Soraya Chemaly: The Myth of Resilience

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer, journalist and activist whose work has been at the center of mine. Her now-classic, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger lit me on fire—not only for the deftness of her arguments but also because she is a meticulous researcher. What she gave air to in the pages of that book blew me away. She figures prominently in the endnotes of On Our Best Behavior.

Her new book, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, follows a similar path. Soraya takes something we’ve been served as an ideal—develop resilience—and flips it on its head, both widening and undermining this definition. She challenges our cultural myths about this concept and urges us all to shift and expand our perspective on the trait, moving from prioritizing the role of the individual to overcome and conquer to focusing on what’s really at work, which is collective care and connections with our communities. As she proves in these pages, resilience is always relational. Okay let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM SORAYA CHEMALY:

The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

Follow Soraya on Instagram

Soraya’s Website

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Your books are so good. And they're so important. I mean, because you're also an exceptional researcher. So, thank you, because you really are exquisite at finding incredible research. I feel like the timing, as delayed as it may have been for this book, feels a little right? Because I think that we're, and maybe this is just me looking through the same lens at the world as you, because I feel like we see things quite similarly and are interested in many of the same things, but that there is this crisis of masculinity, which obviously has been evolving and growing for, we could say but it feels like it's reaching this point where It's breaking into the mainstream and now people are saying things what I see very curious for your thoughts is like somehow the cure for this crisis and masculinity is more masculinity...

SORAYA CHEMALY: is more.

ELISE: Is yeah, it's wild. It's wild.

SORAYA: You're going to laugh. Did you see this today? I actually printed it out to remember that we had to talk about it.

ELISE: Oh, this is perfect. Yes. Yes. Nice, beautiful shot of Andrew Tate.

SORAYA: Yeah. I'm like, it didn't work in the sixties. Didn't work in the nineties. Didn't work in the oughts, but let's do it again. Yeah.

ELISE: what's wild is this in a culture where undeniably women do not have as much power in the sense that we think of it as men, that still men are so terrified of the feminine, their own femininity, I would say, their own sort of anima, that they are blaming women for feminizing culture and emasculating them and creating a crisis where they are hurting themselves and hurting other people.

SORAYA: It makes no sense. I always laugh. I know you'll appreciate this too, that the word emasculate and effeminate mean the same thing. Yeah.

ELISE: Oh.

SORAYA: I'm like, how did that happen? They're just both bad for men, right? There is no world in which feminizing is good to the culture, you know?

ELISE: Say more about that because I think that there's an end amongst women and I sense this in myself. There's so much contempt for the feminine.

SORAYA: So I'll share this with you because I'm literally obsessed with this, this, this, which is what I'm working on now, which is basically how I think that what's happening now is just a massive status anxiety, right? Just just this deep status anxiety. And I think if you say that people think of status in terms of social class or hierarchy or even gender and race classifications. But I mean it more in the sense that masculine identity is currently indivisible from domination. There are very few ways to be a healthy, happy, compassionate, masculine person without some element of shame about not dominating in some way, not being the best, not competing effectively, not being strong, not being powerful. And I went back and I, I read your book again this week and what was really striking to me was that you're talking about all these sins, but the flip side of the sins are all the virtues,

ELISE: Yep.

SORAYA: you know, like I say, with my book rage, I could write that whole book, flip it, take the same research, and it would be about men and sadness. You could take your whole book, flip it, and it would be about manually virtues and their harm. Right. And so many of those virtues that you I, that you would identify are implicit in the kind of resilience that I'm critiquing because they're less having to do with adapting than they are about being real men in a particular model of masculinity.

ELISE: Yes. A hundred percent. I know people are only listening, but I'm nodding my head vehemently. You know, the central thesis of my book is that women are conditioned and programmed for goodness while men are conditioned and programmed for power. And that idea of power, which is a very specific patriarchal power, and I feel like you do an incredible job of teasing this apart is restrictive, unyielding, harsh, and weirdly aggressive, as oppressive to men, maybe more oppressive, even though they seem to benefit from it. But it's a horrible standard.

SORAYA: It's a horrible standard. And I think it's really coming home to roost in loneliness, right? Like that ideal of masculinity, its foundational assumption is that you have to be a self sufficient, in control individual. So it's not relational in any way, unless you relate as someone with power over others, whereas women are supposed to maintain those connections, those relationships for better or worse. I mean, we understand the exploitation and the exhaustion, but in fact, we really benefit in virtually every way from our socialized ability to maintain and cultivate relationships. So anger, one of the sins, threatens to break those relationship in the culture's imagination when in fact it's not true I don't think at all, you know, all the things that I think about anger, but yeah, I think that loneliness we're seeing now is part of that masculine backlash.

