Submission as Consent: Why High-Performing Women Stay Silent

High-performing women are the most likely to consent to their own invisibility

A colleague recently mentioned that her teenage daughter was beginning to navigate the Madonna-whore dilemma that ancient, exhausting split the culture imposes on women’s identities. As she described it, I realized something: this isn’t just a teenage problem. I know women negotiating billion-dollar deals who can’t articulate what they want in bed. I know founders who’ve built entire systems but live as though their own desires are secondary. I know high-achieving women everywhere who are, essentially, living half a life. This essay is for all of us in that boat.

The Architecture of Submission

None of us are born submissive. 

Yet the culture initiates us into submission, and this initiation happens differently depending on gender. Developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan maps this precisely: boys undergo a relational severing around age four, when pressured to suppress emotional attunement in favor of autonomy. Girls experience their rupture later, around age eleven, when adolescence ushers them into a social world that rewards self-silencing over self-expression. What was once a confident, outspoken girl learns to hedge, defer, ask permission. Both are initiated into patriarchy, but the wound takes different shapes.

This is where Simone de Beauvoir’s insight becomes crucial. She argued that while patriarchy shapes our condition, we retain the consciousness and freedom to choose within it. The question isn’t whether patriarchy exists—it does, and it has shaped our desires, our bodies, our reflexes. The question is: knowing this, what do we choose now?

This is important because the cost accumulates. For high-performing women, the awareness of what this initiation cost is acute: the burying of their emotional world, their honesty, their full-bodied self. We were each born whole. The question is not whether we can see the cage, many of us can. The question is whether we believe we have the right to leave it.

Submission as Consent, Not Choice

Women do not actively choose submission. They consent to it and they consent to what has been prescribed to them through the structures of patriarchy. This is important because there is a difference between choice and consent.

Under formal equality, this distinction becomes nearly invisible. The law no longer mandates submission. We appear to be free. And yet women continue to consent to the very structures that constrain them, often while believing themselves to be choosing freely. We adapt by prioritizing another person’s needs, and by performing versions of ourselves calibrated for external approval. None of these adaptations are necessarily wrong. But they become easier to make and begin to feel inevitable when we are living under patriarchal pressure. At times, this can be a passive attitude of not actively pursuing freedom. It is a cost-benefit analysis: given the costs of claiming autonomy (rejection, abandonment, the loss of validation), submission begins to look rational.

We confuse what we’ve gotten used to with what we want. We tell ourselves we are choosing when we are actually accommodating. False consciousness hides in the gap between what we tell ourselves and what’s actually happening. What matters is many of the reasons we do things aren’t transparent to ourselves anyway. There’s no room for judgment. There’s room to learn and gain clarity.

The Body as Contested Territory

Patriarchy shapes not only our choices but our desires and our sexuality. Submission becomes inscribed in the body itself. The alienation begins early, in adolescence, before a young woman’s body is something she inhabits for her own pleasure and desire. Before that happens, her body becomes something others comment on, follow, appraise, touch without asking. These early experiences, the unwanted remarks, the lingering gazes, the bodies that move too close, teach a devastating lesson: your body exists for others before it exists for you.

This creates an estrangement from the body itself. This separation makes submission feel not just acceptable, but almost like relief. If the body is already not yours, if it has already been claimed by the external world, then yielding to those claims can feel like the path of least resistance. It can even feel like validation. The only validation available. The other’s gaze becomes the primary reality of your embodied existence.

In sexual experience, this manifests as disembodiment. Women’s pleasure, particularly orgasm, has been thoroughly colonized by the medical system, by pornography, by performance expectations. About eight years ago, I reviewed Hannah Frith’s Orgasmic Bodies: The Orgasm in Contemporary Western Culture for Feminism & Psychologyjournal, and what struck me was this: orgasm has been constructed simultaneously as both natural (an inevitable bodily reflex) and as something that must be learned, mastered, improved upon. The result is a double bind. Women feel pressure to achieve it effortlessly while simultaneously being told it’s a skill that requires work.

This framework is treating women’s orgasm as a benchmark of liberation, as a measure of relationship success which creates tremendous pressure without creating safety. And so many women give up trying to connect with their own pleasure at all. The version of sexuality on offer bears no resemblance to their actual experience. They have learned to read arousal through others’ satisfaction, to measure success by a partner’s pleasure, to doubt their own sensations. The result is a fundamental disconnection from their own embodied experience.

