The Madonna/Whore Complex
Jan. 27th, 2010 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helblingArgh.
I am going to have a little bit of a rant, if you'll excuse me.
I have finally finished the trilogy I was reading – I deliberately made myself wait a set number of weeks before purchasing the next one so that I don't blow all my hard gotten wages on books, fun though that may be[1].
I should point out that the Shadows trilogy by Brent Weeks, which is to be the subject of this rant, in pretty much every area other than the one I'm about to rant on, is very enjoyable. It's well written, well paced and the plot is engaging and hard to predict. I, other than the below, enjoyed it. Further more, it's not the only thing in the world to be subject to this rant[2], it's just the thing that happened to set me off.
What I'm going to rant about is the Madonna/Whore complex.
The Madonna/Whore complex harks back to a time when women were one of two things:
-Dutiful wives
-Bad People.
Of course, the bad people were any woman that had sex with someone other than her husband. It didn't matter what reason she chose – if you weren't hitched, it was a bad thing. And it made the woman a Bad Person[3].
Of course, this idea is no longer so[4], yet the stereotype lives on, in the media in particular, which gives people all sorts of skewed ideas over a woman's sexuality. It's the one that responsible when you hear middle aged folk grumble insults at a woman that is deemed to have slept with too many people for their liking and is deemed a 'slut'.
If you sweetly, as I did back when I was young enough to get away with it, ask them what they think a reasonablelimit is, they'll turn a wonderful shade of purple and stomp off, because what they really want to say is 'none at all until that ring's on her finger' but there's no way they can even hedge that answer because they know the correct one they're supposed to give is something about having a healthy attitude towards sex, but they can't bring themselves to admit that they dislike the idea of a woman having sex with more than x[5] number of people, even if someone else has told them it is healthy.[6] The idea that there may not be an upper limit on the number of partners a woman 'can have' will never have crossed their minds.
The media (by which I mean shows, movies, books, and, in fact, the occasional radio play) is very good at propagating this stereotype. You will see it everywhere.
Woman having sex = bad person.
Woman who holds out for her one and only = good person.
Weeks, I confess, surprised me when I realised he was beginning to conform to this one. Why?
Because the Madonna/Whore complex is, at its heart, there because whoever wrote what's being put forward, in whatever medium, was lazy.
It's an easy way to classify women – by their sexuality. Rather than turning them into fully rounded characters with motivations and desires, the complex is a shortcut to instant characterisation. It's so well known that if you show a female casually hoping from one bed to the next, the chances are you'll assume she's on the bad guy's team or at least, 'up to something'. Show her in a bed with more than one other person and that becomes doubly so.
If you show people a girl turning down an amorous offer with an explanation of how she's only ever going to sleep with her partner – of which, of course, she'll have very few because she's that sort of girl – she will, almost without a shadow of a doubt, become a 'good person' in the audience's eyes.
It's a very easy route to go to get 'believable' female characters for those that can't actually be bothered to write them.
Which is why Weeks surprised me – his female characters are well written. They're rounded. They have desires and motivations and willpower and plot just a freely as the men.
But they all still fall neatly into the Madonna/Whore side of things – there isn't a single female character present that has a healthy attitude towards sex, and every single one that has sex with more than the one person they're 'in love with' is a Bad Person.
For instance: We see two hot-blooded noble women – both of whom are on the bad side. One is the king's mistress who sides with the invading army. She has an affair with the prince, kills him for money, then ends up making sculptures for the new king's perverse pleasure out of the bodies of the girls he's raped so brutally most of them have killed themselves as a result.
The other leads the noble's rebellion and takes over as queen – but then turns out to be a power-grasping idiot who tries to hang onto the crown even when the real king re-emerges. It eventually comes to light that she's fucking her own, much younger, brother[7] and is brutally slaughtered by the main character.