ELISE: And just the devastation of the way that I was just reading this week In a Human Voice, which is Carol Gilligan's, follow up to In a Different Voice, where she talks about how despite writing in a different voice, her regrets about writing in a different voice are simply, and I think they're just a symptom of the time, that she, by introducing the voice of women to these developmental psychological models, because women were not Kohlberg and Piaget, that she, by calling it in a different voice, was making that voice different. The one that's different is the feminine voice rather than saying this is actually half of our humanity and the masculine and feminine is present in each of us. And so that's the renaming of in a human voice, but she does sort of going into those developmental psychological models too, if you think about the masculine as growth and individuation, and then the feminine is the integration and relatedness is part of our process. All of us, male, female, and other, I'd just like to add that the feminine is on top. That's the integration level, but that men are stuck in this like growth and individuation phase rather than being able to bring it back into the whole.

SORAYA: right. It's I think it's interesting too, because that individuation and that subjectivity is how our relationship to the state is defined, right? This state relates to us in that model, and that model actually is one in which the baseline belief is that citizens are self- governing, self- Actualized individuals who have the ability to do X, Y, and Z, instead, for example, which Martha Feynman, legal scholar, she has a whole theory of vulnerability and subjectivity in the law, she's like, what if we had a, a model of governance that recognized our interdependence instead of focused on radical independence, right? If we had that model as the model for governance? As the model for how we relate to the state, then we would have an ethic of care, then everything that Carol Gilligan says would actually be kind of woven into our social, political, and cultural institutions and relationships. We are so far from that, you know, I'm happy that it's being developed and articulated, but what you just described in terms of male subjectivity, Cultivated from birth is still the dominant model, which is why there's such the tension between, I don't even say left and right anymore because it's not left and right, you know, there are authoritarian minded people and non authoritarian minded people and authoritarian minded people really benefit from that kind of model, dominance over others, etc.

ELISE: like that rebrand. So interesting to me that you picked resilience, right? The resilience myth.

SORAYA: Or resilience picked me as you know.

ELISE: but again, to go back to this idea of rebrand, it's this rebrand in some ways of power and individuated power that has been slipped into the culture in a way that I was like, wait, resilience is a myth? Like, aren't we all supposed to...

SORAYA: aren't we all supposed to be resilient?

ELISE: Yeah, and so I walked into your book being like, huh, like where is she going with

SORAYA: Did I convince you at all?

ELISE: Oh, of course.

SORAYA: I think we all, we all have it. Right. We all know it. Yeah.

ELISE: and I loved that you sort of at the outset mentioned George Bonanno and his research into grief and recovery, because his point is like, humans are resilient, it's baked into who we are, this isn't like a

SORAYA: Not an outlier.

ELISE: at all.

SORAYA: Yeah. A skill that you're supposed to work hard on. That's the other thing, you know, like dedicate so much of your time and energy and think of it as self care and You just have to really scrap your head because everything in our society is designed to erode that capacity in us,

ELISE: Yeah. No, it's so true.

SORAYA: I didn't pick it. I wanted very much in December of 2020, I proposed a book about the care economy before the pandemic. I was like, why are we so resistant to the idea that our society should be a caring society? What is it about American culture in particular that abjures that orientation that says, no, you have to care for yourself in the most isolating, impoverishing, you know, humiliating ways for people. And then COVID happened. And my editor was talking about how we were all being traumatized and I said actually I don't think that's true I think we will live through a great trauma. But what we're feeling right now is kind of an anticipatory grief. We're not traumatized right now. We are grieving the world We understand that the world is not going to be what the world was and I think that's different and so she asked me to write about that and I said I will only really write about those things if the core of it is this idea of care, because the reason we have so much trauma, the reason there's such a demand for resilience is because we live in a profoundly careless environment. And that's how I ended up with this. And I didn't, there are many, many interesting, good books about trauma, and also television is basically like literally trauma porn.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: You know, and people are in a therapeutic, linguistic world online, like we understand things, whether accurately or not, but I don't think that we really appreciate A, as you said, how resilient we are and B, what resilience really looks like, as opposed to what we're told it should be.

ELISE: Yeah. No, I thought it was sort of a fascinating way to sort of take this cultural ideal grittiness, resilience, all of these things, the ability, and to say it's not as simple because I certainly, you know, I don't think it's necessarily even a trap and you talk about how much truth there is in this, right? Like when horrible things happen to us, things we would never choose, often It forces a growth phase. Yeah. In a way that's life, right? Like this is how we grow up. But that there's not necessarily one that we become, I don't know if it's that we become so attracted that we overdo these things.