The Madonna-Whore Binary

All of this manifests in the madonna-whore binary. This ancient split divides women into two impossible categories: the madonna (idealized, pure, desexualized, passionless) and the whore (sexualized, devalued, unworthy of love). Neither role permits full subjectivity. Neither allows a woman to be both desiring and respected, both embodied and whole.

Women do not choose one pole over the other out of weakness. We do so because the social order makes wholeness costly. To resist the binary, to insist on being a full person, with desires, embodiment, and voice can feel risky so women split themselves. They become one thing in public (capable, controlled, composed) and something else in private (compliant, accommodating, selfless).

As Deborah Levy writes in Real Estate, women build houses inside themselves, with rooms locked against their own desire. I’ve been rereading this recently, and she captures something I see constantly in my practice: this internal architecture becomes so sophisticated that women forget they built it themselves. The separation becomes a survival strategy so seamless it feels like truth.

The Possibility of Actual Choice

However, things have changed: for the first time in history, many women have achieved independent financial security. This is not a small thing. The cost-benefit analysis that made submission rational has shifted. The economic penalties for claiming autonomy have diminished. Real choice becomes possible in a way it was not before.

And yet, high-performing women who have dismantled external barriers to their autonomy often find themselves consenting to submission in their intimate lives while believing they are choosing freely.

The woman negotiating big deals structures her sexuality as a task to check-off. The founder who builds systems finds herself unable to articulate her own desires. The cost-benefit analysis persists and not because it is economically necessary, but because it has been internalized so completely that it feels like truth. This is not weakness. It is also no longer necessary. The external constraint has loosened. What remains is internal.

In Each Moment, You Get to Choose

In each moment, there is a choice available to you now that was not available before. You do not have to keep the rules you inherited. You do not have to honor the script the culture wrote for you. You get to make up the rules.

Real freedom and real love begins with genuine choice about what actually feels good for you. This is an active pursuit of freedom. Not what should feel good. Not what produces validation from others. But what, in your own body, in your own experience, actually generates pleasure and aliveness. It is the difference between consenting to a life that was prescribed and choosing a life that is yours.

In my sessions, I watch women slowly learn this language. It’s harder than it sounds. The voice that speaks your own desire is there and you have heard it. The important part is noticing when you’re relinquishing its control in service of others’ needs. That’s the moment of awareness. That’s where change begins.

It is the difference between consenting to a life that was prescribed and choosing a life that is yours.

This begins with voice.

It begins with learning to articulate, honestly and without apology, what you actually want. For many women, it is difficult to stick with what we think and want because we have a lot of pressure to hit certain marks at work and/or hold the mental load at home. This is genuinely difficult.

Reconnect with your body as a source of knowledge.

This means:

• Attending to what actually feels good rather than what you’ve been told should feel good

• Noticing when you are performing instead of living authentically

• Understanding that your pleasure is not secondary, not a luxury to be earned after you’ve satisfied everyone else

Your pleasure is the life energy and self-expression that brings what you want from life.

Build a relationship with yourself that’s not mediated through others’ validation.

This is perhaps the most radical thing you can do: to care about your own fulfillment as much as you care about others’. To make decisions based on what makes you happy rather than on what you think you should want.

Ask yourself in each moment:

• What do I actually want?

• What would feel good to me?

• Am I choosing this, or am I accommodating?

• Is this choice mine?

Your pleasure is the life energy and self-expression that brings what you want from life.

The Wholeness Paradox: Why Choosing Yourself Isn’t Selfish

When we hide our honest voice or our embodied vulnerability, even in service of connection, even in acts we experience as love, we create a dissociation within ourselves. This internal split mirrors and reinforces any disconnection you feel in your relationships—at home, work, or friendships.

I mainly work with women and couples who think outside the box and are working hard to be their best selves. And I notice this pattern: even as they build sophisticated systems at work and in their relationships, they’re still making choices that reinforce the submissive/dominance paradigm. The awareness that this is a choice, not an inevitability, is where healing begins.

When you choose yourself by speaking your truth, when you honor your body, when you build your life around your own fulfillment then you are not being selfish. You are being whole. And wholeness creates a more authentic connection with others and you feel more content in life.

The Cage Has Loosened

We were born whole.

For decades, many of us have been living as though we needed permission to reclaim that wholeness. But the cage has loosened. The rules have changed. The cost-benefit analysis that made submission rational has shifted.

You have options now. In each moment, you have a choice.

You get to decide what the rules are. You get to decide what fulfillment looks like. You get to decide who you are when everyone is witnessing you.