The Madonna-Whore Trap

Women, it has been told, descended from Eve. Biblical sources say, God created Man. And then from the rib of the first man, Adam, the first woman, Eve was created.

But there is another theory. According to Jewish mythology, or more specifically, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the first woman to be created was a woman named Lilith. God created Man. Man wanted a companion. So, God made him a companion. Except this companion, Adam’s first wife, was a troublemaker.

The couple fought all the time. And among many reasons for discord, one was that they didn’t see eye-to-eye on matters of sex because Adam always wanted to be on top, while free-spirited, strong-willed Lilith also wanted a turn at the dominant sexual position. When they could not agree, Lilith decided to leave Adam.

She uttered God’s name and flew into the air, leaving Adam alone in the Garden of Eden. God sent three angels after her and commanded them to bring her back to her husband by force if she would not come willingly.

When the angels found her by the Red Sea they were unable to convince her to return and could not force her to obey them.

It was then that Eve came into existence. Eve, created as an Other to Adam, was brought into existence only to play a supporting role in His-story, as not to threaten Adam’s ego.

The Mother of all creation, was created to appease Adam, agreeing to forgo sexual positions that aren’t missionary and power dynamics that are too volatile. Eve, maternal, vulnerable and gullible, fell into the traps of Satan, causing Adam to disobey God, get banished from Heaven and follow her to Earth for atonement.

Both were set to face the many tests of God, through countless reincarnations, in order to eventually return to Eden in their original sinless form.

Lilith was either erased or demonized and Eve was portrayed as a subset of Adam.

These religious narratives or myths are left open to interpretation and imagination. But what isn’t a myth is that we are all performers. And each of us are performing a script that was handed down to us by the society we are asked to live in.

Roles which have become norms through stories, passed down from generation to generation, cementing their typically heteronormative existence.

The script establishes that sex, like everything else in life, is also a performance, culturally-prescribed template for behaviour. The story of Adam and Lilith, and later Adam and Eve, sets the myth-historical context to this seemingly strange anxiety that men seem to have about women’s sexuality.

I use the term sexuality here fairly broadly to talk about parts of one’s sexual identity that go beyond sexual preferences.

This anxiety towards women’s sexuality, Freud suggested, can sometimes be methodologically managed by men. He claimed that to allay the uncomfortable dichotomy of fear and desire, men cast women into one of two categories: The Madonna (women he admires and respects) and the Whore (women he is attracted to and desires).

Therefore, the Madonna-Whore dichotomy splits women’s desirability/licentiousness and purity/maternal goodness as mutually exclusive traits and denotes polarized perceptions of women in general as either 'good’ -- chaste, and pure Madonnas or as ‘bad’ -- promiscuous, and seductive whores.

So there are two women. The free-spirited, adventurous, bold, sexually-liberated Whore. And the shy, prudent, chaste, sexually-constricted, abiding, womb-for-my-child-and-nothing-else Madonna. The Madonna is a trap. The Whore is an escape. The Madonna is Forever. The Whore is For Now, and maybe later, for Sometimes.

As author Orly Bareket puts it: “These men may have difficulties feeling attracted to the women they love, or loving the women to whom they are sexually attracted, leading to chronic dissatisfaction in their romantic relationships.”

A study published in the journal Sex Roles found that, men who buy into the Freudian Madonna-Whore dichotomy are more likely to embrace a patriarchy-enhancing ideology and feel less satisfied in romantic relationships.

In fact, this dichotomy may contribute to many relationship issues, where men generally seek to maintain the image of their romantic partner as Madonna, but may seek the Whore in the form of an affair, a hook-up, a fling, in order to achieve both opposing idealizations that they find difficult to project onto the same woman.

But there is one tiny problem in this over-simplified dichotomy, people rarely fit into pristine, organized, clearly labeled boxes.

Most women are both Madonna and Whore. Madonnas who display so-called wifely characteristics also desire liberation and freedom, passionate sex, travel within and travel across.

Whores who are free-spirited and adventurous also want stability, commitment, respect and a home. While to those who endorse the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy, love is seen as clean and virginal and sex is viewed as dirty and shameful.

In reality, love is both pure and passionate, and sex is both dark and sacred.

And since women want to be both respected and desired, the female plight ends up being just as dichotomous as the male’s. So, while poor men struggle to reconcile these paradoxical  concepts, suffering from a kind of cognitive dissonance, women are also caught amidst this chaos, craving to be seen as they are.

Woman keeps waiting for the world to realize that Lilith and Eve are not two women, polar opposites, black and white, dark and light. They are one. But Man either sees dark or light. We are all performers. And through repeating performances of the same culturally-prescribed scripts we trap ourselves in the same stories, suffocating under walls of our own creation, over and over again.

Shagufe Hossain works at the intersection of gender justice, faith, and social change using creative practices to revive and strengthen feminist movements.