SORAYA: We have a culture where there are no limits. So if you're going to grow, there's infinite growth, which of course can lead to perfectionism. When are you enough? When is it enough? When are you good enough? When have you accomplished sufficiently, right? Like if there are no limits to your growth, and also resilience studies show pretty consistently that people don't benefit from their traumas, the more trauma a person experiences, the more likely they are to have traumatization. So maybe yes, you necessarily grow after a traumatic event, one after another, after another, or just living in a traumatizing context, for example, living in white supremacy as a black or brown person, you know, just daily life, it's so filled with microaggressions and threats. That's not one moment in time. It is a pervasive kind of traumatizing existence. You don't bounce back from that. You don't necessarily grow from that. You just have to figure out how to adapt in the least harmful

ELISE: yeah. It's interesting too, in the context of thinking of the way that these things become mainstreamed and I don't want to say co opted...

SORAYA: mm hmm.

ELISE: 10 years ago in conversations with people like Gabor Mate, et cetera, it was like, how do we make trauma sort of a mainstream concept where people understand it and are trauma informed and trauma literate? And I feel like we've achieved that maybe to our detriment, right? Where suddenly everything is a trauma.

SORAYA: But there it is again, no limits.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: It's like, let's take that trauma idea and run through the goalposts and out of the stadium and go as far as we can where it's like, okay, now what are we going to do?

ELISE: And these things start to take on a life of their own and everyone in some ways feels like they need to claim them in order to, I guess, orient themselves in the culture or feel like they have a story to tell or that their story matters. And it starts to degrade the meaning of these ideas or make them again something to like have or to do rather than basic realities, rather than naming what we already are experiencing.

SORAYA: Right. And as you say, there's really no nuance in the language, the word trauma It's used to describe a really bad meal, the same way it might be used to describe a war born amputation. Like, literally, it's the same word. We don't even have different words in English to describe those things, you know? And so, that's a big problem. And kind it's also kind of true of resilience. One of the clear outcomes of the research that I did was that nobody agrees what resilience is. There's no agreement. Psychologists think one thing, military experts think another thing. You know, personal health and medical practitioners think it's another thing. There are infinite variations on what this means, and so we're not specific as with trauma, then you just end up with a meaningless conversation, which is how it gets co opted, right, into these narratives and culture. And the narratives and culture are really Horatio Alger narratives.

ELISE: Yeah. Yeah, just to quote, to read from you for a second you write, "in spectacular arrogance, our mainstream vision of resilience encourages us to ignore, minimize, and even punish the desire for our greatest resilience assets: interdependence, collective versatility, and shared care. Instead of revealing our relationships to one another, our environments, and the systems we live in. This vision highlights and glorifies self sufficiency, limitless positivity, and individual strength against all odds." Yeah, that's pretty much it. And that's like...

SORAYA: it's accurate.

ELISE: masculine.

SORAYA: That's exactly right. That's right. I know that people often want to resist the imposition of feminist ideas and analysis, but there is no doubt that those are gendered cultural norms. You know, they're also ultimately in their complexity, highly race. Right. Like, what type of trauma are we going to recognize? We're going to recognize the trauma of soldiers coming back from Vietnam, not the trauma of women who were raped in their homes or black citizens who are arrested when they go out for dinner. You know, that's not trauma according to our medical definitions when they began. Right. And so I think too, that we just want to resist complexity, which I'm glad to say, I think younger people are not inclined to do.

ELISE: You think? I hope you're right.

SORAYA: I really believe that. I think they're like, no, no, no, no, we can hold all these ideas at once.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, some, right? Because I think in the book, you also mention that there's also for a lot of men, like a regressive...

SORAYA: true. Yes.

ELISE: sort of these like, quote unquote, hashtag trad wife values. Like, I deserve to know where my girlfriend and wife is at all times.

SORAYA: At all times. Isn't that shocking? That one really floored

ELISE: me.

I should make all decisions.

SORAYA: Yeah.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: But I think that's why 60 percent of men in their 20s aren't dating. 40 percent of women aren't dating, but 60 percent of men. And there's one I was talking to said to me, how is that possible?

ELISE: yeah, I know. Well... It's the golden girls starting younger and younger.

SORAYA: I just laughed. I was like, you know, it happens. Very funny. She just couldn't figure that one out. And I was like, okay. I'm going to say it.

ELISE: Oh, God.

SORAYA: You know, that gender divide is real in Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z.

ELISE: Even as I feel like it's becoming also much more fluid and non binary and...

SORAYA: that's made more girls. It's real. more girls than boys, right? Like, I think one study I saw said that girls in this cohort are at least three times more likely to be queer, bi, and lesbian, which is how you account for that dating difference, right? They're, they're like, we just are not dating you people. Because as you said earlier, there's this unit of contempt. There's this disgust and disdain and disparagement of feminine things and feminine people. And A real fear of certainly spectrum behaviors, trans people, because if you start breaking those borders, we keep asking what's a woman? I would really like to have that be what's a man? It's like, why are we not talking about this? You know, everyone's very fixated on one and not the other. And I'm kind of curious.