There is, in fact, within the 'nobles' group of people, only one woman who has sex with more than 'her share' and yet is one of the good guys. She's the love interest of one of the main characters for the first book, and is rare because she's on the 'good guys' side, and yet has had a large number of partners. Good, right? Wrong. When it's revealed to her love interest who she's been sleeping with, she runs off in shame, gets captured by the enemy, raped to death, then made into a statue by the character mentioned above.
Yes, the Madonna/Whore complex has yet another side to it – not only if you have sex are you a Bad Person. The chances are that if you have sex, Bad Things will happen to you[8].
Weeks actually hangs onto this concept quite firmly, with both hands actually, because several of the more important female characters display the Madonna and the Whore side of things, within the same character.
In his defense, one of them is understandable – a character called Vi, who's a type of assassin, had a master that enjoyed raping her as a motivational technique for training[9]. He dies and she gets press ganged into a group of chaste nuns that end up functioning as battle mages[10]. So it's sort of understandable why she'd classify the part of her life that involved sex as bad and the one that didn't as good.
Another central character called Momma K, however, is less excusable. Her life can be chopped into three stages, each of them getting progressively 'better'. Or at least, we're told she views it so. But the problem is that the activities within each stage suggest is should be an up-down-up pattern, not the low-up-high pattern she reports. Allow me to summarise:
-Stage one: She's a prostitute, starting out in a low-level brothel, then works her way upwards to eventually take control of the city's black markets and illicit activities, and proceeds to rule it more steadily and with a firmer hand than anyone has ever done before her. We're told this stage of her life is: Bad. The amount of sex she's having at this time is: lots.
-Stage two: The city is invaded, she co-ordinates first the commoners rebellion, then finally, the entire bloody thing. She has people she loves dying left, right and centre, some of them killing each other. We're told this stage of her life is: Better. The amount of sex she's having at this time is: none.
-Stage three: The rebellion wins, the invaders are routed and then destroyed, she's reunited with the man she's in love with who she thought was dead. We're told this stage of her life is: The best. The amount of sex she's having at this time is: lots with just one person.
Somewhat counter intuitive, yes?
But all of these could be brushed over. Hell, I did brush over them over. There was only one particular scene at the end of the final book that broke that camel's back and triggered this rant.
Allow me to summarise – under the cut, spoiler warning:
One of the main characters is called Logan. He is portrayed as being honourable to a fault. Despite it being his by right, he refuses to take the crown on several different occasions because it would involve doing something against his moral code, so eventually, his friend has to kill the ruling queen himself. Resultantly, Logan has his friend put to death in the nastiest way they can think of, because that's what's honourable.
So, this character is all about the honour? Got that? No lies, no breaking promises, no nothing. Honour, honour, honour.
In the first book, he ends up surprise!married to one of the king's daughters. They don't get time to consummate the marriage before the invasion happens, starting in the middle of the castle, and Logan and his wife, Jenine, get separated and then think the other dead.
Logan goes on to help with the rebellion, eventually becomes king, kills his best mate, etc. During this time, he nearly gets married once to prevent arguments as to who should lead - the rebellion queen or the rightful king - so they decide it would be easier just to make them one 'unit'. He stops the wedding at the last minute because he realises she's a power-hungry moron and just swears fealty instead.
Jenine, by contrast, gets taken to another kingdom where one of the princes of that land tries to break her out of her prison. Through an unfortunate series of circumstances, this prince actually ends up king, and, having fallen in love with Jenine, asks her to marry him. She accepts. They have a lot of sex, Jenine never quite liking it because she knows 'something's wrong'. That wrongness would be the prince knows Logan's alive and hasn't told her so he gets to keep her all to himself.
At the end of the last book, they are finally reunited, and decide to go on with the marriage. She begs his forgiveness for sleeping with another man[11] and not staying true to him. He has an anxiety attack when they try to have sex because she might know if he's no good because she's not a virgin[12], but it's shortly followed by an epiphany that he can forgive her[13] for sleeping with her other husband and tells her everything will be ok.
