start to like dig and say like let me find all the fissures here let me find all the badness here so that I can expose this person to the world for their full humanity and we can turn on them yeah you know it's just exploiting the vulnerability that all women have to sort of destroy each other unfortunately the big million dollar question is how do we stop that how do we stop doing that to other women because it's a conversation that's been we've had it a

hundred times. We all know it. We all know we do it, but I think perception is a really powerful thing. And instead of lacing envy with these negative connotations, why don't we use envy to motivate us to do what they're doing? Like let's turn it on its head and say, I am envious of what they have because it's something I want. What can I do to go and change my life to move it in the trajectory that they have? Yeah. How can I, you know, to quote this woman, Lacey Phillips, use this person as an expander. How can I say, oh, if she has that, I can have it too. Let me study her. Let me learn from her. She's showing me the way to do this thing that I want to do. Again, men are not curtailed by the same idea

of scarcity. They help each other. They get behind each other. It's natural for them because they don't perceive the world as being inherently limited. So they don't see it as like, if he gets this, then I don't get anything, which is how women have been conditioned to perceive the world. And again, there's some truth to that. I'm not saying that there's not. But the way to make that not true, as incredibly powerful people, women have been outperforming boys at school for a century. We outlive men. We're incredibly hardworking, durable, brilliant. We're legends. We're even better at being alive than men. Put it that way. We literally stay alive longer. We win. We win. But yet it's like you look at culture and it just seems like we're losers.

and then we sort of blame ourselves for that. But as soon as we can get on side with each other, I think we can watch out. This could be bridged really quickly, but part of it is puncturing a lot of these myths. And to what you were saying, like, because I think envy is unconscious for so much of us, it just feels bad and uncomfortable.

So we suppress it, repress it. We're not diagnosing it. We're not saying I'm envious of her. I'm gonna deprecate her. It's much faster than that. It's, I don't like her. Who does she think she is? Why her and not me? It's not a conscious meditation, but I think the more we can make it conscious and say, what is this feeling? Why is she making me so uncomfortable?

Why do I want to deprecate her? Why do I want to criticize her? And say, okay, oh, oh, there's information. This is just pushing on a dream here. I need to own that dream. This is my soul knocking. But often because it feels so bad that the instinct is to be like, I can't have this bad feeling. I'm just going to pretend to be excited and stuff this. And then meanwhile, it's going to come out. It's going to come out. But I think if you sit in it and you say, okay, I'm disappointed. I'm sad. I have some envy. I didn't get it. 90 seconds. 90 seconds of just allowing yourself to process that emotion and that underlying feeling, and then you've moved it. My book came out close and time to a friend who has a much bigger platform. And she was doing a New York Times

profile for launch. And I was like, I could feel it. We were walking and I was like, I'm going to let myself feel like my envy. And I mean, I moved it in real time as we walked to 90 seconds. And yes, simultaneously, I could be like, I'm thrilled for you. Like this is huge. And this will open other doors and I need to like process my own and be here. It's so interesting because it leans into all the other qualities in which women get dumped with. Like we get dumped as though we are gossiping or we're bitching or we're unkind to each other. And it's fascinating to unpack the why of where those characteristics come from, because men can be deemed as being like angry and aggressive and loud. Whereas like our outlet for frustration is, I guess, socially more sinister. We still

have all those feelings, but those outlets are explored in a very different way. And it's because we don't have the ability to just be angry or to be loud or to take up space in the same way, I would say. Yeah, certainly. And you just hit all the salient points of the way that women are conditioned around anger, which is to not have any anger, that it's unseemly and unladylike, but also that its expression should be covert and backstabby and gross. And Rachel Simmons wrote this book called Odd Girls Out, which is all about aggression and girls. And her main point, and I write about this in the anger chapter, is that kids are aggressive. We're human. We're all aggressive. This is how we come to understand boundaries and assert our needs. And who knows

when this starts, again, culture is so contagious. So you think about your pliable little girls out on the field and you're like, they're just such sweet little girls. They're watching other girls and they're watching women. This is how we educate ourselves. This is how we learn. And her point is that boys with their aggression, it's completely acceptable. We might tell them not to, but it's very acceptable for them to push and yell and be very overt in their aggression. Ideally, we'd be teaching our kids conflict and how to have healthy conflict, et cetera, without violence and without yelling. We don't, but they're allowed to push and yell. Girls on the other hand, don't push and yell. That is not ladylike. It's very unfeminine. And so all that aggression, all that, it comes

out in covert ways, alliance building, whisper networks, backstabbing. And then we're told that that's just how women are you know we're catty bitches this is who we are but no this is who we're cultured to be and this is the only outlet that we have because we're not allowed to let these bad feelings come up and then express them directly elise thank you so much for how generously you share and also i mean to put into words i think what so many people experience but probably We don't have the understanding to pick those qualities out about themselves that they don't like. I think for anybody who hasn't read it, go and get Elise's book,

but also you can listen to her on her podcast, which is Pulling the Thread. Elise, thank you so much for joining us today and being part of the pod. Thanks for having me. This was so fun. We'll be right back.