ELISE: Yeah. It's really interesting. When you start to just see it in a new light or against a different context, it starts to become, I think, very clear in ways that are fascinating, once you start seeing the patterns...

SORAYA: that's right.

ELISE: playing out. And you write, too, about how and again we get into the masculine feminine mind over body, all these binary splits which are often gendered even though they're not actually really gendered but in our minds, and I write about this too, like the feminine is, matter, which the etymology is mater, mother, like she's the physical body, we're trying to get sort of above the body with our minds and dominate the body and dominate nature, right? And that resilience falls into the same swamp, because you write about how resilience equals strength, equals mental toughness, equals self sufficiency and physical power. It's a mind attribute, not a body.

SORAYA: It's interesting, right? I think I said if you think about the word mental toughness It sounds like you're talking about the mind but the opposite of mental toughness is physical frailty. Right, and so it manages through sleight of hand to also convey certain ableisms, right? Because there are real human beings who define the utmost of what it means to be a human, right? A rational, able bodied, in our tradition, white man who can take care of himself and go after what he thinks is right, right? But, by comparison, every other type of person suffers a kind of disability from that ideal. Right? Women are literally in Greek philosophy disabled men because of their bodies.

ELISE: Thanks, Aristotle.

SORAYA: thanks all of them. Right?

ELISE: Deformed men. Yes.

SORAYA: You know, when people trot out the classics and there's a lot of great, great thinking in the class, but when they trot them out without noting this kind of disparagement, I don't have the time of day for the conversation. I'm like, come on, are you really going to pretend? That these same people did not espouse these hateful, hateful and massively influential ideas, you know, and as you write too like the conjunction of that thinking with religious misogyny continues so thoroughly in our culture today, whether you are secular or not.

ELISE: It's unconscious at this point. And so much of it is what we take for granted is the way things always are. And I was so happy to see you explore like the myth of man, the hunter and you know, women in the caves.

SORAYA: Is that not so funny?

ELISE: It's so funny. And it's wild how insistent that is, as a myth in our culture that women were not warriors, and we're not hunters, and we're not Vikings. Whereas now we have all the evidence to suggest like, We've always been very, very varied in our expression, and these are not ideals. These are not, these are not tight...

SORAYA: they're fantasies, literal fantasies. You know, there's an entire genre on TikTok of men explaining to other men the man the hunter theory as a dating practice. Like why you have to relate in that way to women who are naturally this other way, you know? And it's just gobsmacking to me. I have a fun fact though that, that is sort of related to this that just literally makes me laugh every time I think about it. I heard this on NPR maybe two, three weeks ago, but apparently in the same way that bias builds these theories in research, in research studies, everything we've been talking about for a long time, scientists were studying the physical dimorphism of animals, and they were particularly interested in the animals where the males developed defensive or sexual attractive mechanisms like giant antlers, right? Like display of masculine strength for whatever reason, whether it was to attract female animals or whether it was to fight. And so they just studied that, they didn't study what was happening simultaneously to the females in the species like deer. So in the past few years, people have been going back and they're like, well, what did happen? What was going on with the women when the men were out there flexing, right? The males were out there. And it turns out that in all of those species, the bigger the display grew among males, the bigger the brains of the females got, [laughter] and I cannot help in shoddy science to apply that to what is happening to humans.

ELISE: Yes.

SORAYA: I'm like, seriously? So in species after species, they're like, yeah, we went back and we looked, and it turns out that over that period, the brains of the females in the species were growing as they adapted in ways that we just were not considering at all.

ELISE: It's amazing. And it's true, you know, yeah, one of the people I write about is Ashley Montague and this New York Post story that he published in the fifties called the natural superiority of women. And he was like, as a scientist, he was like, this is just actually provably true. But provably true that Women have been outperforming boys in school for a century across the globe in ways that are actually very concerning. I'm the mother of two boys. And we're more durable. We outlive men. He cites just endless research. And then I was so excited to read in your book, too, the way that we think about strength and this idea that men, of course, are stronger... Can you tell us about Jasmine Paris?

SORAYA: Oh my God. Isn't that an amazing story?

ELISE: It's an amazing story.