I'm just going to get the required protestation of disbelief out of the way now, ok? Then we can get back to semi-intelligent discussion.
YOU WHAT???
Right. So this more-honourable-than-thou character, more honourable than god even, sees no problem with allowing her to blame herself for daring to have sexual relations with a man she was married to at the time. He doesn't even think to point out that he didn't wait for her, and that every time he turned down a ring and thus a roll in the royal hay, it wasn't because he was waiting for her, but because he sidestepped it because of outside circumstances.
Not because he was waiting for her.
But she is apparently at fault for not waiting for him.
Despite getting FUCKING MARRIED IN THE MEANTIME.
Almost to rub this in, this scene is present, from what I can work out, only to give the characters some form of closure. Had he turned around and been someone with a spine and owned up that he didn't wait for her either, it's just the opportunity to get married and shag away into the sunset didn't come up while fighting for their lives in a cross-kingdom war, there would have been no overall difference to the plot. Everything could have progressed on as normal, the same people would have lived happily ever after.
This was, apparently, just to raise my blood pressure.
And is something I hate. Young girls are constantly given entirely conflicting messages about their sexuality. Verbally, they are told that sex is not something to be afraid of, ashamed of, it's an enjoyable activity and if you have more than one partner, or want to indulge just for the physical sensation, that's fine, providing everyone is a consenting informed adult.
Socially, they are told, in this way as well as many many others, over and over again, sex is bad, sex is bad, sex is bad.
So you go up to a girl and ask her to define what a healthy attitude towards sex is, you'll never get a straight answer. How could you? People learn by example, by investigation. There are so few examples it's a wonder if they've found one, and investigation will get them conflicting messages of 'sex is fine/sex is bad' in varying proportions depending on where they're looking.
Healthy attitude towards sex? It won't happen until people start thinking of women as fully rounded characters that can neither be classified by their sexuality or be labelled as deserving of good or bad things happening to them, dependant on who they've slept with.
Right, rant over, I believe. For now.
So yeah, aside from that scene and one other thing[14], Brent Week's Shadows trilogy is mostly an enjoyable read. 7/10 from me.
Footnotes:
[1]: Holy shit, is this that adult thing everyone keeps talking about?
[2]: Depressingly, it's extraordinarily rare that you find something that doesn't have characters that conforms to the above.
[3]: If they said anything about the male involved at all – if there was one – it would be that she led him into temptation, and he'd be a good person if it wasn't for her. Sexism at its finest.
[4] Supposedly.
[5] If you ever manage to actually pin them down on a number, I guarantee you it'll be five or less. Apparently, we women have tickets given to us at birth – men need one to ride. No more tickets, no more rides, sorry boys! And if you let someone on for free, that's cheating.
[6] And while you will get protestations that men 'can be sluts', I have never yet heard someone describe a man as a slut unless it was in the middle of a conversation where they desperately tried to protest that 'slut' was a gender-neutral insult.
[7] Incest and definitely abuse even if it's not quite paedophilia – if a woman likes having sex, she must, of course, be all sorts of bad things, right? Oh, and she also killed their other sister because she found them out and was going to 'tell' on them.
[8] You remember how, in horror movies, if you have sex you, more often than not, end up dead? The M/W would be to blame for that one too.
[9] That, and he was a sadistic bastard.
[10] However much I know that sounds like it was on crack, I do promise, it makes sense and this is a good read, most of the time.
[11] WHILE MARRIED TO THE OTHER MAN.
[12] Nothing about worrying that she'll think he's no good because you'd have to be all kinds of stupid to not be able to tell when a sensation is pleasurable or not.
[13] FOR HAVING SEX WITH HER HUSBAND
[14] There was only one character that was even hinted at being gay[15] but it was revealed that actually he had only fallen into prostitution, where he catered to men, as a result of being raped by another boy when he was younger, and was in fact, straight and in love with a woman. This was about 5 seconds before he died.
