Madonna Wh-re Complex: Part 2

A breakdown of the psychological dynamics animating the complex

Are you a Madonna or a Wh-re? Don’t worry, it’s a trick question because you’re both!

As we discussed in part one, the Madonna Wh-re Complex, on a social level, is about categorizing women by male use.

The Madonna is the pure, nurturing, desire-less mother figure who sacrifices self to pour all of her creative powers into making someone else’s (read: a man’s) vision and dreams reality.

She is virtuous through her lack of boundaries and self-directed desire. She dedicates herself to being the resource that fuels others - children, men, and society at large - without ever seeking reciprocity, mutual investment, respect, or compensation.

Hyper individualistic and capitalistic societies, like the United States, cannot function without most of its women performing the Madonna role.

It is the Madonna’s endless self-sacrifice in the name of meeting the needs of others without ever having her needs considered that ensures the state can refuse to make investments in meeting the basic welfare of its people.

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This article provides a structural analysis of this process - and this video essay explores this process within the historical context of President Nixon vetoing federal investments to restore WW2 era universal childcare.

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The Wh-re is the wicked temptress who enjoys her own sexual (read: creative) agency and leverages it to manipulate men and corrupt humanity! She demands respect, reciprocity and refuses to be the means for another’s (read: patriarchy’s) ends.

It is the Wh-re’s confidence and autonomy in directing her creative powers to produce her own desires and birth her own visions into reality that is labeled as corruption incarnate.

When the Wh-re ensures that her own needs are met first and that her creative visions take priority above performing a role that serves others, but not self, she becomes a threat. She no longer functions to subsidize the eogic desires of adult men and society at large. This makes her dangerous.

At the broadest scale, this is the function of the Madonna Wh-re Complex. To condition women to direct their labor and creative capacities to meet the needs of others exclusively.

This enables men to refuse to participate in normal processes of maturation and care work. It also enables the state to refuse making necessary investments in the welfare of its people.

This socialization isn’t limited to women’s experience or abstract levels of social engagement and investment. Let’s take a look at how this complex manifests within men internally and interpersonally.

Video essay above deep dives into this Reddit thread and various aspects of the MWC

Psychological Dysfunction of the Complex

In the simplest sense, men experience the Madonna Wh-re Complex as love without sex and sex without love. But there’s much more happening beneath the surface.

I’m relying on this incredible Reddit thread as our tour guide into the subconscious mechanisms animating the surface level pursuit of sex without love and love without sex.

This man, God bless him, asked the Carl Jung forum how to heal this complex within himself.

Over the years I’ve had this weird pattern when it came to the women I dated/liked. With some of them I projected this pure image. They were angels, sweet, innocent, motherly, and I felt deeply in love with them. Sex wasn’t that important, it was more about living this beautiful dream with them. Other women I saw as bad. I thought they were manipulative, promiscuous, out to hurt me, liars, sexually obsessed and so on. Sometimes, more often than not, I see both images in the same women and that creates a sort of attraction- unattraction loop.

Not only is this not fair to them, because they are complex people that deserve a more complex understanding. But it also sort of hinders my love life. The women I really want end up as my friends, the women I only want sexually end up as my partners. But when I start to apply the romantic image to them my sex drive for them becomes lower, I become content just being with them. And at this point I don’t even know what it is I want.

Straight up, I appreciate this man for being honest and seeking out solutions in a space dedicated to psychology. That’s the initiative and self-awareness that opens paths towards healing and evolution that we all need - from ourselves and each other.

Many of the responses were standard Reddit fare - a mix of positive insights, negging, and genuine engagement. But one responder - who has since deleted their account, so I cannot provide proper specific credit - offered the greatest psychological breakdown that I have ever encountered, in any space, about anything.

I wish I had their home address to mail a crisp $100 bill as a thank you. Seriously - I learned SO MUCH.

I’m going to transcribe their entire response below to ensure that anyone reading on a phone can easily absorb this wisdom without squinting on the images.

Fantasies of Idealization and Dehumanization

The following is transcribed from the linked and pictured Reddit thread - these quote blocks are not Coco’s original insights

You are projecting a fantasy that revolves around dehumanization. What does that tell me? That you are disgusted with your own humanity and the humanity of others.

The more human women become, the less you “love” them. I think this is a father wound tbh since there’s a desire to utilize others. More significantly it’s because men socialize with other men by degrading women.

A jungian view would be that men are collectively being “possessed” with archetypes that demonize women/see them as inferior. It’s a societal thing and a lack of anima integration.

This fantasy is rooted in a desire to idealize and all idealization is done with the unconscious desire to then degrade. It’s compulsive. One of the most important elements found in the tendency to idealize is that the idealizer wants to be idealized. This is why degradation is a guarantee because then the idealizer’s goal is reached—the idealizer degrades what they first idealized to be above it.

What does this look like interpersonally?

You want to feel like Superman but you also don’t want Lois to have needs outside of regulating your ego. But if Lois puts you first and herself last, you’ll hate her for that too. If Lois fails to make you feel like a god (because she is attainable), you experience disgust. That disgust puts you above Lois, making you the god you wanted to feel like when the initial idealization occurred. I’d like to add that you are thereby putting women in a double blind simply so you don’t have to look in the mirror or acknowledge your humanity. [Coco’s bold emphasis]

You confuse consummation as evidence of their low character. If women having sex with you makes them a whore then it is you that is the whore, not them. You mistake their attainability as being whores and thus no longer valued by you which speaks to a deeper insecurity; you feel like you have nothing to offer anyone but need them to take the blame for your lack. That means it’s a conquest for you; women have nothing to gain by being with you. In fact, women have everything to lose simply by being with you because you will degrade them.