SORAYA: it is. So she's an ultra marathoner. She ran this grueling race along the Pennine Way and along the way, literally on three hours of sleep, she would stop to breastfeed a newborn, while everyone else was resting and then she would run again and she won the race for passing the next closest person, a man, by 15 hours. By the time he crossed the finish line for this race, she was back home in Edinburgh, and she was like back home getting ready for work or something. And I think, I can't remember the exact words, but she literally was really modest. Someone was like, you know, what do you think of this? And she goes, well, you know, I'm a good runner, or I'm just trying to get some rest. It was just so self effacing. I was so fascinated by this especially because, my God, she'd just given birth. She's breastfeeding a baby. You know, and it turns out that, as I said, and as you kindly shared, Women ultramarathoners, 99 percent of the time they're faster than the men, not by huge margins like that, but they consistently outperform the men in these races. And I think that kind of defies some of our ideas, but I was really interested there in the difference between what we now understand as men's ability to have these spurts of power, like sprinter power. And that's how we define strength. That's how we define resilience as opposed to, as you said, women enduring, living longer, surviving catastrophes, surviving, you know, horrible things over the course of their lives or over the course of generations. We don't see that as strength and we don't think of resilience in terms of that quality.

ELISE: Yeah. This is, again, shoddy science, but I was thinking about that study yesterday and I was talking to my dad, who's a physician, and I had to wonder too, we were talking about sort of hormonal differences in men and women, and I was thinking about sort of weight as well, because in my marriage, like, in most marriages, my husband, like, eats a pint of ice cream a night...

SORAYA: my husband weighs what we met at 18. He's exactly the same body.

ELISE: yeah, my scale often confuses me for my husband, and I was like, that's so frustrating because I feel like I work harder...

SORAYA: you're trying, yeah, I agree.

ELISE: yeah, but thinking about this study, I'm like, well, I feel like actually the ability, even though we culturally see it as a negative, the ability to hold on to weight, also I'm sure, more durable, right, and more resilient in the...

SORAYA: there must be a reason, right? But you have two sons, you said, right? And no one ever talked to me about these things. I don't know about you, but it was just not a thing you did when I was growing up. Like you wouldn't sit a 12 year old down and explain menopause to her, right? Because why the hell would you do that? Getting your period was depressing enough. Then ending it is like a whole next level. But I think that what I realized in retrospect was that truthfully, I've had five different bodies.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: My childhood body, my adolescent body, my dewy, fertile body in my twenties, my mothering body in my thirties, my premenopausal body in my forties. You know, every time I adapted to one, I started feeling like, Oh, I've got this. I understand what's happening, it would change. And so I just decided, well, something must be good about these changes. I have to embrace these changes because at least so far, the women in my family have all lived into their 90s, and I'm like, well, the same things I know happened to the ones I knew who were alive. Like I remember these passages of these frictions and the complaints and all the things that they would say out loud. But yeah, there has to be something like there's a reason.

ELISE: No, and there is. I just had Lisa Moscone, who's a neuroscientist who has, I think, 11 grants to study the brain, and only now is money starting to come into research for women.

SORAYA: For those things. That's right.

ELISE: Yeah, as not just deviant men or smaller men or whatever it is, but because of all those phases that you were just talking about, she was explaining how each one is a remodeling process. And they can be incredibly painful and uncomfortable, but that our brain is being remodeled for either hypervigilance or no need for hypervigilance anymore, yes, increase in empathy, et cetera, and that our brains are quite stunning. It was interesting to hear about, because I'm like you, very interested in gender as like a cultural concept and then what is the biological?

SORAYA: What is the biology? Yes.

ELISE: Yeah. And that brains are gendered. She talked about with trans people, you can see the brain become gendered.

SORAYA: You can see changes. Yeah. The other thing, I was totally, completely immersed in a whole set of great books and research that came out about testosterone. Because as you know, certainly with anger, people are like, well, men are more angry because they have testosterone, which is bullshit, by the way, like that is not true. Testosterone has nothing to do with anger. It might make you more aggressive. But you can be aggressive without any anger. You can be angry without any aggression, right? It's just much more complicated than that. And the studies that just really struck me, particularly when you think about childhood socialization, was that we think that testosterone causes certain behaviors instead of behaviors maybe spurring increases of testosterone. And one of the best studies that, that indicated this was conducted where they, they took a bunch of actors, put them on a stage, gave them scripts, men and women, and they mixed them in various partners of one person acting as an employer and one as an employee who was about to get fired. And they had men and women play both parts, and then they measured the testosterone in the people before and after this role playing. Oh, and the firing of the employee was done in a particularly demeaning, harsh way in which a more powerful person exerted this power to hurt the other person. And in men who were playing the role of the boss, after they did it, their testosterone levels had gone up four times. And in women, their testosterone levels had gone up by a factor of 10.

ELISE: Wow.

SORAYA: And so these researchers are like, hold on a minute, the testosterone responded to the behavior. So when we teach boys, when we are on a playground and we kind of coddle girls and tell them don't climb too high, don't jump too far we're actually engaging in practices that reduce the production of testosterone in their bodies. Whereas with boys, when they're roughhousing and they're playing football or they're doing these other things, We're amping up the production of testosterone in those children, and yet we think it's going in the opposite direction, which is super interesting, I think, you know, especially with the rise of women's sports, and we're just seeing now how completely athletically capable women who were not allowed to do these things really are.