[15] He was also the only black character. Yay I have POC friends/tokenism rant ahead!
I am going to have a little bit of a rant, if you'll excuse me.
I have finally finished the trilogy I was reading – I deliberately made myself wait a set number of weeks before purchasing the next one so that I don't blow all my hard gotten wages on books, fun though that may be[1].
I should point out that the Shadows trilogy by Brent Weeks, which is to be the subject of this rant, in pretty much every area other than the one I'm about to rant on, is very enjoyable. It's well written, well paced and the plot is engaging and hard to predict. I, other than the below, enjoyed it. Further more, it's not the only thing in the world to be subject to this rant[2], it's just the thing that happened to set me off.
What I'm going to rant about is the Madonna/Whore complex.
The Madonna/Whore complex harks back to a time when women were one of two things:
-Dutiful wives
-Bad People.
Of course, the bad people were any woman that had sex with someone other than her husband. It didn't matter what reason she chose – if you weren't hitched, it was a bad thing. And it made the woman a Bad Person[3].
Of course, this idea is no longer so[4], yet the stereotype lives on, in the media in particular, which gives people all sorts of skewed ideas over a woman's sexuality. It's the one that responsible when you hear middle aged folk grumble insults at a woman that is deemed to have slept with too many people for their liking and is deemed a 'slut'.
If you sweetly, as I did back when I was young enough to get away with it, ask them what they think a reasonablelimit is, they'll turn a wonderful shade of purple and stomp off, because what they really want to say is 'none at all until that ring's on her finger' but there's no way they can even hedge that answer because they know the correct one they're supposed to give is something about having a healthy attitude towards sex, but they can't bring themselves to admit that they dislike the idea of a woman having sex with more than x[5] number of people, even if someone else has told them it is healthy.[6] The idea that there may not be an upper limit on the number of partners a woman 'can have' will never have crossed their minds.
The media (by which I mean shows, movies, books, and, in fact, the occasional radio play) is very good at propagating this stereotype. You will see it everywhere.
Woman having sex = bad person.
Woman who holds out for her one and only = good person.
Weeks, I confess, surprised me when I realised he was beginning to conform to this one. Why?
Because the Madonna/Whore complex is, at its heart, there because whoever wrote what's being put forward, in whatever medium, was lazy.
It's an easy way to classify women – by their sexuality. Rather than turning them into fully rounded characters with motivations and desires, the complex is a shortcut to instant characterisation. It's so well known that if you show a female casually hoping from one bed to the next, the chances are you'll assume she's on the bad guy's team or at least, 'up to something'. Show her in a bed with more than one other person and that becomes doubly so.
If you show people a girl turning down an amorous offer with an explanation of how she's only ever going to sleep with her partner – of which, of course, she'll have very few because she's that sort of girl – she will, almost without a shadow of a doubt, become a 'good person' in the audience's eyes.
It's a very easy route to go to get 'believable' female characters for those that can't actually be bothered to write them.
Which is why Weeks surprised me – his female characters are well written. They're rounded. They have desires and motivations and willpower and plot just a freely as the men.
But they all still fall neatly into the Madonna/Whore side of things – there isn't a single female character present that has a healthy attitude towards sex, and every single one that has sex with more than the one person they're 'in love with' is a Bad Person.
For instance: We see two hot-blooded noble women – both of whom are on the bad side. One is the king's mistress who sides with the invading army. She has an affair with the prince, kills him for money, then ends up making sculptures for the new king's perverse pleasure out of the bodies of the girls he's raped so brutally most of them have killed themselves as a result.
The other leads the noble's rebellion and takes over as queen – but then turns out to be a power-grasping idiot who tries to hang onto the crown even when the real king re-emerges. It eventually comes to light that she's fucking her own, much younger, brother[7] and is brutally slaughtered by the main character.