I’d also like to add that you are most likely projecting that women are out to hurt you onto them—meaning, you’re out to hurt women and then you will ultimately blame them for it and assume it’s actually their goal toward you. This paranoia reflects that you subconsciously realize that you will devalue women after initially idealizing them, which I covered above. This is…abusive.

Men think they naturally degrade women (misogyny) but that degradation is a choice that becomes a habit that’s feeding your unconscious desire to destroy. Jung would refer to this as the devouring lion. So, you devalue women because that doesn’t hurt as much as devaluing yourself—women are seen by you as instruments to be used to help you self soothe and hide from your own inadequacy. This is called externalization; causing harm to others instead of doing work on yourself.

Men are very sick, collectively, and it goes far beyond a simple mother wound and is a cultural thing. Objectifying women is at the root of an identity centered in toxic masculinity. Healthy masculinity doesn’t feel the need to do this.

In order to see women as human beings, you need to develop empathy and not objectify them. But seeing women as people means you have to also see yourself as a person…and you don’t want that because, again, the need to idealize others means you want to be idealized.

My heart hurts for women. A concerning amount of men have a need to tear women down, leaving women with the idea that they have to shrink themselves so men can feel big. This is called having a sadistic worldview. All objectification is rooted in sadism—many men have this (because patriarchy) and embrace it/feel entitled to harm women (even if it’s unconscious) because harming women makes you a god (it doesn’t).

I wish men would not engage with women when having these issues. Please heal yourself/go to therapy/do the work because it causes so much harm to the women in your life. Harm reduction should be the priority.

Coco’s Takes

HOT DAMN WHAT A SERMON!! Overall, I was struck by the realization that patriarchy really is the core wound of humanity. Which is funny because my whole thing is that patriarchy is the core wound of humanity that spawns and fuels every other system of supremacy.

I really appreciate this breakdown because it affirms that patriarchy is the root of dehumanization for all people.

Patriarchal beliefs require the dehumanization of self first, and from that dehumanization of self, we dehumanize others into tools to use to avoid healing the pain and patterns caused by that initial rejection of self.

The Father Wound of I Use

The core father wound that patriarchy instills in every single person is to use people instead of connecting human to human. It’s born from a standard of masculine authority (the father figure) who extracts instead of investing.

The wound is the conditional love of the father - of the masculine authority figure - that must be earned and justified by performing for his profit and approval.

A minor but common expression of this wound is the unhinged sports dad. The father who only shows up to a child’s sports game if they excel at the sport, generating profitable social clout for that father to consume.

This father will coldly reject their child or berate them after performing poorly at an event. This father would never even consider going to a child’s sports game if the child wasn’t recognized as talented because the child’s participation alone does not warrant the father’s time and attention.

Not when that father could devote that time to chasing pay, praise, or pleasure elsewhere.

This conditioning that if we are not profitable to authority, we are not worthy, is the root of human wounding that requires us (we’re all children of patriarchy, unfortunately), to first disconnect from “unprofitable” or “unacceptable” parts of our own self.

This is also the root of human wounding that is the foundation of capitalism. Capitalism teaches that people who are not of profitable use to the captial-holder should perish alone in a ditch. This is a direct material extension of this father wound of I Use. We’ll explore that in more detail another time.

Idealization in Response to I Use Wounding

From that initial self-abandonment of rejecting “unprofitable” parts of our own humanity - done intuitively as children to survive the family dynamics and gender roles we’ve inherited - we learn to seek idealization as a means of securing safety and belonging (or at least tolerance) amongst each other.

Which is to say, we all must kill off our own humanity to survive our fatherless culture and for-profit conditionality as the basis for all value.

Men and masculines are socialized to only seek idealization - never connection - by using women to experience the fantasy of superiority they are taught is their birthright.

That goal to feel superior is the will to idealize self that keeps masculines in constant pursuit of outrunning their interior self where the rejected femininity of feeling, perceiving, and creating lives - however repressed.

It becomes a group project of consumption and suffering. Men end up only knowing their masculinity - individually and collectively - by using and degrading women.

By performing I use women, men signal to each other that they are not to be used by other men. It’s an affirmation of the shared status entitlement to use and not to be used.

This addiction not only destroys the lives and wellbeing of girls, women, and femmes, it leaves men with less than nothing themselves.

Irrationality of I Use Masculinity

There is no rational identity within patriarchal masculinity - no real value beyond consuming and exploiting to avoid feeling.

As we’ve talked about before, rational authority and rational value stand on its own merit. It does not co-dependently rely on consuming or subjugating anything outside of itself to seem valuable.

Rational authority and value is self evident and cannot be diminished nor enhanced by comparison nor the subjugation of anyone or anything else.

So, of course patriarchal men feel disoriented by women’s self-directed pursuit of liberation. Of course men who rely on conquering or subjugating women to feel any sense of worth or value - however fleeting - believe feminists are wh-res.

Without means to fuel their pursuit of idealization by forcing women into manufactured economic and social dependence, men must heal their patriarchal wounds or accept isolation.

And who can hide from their own selves in total isolation?

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