ELISE: Or the way that they do it is policed, right? Or circumscribed. Yeah. I wish I could refer to exactly who this was because it was an athlete, but I don't think she was super famous, but she put something up on Instagram recently that was really powerful where she was saying how whenever they win, they're conditioned to talk about how they're really doing it for the girls.

SORAYA: For the team and the girls. Yeah..

ELISE: Yes. And as role models, yeah. And she was like, rather than just like, well, we want to win because we're athletes. We want to win. But this insistence from culture that like the Caitlin Clarks, et cetera, that they all need to be triangulating their desire to win off of improvement or positive role modeling for someone else. It's so interesting. And it's everywhere.

SORAYA: Has to be other focused.

ELISE: Always.

SORAYA: Yeah. That quality of status anxiety that I'm obsessed with, one of its dimensions is what I think of as the theft of glory from women, right? Like they're not allowed to bask. They're not allowed to bask in their own glory. They have to experience it like power of vicarious, and when they don't. There's a lot of criticism, you know, like Megan Rapinoe, remember Megan Rapinoe? Like that was amazing. Like she just was so clearly thrilled by victory, you know, as a person, as an individual, as someone who would work really hard. And yet there was just so much conservative backlash against her as selfish, stealing attention from the team, not representing the country, you know?

ELISE: Yeah. Yeah. No, there are examples everywhere. But, and then again, and this is where I feel like I'm thinking now of sort of women in the military and women in war and too, that there is this idea, which I think is very beautiful, which is that women, and it seems to be true, statistically, somewhat true, obviously there are aberrations, but that women really don't kill unless they're killing on behalf of other people or on behalf of protecting something or someone that they love, right? There aren't many...

SORAYA: no, there are just not a lot of cold blooded, serial killing women out there. Yeah.

ELISE: What is it? 99 percent of mass shootings are at the hands of men.

SORAYA: That's right.

ELISE: Yeah. And so there are also these qualities again, in this culture that I think pushes women to be like, the way to achieve equality is for us to...

SORAYA: to be like men.

ELISE: Be like men, let's also acknowledge like all the incredible qualities of femininity that men need to let come up in themselves. Like men need to be more like women.

SORAYA: I think that's what's happening now, right? This is scaremongering over the feminization of society as though having a more compassionate orientation, a more relational orientation is a really bad thing. It's just kind of surreal. You just think, what does that even mean? And, you know, maybe it's a minority of people who would say that out loud, but in fact it's a disproportionately high number of people with money and power who say it. And it's very destabilizing, I think. Clearly destabilizing, you know.

ELISE: I wonder too, like, I think about it's so easy for men to sort of, I don't know if they get scared by their own femininity into tipping into sort of red pill territory. I don't know what that is, but you will see it's an I don't know if you I'm sure you saw that New York Times op ed recently about how toxic this culture of masculinity...

SORAYA: mm hmm.

ELISE: the toxic manhood culture is and I liked the piece, I thought it was good.

SORAYA: He was talking about virtues, Greek virtues.

ELISE: yes, he was talking about the virtues, which is nice. But I was like, waiting for him to just be like, men need to be more like women.

SORAYA: I hated that piece. I hated that piece because he literally didn't say, why are men so repelled by femininity? Why is he unable to, unwilling to admit to the misogyny of the culture? To the disdain and the contempt. It's very clear. It starts off really early. And we're all subject to it. Like that study that came out a few years ago that showed that at the age of five, boys and girls associate genius with boys and girls, men and women equally. But by the age of seven, that's no longer true. They all associate genius with men. That doesn't happen because of our chromosomes. Like, it happens because the entire culture is saying men are smarter, men are superior. And so to write an article like that without at least giving a hat tip to the Fundamental male supremacy of the culture is a waste of time. It's a waste of faith. I'm like, okay, whatever. Yes We know their virtues blah blah blah virtues, you're kinder than I am.

ELISE: I appreciate, I tend to be gentle and I feel like I, like everyone, have to watch myself for how I will protect or be like, oh, this is in the right direction or at least a man's talking about it because I feel like so often the only people talking about this are...

SORAYA: women, but he's not really talking about it. He's kind of talking about it. He's kind of virtue signaling. But when the rubber hits the road and you're like, well, are you going to talk about the levels of hate that are baked into virtually everything? But no one wants to call it hate either because it's complicated.

ELISE: And it bums me out. I don't know if you feel this way, maybe you had a different experience as you have brought, Rage Becomes Her into the world and it's sort of gotten its teeth into the culture, but it's so hard to get men to engage in this conversation at all.

SORAYA: I could probably count the number of men that read my book on my fingers.

ELISE: Really?

