Women and Madonna-Whore complex

I first heard about this complex when I watched a biopic on Elvis Presley. Apparently, he never made love to his wife Priscilla Presley after she became a mother and couldn’t have sex with any woman who was a mother.

The next time it came up in a casual conversation with a friend years ago when she confessed her sex life had come to a standstill after she’d had a child. Her husband didn’t get turned on by her anymore, she said. I remember looking at her and doing a double take. She was in fabulous shape, then in her late twenties, with her life ahead of her. They divorced shortly after, an amicable divorce by mutual consent, but she remained scarred for life. It was her fault, she thought. But it wasn’t and I wish they had sought couples counselling, but that is a column for another time.

The founding father of psychoanalysis, Freud, called it the Madonna-Whore complex. Like the name suggests, it is a complex where a man can see a woman only in dichotomies, the virgin or the slut. It is when a man can have sexual congress, to use the delightful terminology of yore, only with women he perceives as ‘degraded’ (Whore) and cannot sexually desire a woman he considers ‘respectable’ (Madonna). Identified under the rubric of psychic impotence, Freud wrote: “Where such men love, they have no desire; and where they desire, they cannot love.”

Psychologists state the complex comes into play most intensely when a woman has a child. Often some men cannot reconcile to the concept of their wife as a mother, and because of the association of a mother as a non-sexual being, this may affect their sexual relationship. This can be disconcerting for the woman though, to realise that she is no longer perceived as desirable by her partner. It might be quite a blow to her self-esteem. The marriage, one might surmise, will be on rocky territory.

You only have to look at Hindi cinema of the previous decades to see variations of the Madonna-Whore complex playing out on the big screen. The heroine was always pure and virginal, the vamp a sexual libertine to be cast aside. In English cinema too, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull featured the Madonna-Whore complex as an integral part of the plot and characterisation.

While Freud’s rationalising of the Madonna-Whore complex comes with a bucket load of stuff including Oedipal guilt, castration anxieties, etc, the fact remains that this binary only does disservice to women.

The invention of the pill changed the way women viewed and approached sex. Nonetheless, we still live in a world where to admit that one enjoys sex as a woman is to invite slut-shaming. And there’s the many ways in which, we women ourselves keep reinforcing the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. For instance, not being fully expressive about our true sexual nature.

The main problem with the Madonna-Whore dichotomy is that there is no divide. Most women have sex drives, barring the few who might call themselves asexual. We’re all, at various times, differing percentages of Madonna and Whore, and the ratio shifts and blurs depending on circumstances, life stage and the current sexual partner. It is time we gave ourselves permission to be both, and in doing so break the archetypes that constrain us.

Kiran Manral is the author of seven published books across genres. She is also a recovering Nutella addict.

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