There is, in fact, within the 'nobles' group of people, only one woman who has sex with more than 'her share' and yet is one of the good guys. She's the love interest of one of the main characters for the first book, and is rare because she's on the 'good guys' side, and yet has had a large number of partners. Good, right? Wrong. When it's revealed to her love interest who she's been sleeping with, she runs off in shame, gets captured by the enemy, raped to death, then made into a statue by the character mentioned above.
Yes, the Madonna/Whore complex has yet another side to it – not only if you have sex are you a Bad Person. The chances are that if you have sex, Bad Things will happen to you[8].
Weeks actually hangs onto this concept quite firmly, with both hands actually, because several of the more important female characters display the Madonna and the Whore side of things, within the same character.
In his defense, one of them is understandable – a character called Vi, who's a type of assassin, had a master that enjoyed raping her as a motivational technique for training[9]. He dies and she gets press ganged into a group of chaste nuns that end up functioning as battle mages[10]. So it's sort of understandable why she'd classify the part of her life that involved sex as bad and the one that didn't as good.
Another central character called Momma K, however, is less excusable. Her life can be chopped into three stages, each of them getting progressively 'better'. Or at least, we're told she views it so. But the problem is that the activities within each stage suggest is should be an up-down-up pattern, not the low-up-high pattern she reports. Allow me to summarise:
-Stage one: She's a prostitute, starting out in a low-level brothel, then works her way upwards to eventually take control of the city's black markets and illicit activities, and proceeds to rule it more steadily and with a firmer hand than anyone has ever done before her. We're told this stage of her life is: Bad. The amount of sex she's having at this time is: lots.
-Stage two: The city is invaded, she co-ordinates first the commoners rebellion, then finally, the entire bloody thing. She has people she loves dying left, right and centre, some of them killing each other. We're told this stage of her life is: Better. The amount of sex she's having at this time is: none.
-Stage three: The rebellion wins, the invaders are routed and then destroyed, she's reunited with the man she's in love with who she thought was dead. We're told this stage of her life is: The best. The amount of sex she's having at this time is: lots with just one person.
Somewhat counter intuitive, yes?
But all of these could be brushed over. Hell, I did brush over them over. There was only one particular scene at the end of the final book that broke that camel's back and triggered this rant.
Allow me to summarise – under the cut, spoiler warning:
One of the main characters is called Logan. He is portrayed as being honourable to a fault. Despite it being his by right, he refuses to take the crown on several different occasions because it would involve doing something against his moral code, so eventually, his friend has to kill the ruling queen himself. Resultantly, Logan has his friend put to death in the nastiest way they can think of, because that's what's honourable.
So, this character is all about the honour? Got that? No lies, no breaking promises, no nothing. Honour, honour, honour.
In the first book, he ends up surprise!married to one of the king's daughters. They don't get time to consummate the marriage before the invasion happens, starting in the middle of the castle, and Logan and his wife, Jenine, get separated and then think the other dead.
Logan goes on to help with the rebellion, eventually becomes king, kills his best mate, etc. During this time, he nearly gets married once to prevent arguments as to who should lead - the rebellion queen or the rightful king - so they decide it would be easier just to make them one 'unit'. He stops the wedding at the last minute because he realises she's a power-hungry moron and just swears fealty instead.
Jenine, by contrast, gets taken to another kingdom where one of the princes of that land tries to break her out of her prison. Through an unfortunate series of circumstances, this prince actually ends up king, and, having fallen in love with Jenine, asks her to marry him. She accepts. They have a lot of sex, Jenine never quite liking it because she knows 'something's wrong'. That wrongness would be the prince knows Logan's alive and hasn't told her so he gets to keep her all to himself.
At the end of the last book, they are finally reunited, and decide to go on with the marriage. She begs his forgiveness for sleeping with another man[11] and not staying true to him. He has an anxiety attack when they try to have sex because she might know if he's no good because she's not a virgin[12], but it's shortly followed by an epiphany that he can forgive her[13] for sleeping with her other husband and tells her everything will be ok.
I'm just going to get the required protestation of disbelief out of the way now, ok? Then we can get back to semi-intelligent discussion.