SORAYA: I believe so. I think a lot of women gave the book a lot of women have said to me I gave this to my spouse. I gave this to my father. I gave this to my brother, you know, but a book about, Theoretically an emotion so they don't understand it is political at all or philosophical right a book about feelings by a woman with a strange name I mean, what guy's gonna really pick that up? Oh, look, it's a book about angry women by someone whose name I can't really pronounce. Think I'll read something else today. She's just gonna like piss off my wife. Women know what's in that book. That book validates what women experience. It's just like we all know this is happening. We all feel it. We we feel it. Like, aha, that's right. That's what happened to me. That's how that happened. It took me seven years to get angry about that one incident. You know, like, why wasn't I angry seven years ago when I should have been angry, you know?

ELISE: Yeah, and then part of me is like, well, I think we spend way too much energy collectively, as women, trying to get men to care about this, when one of the qualities of socializing boys, per Carol Gilligan, is like this idea that boys don't care and girls don't know, or that that's what comes into their vocabulary. And so I think getting men to care takes a tremendous amount of energy. Meanwhile, going to that like stag story that you were talking about, what could happen if we just focused on ourselves and getting on side with each other? I think there are enough wonderful feminist men in our culture...

SORAYA: I think that's what young women are doing. Young women are like, I'm not here for this. Fuck off.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: Literally. They're just like, no, I'm going to make my own world, my own way, my own community, my own relationships, my own version of a family. I don't need to expose myself to denigration, to insult, to heavishness, to emotional immaturity, whatever it is. I really believe that to be the case. And I think that's really causing a shock. I think, it's interesting, because sometimes memes are just so spot on, you know. But this meme was basically like, you know, everyone thinks of a Stay at home wife or any wife is kind of dependent on her husband and yet what happens when men aren't married? They literally don't appear to be able to feed themselves properly, clean up properly, form relationships properly. And so the truth is that there is this baked in dependence, which I kind of write about when I talk about the exploitation behind the idea that these men are self sufficient, right? Because in fact, the women in their lives are a resilience asset. It's just unspoken. They do the emotional labor. They do the hermeneutic labor. They're doing all of the busy work and the nurturing work and the parenting work. But it's just, it's taken for granted because apparently that's supposed to be what we naturally do out of the kindness of our hearts. And fewer and fewer women are willing to do it. And what you have are kind of emotionally adrift, lonely men who are like, wait, what happened?

ELISE: Yeah, I know. And then, and this is where I get sort of twisted in myself. In terms of watching my own contempt for femininity, where when I get to that point and it's different, like I've had to reframe some things for me. Like I actually enjoy cooking. I don't wanna cook every night, but like, I like doing this. I love taking care of my kids. I don't wanna do it all the time. And I'm fortunate to work in a way that I don't have to. But I couldn't do it. But watching myself to make sure that I'm not. dumping. I'm an excellent nurse, for example. Like, I love that about myself. If something happens to you, you call me and I will come and I will take care of you and I will bathe you. I have no, no squeamishness, but yeah, watching myself to make sure that I'm not treating those qualities as regressive, even though I also am like, I don't want to do that all the time. I want to do it sometimes.

SORAYA: Right. But I think you just delineated the difference, which is that if it's used against you, if it's used to oppress you, if it's used as a bludgeon to make you feel guilty or to totally exhaust you or exploit you, that's one thing. This is the richness of the trad wife explosion, right? There's this simple idea that you get to choose. Now you're choosing to emulate a situation that's a fiction in that those women didn't choose anything. They had to dress like that. They had to live like that. They had to be nice to the men like that, because they had no bank accounts. They had no cars. They had no licenses. They had no income. They had no security. So, don't equate these two things because you're just kind of living a dignified version of something that was pretty egregiously harmful, you know. And it's the difference, I think, in knowing that you have an option.

ELISE: Right.

SORAYA: That you don't have to.

ELISE: Yes. Watching my husband, too, even though he also suffers in a culture...

SORAYA: yes, absolutely.

ELISE: he be more dominant and more winning and more...

SORAYA: provide and protect.

ELISE: Yeah, but he's a great caretaker.

SORAYA: My husband's super nurturing, like, thoughtful, and actually probably our relationship really benefits from the fact that both of us have always been super supportive. Super comfortable with each other's cross gender behaviors. Like, I'm just much more aggressive than my husband in certain contexts. I just am. You know? And that's just what it is. And he's had to live with that, and he's okay with it most of the time.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: and I'm okay that he likes doing things that people kind of associate more with women. He likes shopping. I hate shopping. Like, they're just silly little things, but they make a difference.

ELISE: And then at times I'm similar, I'm much more, and in a way that can make me roll my eyes because he sort of wants to send me out to deal with every tough encounter or anything confrontational. But when he when he really comes alive in those moments it's pretty exciting.

