There are characters as a woman I have spent my whole life desperate to avoid. The nag, the psycho, the tease, the pushover, the bitch. But no matter how sweetly you smile or how strongly you stamp your feet, they will always be lurking around the corner.
Ultimately, these are all derivatives of the ultimate dichotomy- Madonna or Whore. Anyone who has studied A-Level English (or gone down a YouTube rabbit hole) will tell you that this is the Freudian theory that men are only capable of viewing women as motherly or sexual beings rather than people. Sure, I’ve spent hours reading Atwood and Carter, feeling very smug with my psychoanalytic theory, not realising until recently that for me, it exists beyond the page.
The week before lockdown I went on a date with a friend. Always a risky move but the distance of quarantine did not make the heart grow fonder. Foolishly, I thought that with some clear communication and no hard feelings, the confines of our houses meant that once we could go back to group picnics and garden parties all would be back to normal. It did not. To me all seemed fine, I’d check in that everything was ok and he’d assure me that it was. A turbulent time for him personally can’t have helped, as I did as much as I could to help. I congratulated him with every good Facebook update and comforted him with every sad Instagram post to little avail. I gave him space but reminded him I was still there.
In the blink of an eye it was January of 2022 and I hadn’t heard from him in six months. In this time I had started seeing someone new and pre-covid rescheduled concert plans I had with this friend were on the horizon.
As confused as I was by his absence, I was hurt. My friend had slowly left my life. As hard as this was, I saw this gig as a last hurrah to smooth things out. That and he owed me £30.
I messaged him to tell him this the week prior to the gig (for the time being, I dropped the £30). I, yet again, wrongly assumed this would be an intense tango of adult conversation and an ownership of mistakes we had both made.
Instead, I was met by a snivelling toddler, acting as if he had been caught with his hand in the treat jar.
He was hurt by my new partner and spoke to me with venomous self-pity, a world away from the sweet boy I knew even before we’d entertained the idea of a date. I’d seen him hurt by people before but this was different. I could feel the word forming on his tongue – slut. He afforded me the small luxury of not spitting it out.
Upset, I turned to what I believe to be one of the most feminine of coping mechanisms. The act of normalising pathology and pathologizing normality. Initially, I’d surmised it to be my fault. He was sad as I’d taken a chance away from him. At the time I remember telling a mutual friend that this instance is just “part of being a woman”. He reminded me that doesn’t mean it is ok.
This interaction dislodged something in my brain and the penny dropped- I’d turned from his out-of-reach Madonna to somebody else’s whore.
I began to realise all the ways in which I’d accidentally mothered him during our friendship. What began as giving him lifts to places he was perfectly capable of taking a bus to would slowly become finding him apprenticeships and job opportunities in my spare time. This wasn’t an active choice for either of us, more something we fell into. But it did make me realise how many of my male friends see me as a Madonna figure.
They ask me questions they already know the answer to, ask for a hand with basic tasks and come to me for a motherly hug in their rare hours of vulnerability they wouldn’t share with anyone else.
For a year I was sure of it. For all his fallacies and oversights, Freud was right. I was determined to stop raising the men around me.
But was I doing to these men exactly what I’d always feared they’d do to me? I’d labelled them with a psychological trope just as I’d be scared they’d label me as a tease. I realised that when we are scared, archetypes are the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal.
In many ways they are unfalsifiable. It is why horoscopes and magazine quizzes never wain in popularity. Hell, Jordan Peterson managed to forge an entire career of them, but maybe that’s just my Virgo side talking.
Archetypes such as the Madonna-Whore complex, however seemingly fresh can be boiled down to something we’ve heard before. Through the safety of overcomplicated academia, it could be theorised that the Madonna-Whore complex is a projection of The Apollonian and the Dionysian duality, popularised by Nietzsche, projected onto the 19th century German woman.
Reducing this even further we see the theory of Eros and Thanatos (the life and death drives, respectively), yet another theory adopted by Freud.
Although thinking can have the power for change, often an overindulgence in academic archetypes is simply a distraction technique so that we don’t have to face up to the brutal reality of human behaviour.
By blocking out pain with an archetype you also lose the beauty of human tenderness. Perhaps I am a comforting person, I love knowing that those around me feel safe enough to cry to me.
Perhaps my friend did feel that I owed him something, perhaps he does now see me as a whore. But maybe he was just hurt and didn’t have the words to express it properly.
I can sit here and theorise all day but there’s only one thing I know for certain; he still owes me £30.
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