YOU WHAT???
Right. So this more-honourable-than-thou character, more honourable than god even, sees no problem with allowing her to blame herself for daring to have sexual relations with a man she was married to at the time. He doesn't even think to point out that he didn't wait for her, and that every time he turned down a ring and thus a roll in the royal hay, it wasn't because he was waiting for her, but because he sidestepped it because of outside circumstances.
Not because he was waiting for her.
But she is apparently at fault for not waiting for him.
Despite getting FUCKING MARRIED IN THE MEANTIME.
Almost to rub this in, this scene is present, from what I can work out, only to give the characters some form of closure. Had he turned around and been someone with a spine and owned up that he didn't wait for her either, it's just the opportunity to get married and shag away into the sunset didn't come up while fighting for their lives in a cross-kingdom war, there would have been no overall difference to the plot. Everything could have progressed on as normal, the same people would have lived happily ever after.
This was, apparently, just to raise my blood pressure.
And is something I hate. Young girls are constantly given entirely conflicting messages about their sexuality. Verbally, they are told that sex is not something to be afraid of, ashamed of, it's an enjoyable activity and if you have more than one partner, or want to indulge just for the physical sensation, that's fine, providing everyone is a consenting informed adult.
Socially, they are told, in this way as well as many many others, over and over again, sex is bad, sex is bad, sex is bad.
So you go up to a girl and ask her to define what a healthy attitude towards sex is, you'll never get a straight answer. How could you? People learn by example, by investigation. There are so few examples it's a wonder if they've found one, and investigation will get them conflicting messages of 'sex is fine/sex is bad' in varying proportions depending on where they're looking.
Healthy attitude towards sex? It won't happen until people start thinking of women as fully rounded characters that can neither be classified by their sexuality or be labelled as deserving of good or bad things happening to them, dependant on who they've slept with.
Right, rant over, I believe. For now.
So yeah, aside from that scene and one other thing[14], Brent Week's Shadows trilogy is mostly an enjoyable read. 7/10 from me.
Footnotes:
[1]: Holy shit, is this that adult thing everyone keeps talking about?
[2]: Depressingly, it's extraordinarily rare that you find something that doesn't have characters that conforms to the above.
[3]: If they said anything about the male involved at all – if there was one – it would be that she led him into temptation, and he'd be a good person if it wasn't for her. Sexism at its finest.
[4] Supposedly.
[5] If you ever manage to actually pin them down on a number, I guarantee you it'll be five or less. Apparently, we women have tickets given to us at birth – men need one to ride. No more tickets, no more rides, sorry boys! And if you let someone on for free, that's cheating.
[6] And while you will get protestations that men 'can be sluts', I have never yet heard someone describe a man as a slut unless it was in the middle of a conversation where they desperately tried to protest that 'slut' was a gender-neutral insult.
[7] Incest and definitely abuse even if it's not quite paedophilia – if a woman likes having sex, she must, of course, be all sorts of bad things, right? Oh, and she also killed their other sister because she found them out and was going to 'tell' on them.
[8] You remember how, in horror movies, if you have sex you, more often than not, end up dead? The M/W would be to blame for that one too.
[9] That, and he was a sadistic bastard.
[10] However much I know that sounds like it was on crack, I do promise, it makes sense and this is a good read, most of the time.
[11] WHILE MARRIED TO THE OTHER MAN.
[12] Nothing about worrying that she'll think he's no good because you'd have to be all kinds of stupid to not be able to tell when a sensation is pleasurable or not.
[13] FOR HAVING SEX WITH HER HUSBAND
[14] There was only one character that was even hinted at being gay[15] but it was revealed that actually he had only fallen into prostitution, where he catered to men, as a result of being raped by another boy when he was younger, and was in fact, straight and in love with a woman. This was about 5 seconds before he died.
[15] He was also the only black character. Yay I have POC friends/tokenism rant ahead!