SORAYA: You're like, wow, that was impressive. Maybe you're just storing it up for the key moment. Yeah.

ELISE: very compelling.

SORAYA: Yeah. Yeah.

ELISE: I mean he hates traveling with me. He, like, jokes about putting me in a cab like 30 minutes ahead of everyone so that I can go and like bustle through security.

SORAYA: Oh, yes. Leave them alone. I can't even remember what point of crisis we were at, but, you know, electoral politics or pandemic or health or hurricane or whatever it was. And he's like, you know, I think maybe we don't go to any more dinner parties. I don't think I have the fortitude. And I was like, I was like, what, why? You know, and he's like, it's just hard. It's just not fun. And I'm like, so wait a minute. It's okay if everybody else says they're peace. And I'm uncomfortable, but if I say my peace and other people are uncomfortable, it's not okay. I mean, you know, that's hard. That's hard on the people around you, you know, but you work it out. It's fine. I'm still probably not a great dinner party guest.

ELISE: I bet you are really fun. We enjoy that level of aliveness.

SORAYA: It's true. It's true. It's true. I had this guy look at me, like, this is a couple of years ago, but I'll never forget it. I said to him, well, this is Washington, D. C. It's easy, right? Like, you're filled with these scenarios and I said, well, what do you do? And he said, I run three think tanks, nonprofit Institute. And I was like, Oh, wow. What is their focus? He goes, they're all focused on the rule of law. And

ELISE: Oh god.

SORAYA: I said, the rule of law for whom? And meanwhile, I'm kind of smiling. We just met and he says, well, you sound so sprighted. And I burst out laughing and I said, you sound so 80s, like, it was just funny, like the rule of law hasn't worked out for some of us the same way.

ELISE: Exactly.

SORAYA: Which law?

ELISE: yeah exactly, which one are we talking about? I was just watching the season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the court, and it's, you haven't seen it? Okay, you'll laugh in terms of the implications for law.

SORAYA: I'll watch. I'll watch. It's really the apex of cringe TV, I have to say.

ELISE: It's so good.

SORAYA: He's so good at it. So good. I don't know what he's going to pour his energy into now.

ELISE: I know. We need our comedians we need them out there.

SORAYA: we do need our comedians out there, man.

ELISE: Full throated. Yeah. If they can't say it, then no one can. But just in general, like, I think there's a certain brilliance to that sort of mind, I think, to be able to hold a really big context and reflect parts of culture back to us. And it's supposed to make us all uncomfortable and they're supposed to say the things that you're not supposed to say and do the things that you're not supposed to do. But if we lose our sense of humor...

SORAYA: that's all. That's what we've got.

ELISE: that's it. That's it.

SORAYA: Yeah, it's true. It's very heartening to see comedians do what they do well.

ELISE: Yeah. Yeah. And just to give everyone permission to as serious as everything feels in the world to laugh at ourselves.

SORAYA: Yeah. You know, and I think there are comedians who do that and they manage still not to punch down, right? They're smart and it's complicated and they know that.

ELISE: Yeah, no, exactly. But it's not funny when it feels like bullying and abusive. But when it hits and just lights up that collective truth, I think it's really important. Not even reset, but just like, okay, this is so true. It's uncomfortable and funny and we need to look at it.

SORAYA: You know, it's funny when I think of it, I still think of George Carlin.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: Because he was such a good example of that, I think.

ELISE: Yeah.

SORAYA: and totally dating myself because there are so many talented and funny people, but I think that was my first experience with what you just described, which was a comedian who could do all of those things and reveal truths, and make you just laugh till you cry.

ELISE: Yeah. Now I need to go watch a standup special.

SORAYA: Yeah.

ELISE: Well, thank you for your work. We need to do this again because we barely scratched the surface.

I’m so grateful to Soraya for her work which is Rage Becomes Her, which was foundational for my book, On Our Best Behavior. And similarly, The Resilience Myth is just an incredible compilation of research about the way that these ideas have come to exemplify a highly individual idea of strength and fortitute and prevailing over all that comes versus the reality for many of us, which is that we rely on these interconnected webs of care, that resilience is part of who we are, and it’s not part of this mind over matter mental strength that its come to be typified as, it’s more about flexibility, the ability to ask for help, and understand your own needs and listen to yourself and all of those qualities that we tend to code as more feminine. And, as always, all of her work always hits on these major cultural themes, she hits on this idea of limitlessness, endless optimization, self-perfection, and all of these things that become really harsh, hard on all of us on both the macro and micro scale. So again, her newest book is called The Resliance Myth, I hope you pick it up, because it’s really an anthem for the importance of care and what our culture could look like if we could recenter that—which might be the reason we are really here, to be with each other, that’s a core human need. Alright, I will see you next time.