How to Use double bind in a Sentence

double bind

noun
  • This double bind can be a cause for friction yet is avoidable.
    — Dr. Ruth Gotian, Forbes, 21 Sep. 2021
  • This double bind can be traumatic.
    — Hind Haddad, The Conversation, 30 Sep. 2025
  • Cast members of color, on the other hand, are often trapped in a double bind of sorts.
    — Shamira Ibrahim, HollywoodReporter, 8 Apr. 2026
  • Thus, leading to a double bind for Black women athletes such as Reese.
    — Lindsey Darvin, Forbes.com, 20 May 2025
  • Cold chains present a double bind; both their absence and their presence have huge ecological costs.
    — Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker, 15 Aug. 2022
  • But for Republican women, that double bind comes with a twist.
    — Lisa Lerer, New York Times, 19 Feb. 2023
  • Those users who are uncomfortable with this universalism are caught in a double bind.
    — Tung-Hui Hu, WIRED, 12 Oct. 2022
  • The concept evidently places defense lawyers in a double bind.
    — Nikhil Krishnan, New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2025
  • The masochistic double bind is a malign version of the narrator’s problem.
    — Anne Enright, The New York Review of Books, 6 July 2020
  • For the pop stars of ten or twenty years ago, girlhood and femininity presented a double bind.
    — Carrie Battan, The New Yorker, 21 July 2024
  • Caught in the double bind of toxic masculinity and a racist revolving-door carceral system, where does the buck stop?
    — New York Times, 10 June 2022
  • The animal folk of Hollywood are finding themselves in a double bind.
    — Maura Judkis, Washington Post, 8 Aug. 2023
  • When a person’s in a double bind, they’re confronted with two irreconcilable demands and feel set-up to fail.
    — Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Forbes, 12 Feb. 2024
  • With such arguments looming, tour operators find themselves in a double bind.
    — Natalie B. Compton, Sofia Andrade, Hannah Sampson, Gabe Hiatt, Reshma Kirpalani, Andrea Sachs, The Washington Post, Anchorage Daily News, 18 Aug. 2023
  • However well known, the double bind is stubbornly persistent—and in some cases getting worse.
    — Maria Aspan, Fortune, 8 Aug. 2022
  • Researchers frequently refer to this phenomenon as the double bind.
    — Maia Niguel Hoskin, Forbes.com, 12 June 2026
  • Two statements that represent a terrific double bind—a rope thrown by one black woman to constrict another, that surely ends up constricting them both.
    — Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb. 2020
  • These views, deeply ingrained in American society even today, put mothers in a political double bind.
    — Jill Filipovic, The New Republic, 29 May 2018
  • That’s a double bind in a region where households are both less financially able to weather severe climate events but — in many cases — more likely to experience them.
    — Jasmine Cui, NBC News, 17 Sep. 2024
  • Timely and important articulation of the double bind immigrants find themselves in, and why some — in this case the children — turn to extremism.
    — New York Times, 22 June 2018
  • The double bind for female candidates is that women who contend for power are less likely than men to be seen as likeable, but likeability has outsized importance for them.
    — Michelle Goldberg, Slate Magazine, 31 May 2017
  • That Bassett was in the makeup chair when Matthews made the inappropriate comments highlights the double binds facing women.
    — Alia E. Dastagir, USA TODAY, 3 Mar. 2020
  • Febos added that the likeability trap places girls in a double bind where they are expected to manage their reputation and maintain purity, yet please everyone.
    — Kyv Editorial Staff, NBC News, 25 May 2021
  • The double bind deepens when Dana learns that this survival depends on Rufus’s enslavement and rape of a free Black woman named Alice.
    — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2021
  • In this climate, managers are in a double bind, between efficiency mandates and employee expectations.
    — Anjali Chaudhry, Forbes.com, 25 Apr. 2025
  • As if breaking the law would offer a symbolic release from this double bind, the third video documents Liden trespassing into the apartment of an anonymous hoarder.
    — Erika Landström, Artforum, 2 June 2026
  • Even Meredith receives compassion, with her struggles to project authority portrayed as evidence of the double bind of being a woman in the workplace.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2024
  • Women may have to navigate the double bind and likeability conundrum and its associated backlash.
    — Palena Neale, Forbes, 26 Oct. 2021
  • But the disparity in attitudes toward aging – also wrapped up in critiques of their appearance – can pose a double bind for women who aspire to the White House.
    — Susan Page, USA TODAY, 17 Feb. 2023
  • After October 7th, the magazine found itself in an agonizing double bind.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 9 Sep. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'double bind.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: