How Porn Fuels The Madonna-Whore Complex

Contributed by Sammy Uyama

Most of Sigmund Freud’s theories ended up not holding weight and being disregarded by the contemporary academic psychology authority. However, a few of them stood the test of time and have proven to be remarkably insightful. Mommy and daddy issues. Defense mechanisms. Cathartic release. These are all familiar terms originating from his work. One particularly insightful theory of Freud’s is the Madonna-Whore Complex, which he described as the inability to integrate respect and sexual desire. Women must be split into two groups: madonnas—wholesome, clean, respectable, motherly, pure—and whores—debased, promiscuous, flirtatious, sexual, desirable. 

As Freud described it, “Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.” 

Women are to be either respected and loved or eroticized and degraded. 

Madonna-Whore in Real Life

Armie Hammer had the perfect life. Intelligent, charismatic, successful, attractive. He was literally the face of Prince Charming, playing the role in the 2012 Hollywood film Mirror, Mirror. In a 2013 interview, he gave an unexpectedly candid peek into his sexual life. He described how marriage had curbed his sexual tastes from the “dominant lover” he had once been. 

He elaborated, “I liked the grabbing of the neck and the hair and all that. But then you get married and your sexual appetites change. And I mean that for the better—it’s not like I’m suffering in any way. But you can’t really pull your wife’s hair. It gets to a point where you say, ‘I respect you too much to do these things that I kind of want to do.’”

Fast forward to early 2021, and Armie’s life is falling apart in the aftermath of his divorce. Several women have come forward revealing their traumatic sexual affairs with Armie throughout the duration of his marriage which reveals his taste for extreme, violent sex which includes mutilation and cannibalistic fantasies. 

Armie Hammer is an example of what can happen when a person is unable to reconcile the conflicting roles of the Madonna and the Whore in his mind. In reality, the roles of women don’t split into two neat groups like this. Women are born with an innate dignity that makes them worthy of respect. Women are also sexual beings with sexual desire and pleasure. Our inability to merge these two sides of a woman forces us to split them and treat them as different kinds of people. Armie tried to be sexual with his wife, a woman he wholeheartedly wished to honor and cherish. However, without addressing his conflicting views of women, he inevitably felt frustrated and dissatisfied in his marriage, turning to other women as an outlet for his sexual desires. 

Rather than a psychological defect experienced by a small minority, traces of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy are FAR more prevalent than we assume. This affects how both men and women relate to sexuality. 

The danger of failing to reconcile this dichotomy is that it leaves people’s only option as having an unfulfilling relationship. Men feel conflicted in sexualizing their wives, and women feel they must choose between respect and sexual expression. Desirability becomes incompatible with companionship. 

Here are COMMON experiences I’ve heard from both men and women talking about their marriages:

• Men feeling uncomfortable sexualizing their spouses. 

• Women feeling uncomfortable being sexualized by their spouses. 

• Men feeling unable to express their sexual desires to their wives. Instead, creating a sexual world inside their mind they keep hidden from their spouse. 

• Women feeling guilty about their sexual desires or struggling to experience arousal.

Both men and women struggle to blend female sexuality and dignity. Women can be either loved or desired, but not both. 

The most common transitions where people experience this conflict are marriage and childbirth. Armie Hammer experienced this when his partner went from girlfriend to wife. Women can experience a similar conflict when transitioning from the eroticism of boyfriend/girlfriend to the expected intimacy of husband/wife. Many men express confusion and frustration when describing their once sexually adventurous girlfriend who became completely uninterested in sex once married. 

Likewise, many people are uncomfortable merging sexuality and motherhood. They feel like separate entities that shouldn’t coexist. Motherhood is nurturing, protective, loving. Things that sex isn’t supposed to be. Commonly, men struggle viewing their wife sexually after childbirth and women struggle feeling comfort/interest being sexual after taking on the role of mother. 

Learning when and how to appreciate both these sides of a woman is relevant and important for anyone wishing to enjoy a fulfilling, long-term relationship.

Madonna-Whore and Porn

At age 19, Billie Eilish is already one of the most successful and sought-after musicians in the world. In an interview with Howard Stern, she reveals how her exposure to porn completely warped her concept of sex, sharing that porn “really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.” 

She began watching porn at 11 and got to the point that she was unable to watch anything unless it was violent. 

She describes her first sexual experiences, saying “I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.” 

She ends by expressing her anger at how celebrated porn is and the lies that it taught her about how women are supposed to look and act. 

Billie’s is a story of a young teenager mistakenly believing that the only way to embrace her sexuality is to throw away her dignity. 

Porn strips women of their humanness, the very essence of dignity. Women are either “sluts” that are degraded and used or “goddesses” that are worshipped and idolized. In either case, they are reduced to their single ability to sexually gratify. 

Porn has monopolized the conversation on what is sexual. There is no mainstream conversation happening on how to be a wholistic sexual human. Porn says, “If you want to be sexual, this is what it looks like. You want respect? Take that nonsense somewhere else.” 

Porn doesn’t care about dignity. Its only goal is to be sexually stimulating. Some porn sites claim otherwise with things like ethical porn and performer spotlights. However, a porn site’s existence depends entirely on how well it accomplishes that goal.

The Madonna-Whore Complex has existed far longer than the modern-day porn industry. It’s rooted in the unhealed childhood wounds we all experience, but this article isn’t about that. This article is intended to speak to the unspoken sexual conflict experienced by an astonishing number of people. Their conflict has a name and it has a root, but porn drives it deeper by separating women’s sexuality from their humanity.