If the Mad Men producers were psychoanalysts, they might rename the show, 'The Madonna/Whore Complex : You haven’t come that far, baby'. It's ever so slightly less catchy, but accurate. In an awesome and frightening way, Mad Men reflects modern sexual hypocrisy. The gelled hair and beehives create a temporal separation that dulls the sting of our persistent confusion about sexuality and gender roles. The social undercurrents of Mad Men are freakishly familiar. It was all just a little more overt in the 60s, but I don't think much has really changed.
In the show, women are broken into two categories: “Jackies” are demure, glove-wearing housewives like Betty Draper, who still love ponies and probably believe in unicorns. And “Marilyns” are women with the temerity to be in touch with their sexuality and use it either for pleasure or for power. Joan Holloway is the prototypical Marilyn, dovetailing her powerful sexuality with an equally keen survival intelligence. Unfortunately, her lust for power outweighs her loyalty to her own values, and she suffers for it.
Of course, after JFK’s assassination, the world is topsy turvy. Cheating Betty is a ‘whore’ according to Don, the most promiscuous character on the show. Meanwhile Joan is a supportive wife whose loyalty and intelligence save the day for Don and the new breakaway agency.
These days, our madonna/whore hang-up has been repackaged via feminism, but it amounts to the same thing: everything you wear, say, and do points to what kind of woman you are. We are still not fully free to be individuals, we must be a type, branded, and there are always moral strings attached.
The biggest ‘advance’, as I see it, is that now we can appropriate male bravado and discuss our conquests, like Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, without shame... as long as we don’t care too much. To me, Samantha was the Peggy Olson of sexual freedom. Peggy claims her professional legitimacy by aping the men, and Samantha claimed her sexual freedom by becoming a 'player.' Players are cavalier and lack feeling. Feeling lies at the root of eros and is the quality of authentic connection that is a component of sex. In our collective psyche, feeling is feminine. It is receptive, it responds authentically to what's going on around us. And it's the thing that can be violated much more easily than our bodies. It is a rooted connection to who we really are. Many women say they would rather their partner cheat on them than have an emotional affair. They understand that what one feels is deeper and truer than where one puts one’s body. A woman’s feeling is her self. If she cuts off feeling, and just enjoys the sensation of sex, she is not hurting herself, but the real her is not involved, either. She is ironically disembodied. Her body is active, full of sensation, but her feeling, the part of her that knows herself, is not home.
Please note, in psychology, feeling is not the same as attachment. I’m not saying I think a woman should only have sex with people she loves. I am simply disputing the idea that being sexually assertive is necessarily the same as being connected to one's sexuality. This may seem obvious, but we’re not getting it because these amputated stereotypes are everywhere and I see the problem being played out all around me.
A friend in a powerful professional role recently wore a sexy pair of shoes to work and was asked if she thought she was sending the right message.
First, let us acknowledge that shoe choice is, in fact, political.
What is the right message? What message did this person imagine my friend was sending? Is showing our sexuality outside the bedroom inviting trouble? Should we consider the chador? Do some heterosexual men have such a tenuous grip on their impulses that they blame a sexually attractive woman for being ‘tempting’? (Yes). Are some women so uncomfortable with their sexuality that we can’t wait to find the nearest scapegoat to divest us enough of our own taint to move freely among the men? (Yup).
Is my friend with the hot shoes betraying the sisterhood, the women who have worked so hard to be taken seriously, or has the sisterhood been waiting to stab her in the back all along?
If the sisterhood is waiting for her, it’s because it knows that female sexuality is the cornerstone of fear and hatred toward women and the key to it's undoing.
Even today, there are men and women who will silently label a woman a ‘slut’ or ‘bad’ because she is sexually attractive. It happens for a few reasons. For men, it could simply be that he can’t reconcile his frustrated desire. His ego is too weak to contain the opposing facts that: a) he is attracted to her, and b) he can’t have her because he or she is not single or she is not interested in him. To relieve the unbearable tension and preserve his fragile self-esteem, he projects it outward. It is her fault. She is a wanton Eve tempting him with forbidden fruit. Except that the fruit is her being. The woman is guilty by existence.
It could also be that the man is ashamed of his sexual desire. Men with madonna/whore complexes are usually man-children (puers in Jung speak). If he is married, it is to a woman he has turned into his mother. His dependency and childlike need invite her to contain, guide, and nurture him. She will ‘make him into a man.’ She is part Lady Macbeth, overseeing his career, picking out his clothes, and helping him set appropriate social boundaries. She ‘grounds’ him. With her he feels the security and stability needed to go into the world, something he likely did not get from his own mother. He is like a toddler who runs a few steps from mom and then rushes back to her, hungry for the world but not quite steady enough to go it alone.
This marriage naturally breeds serious sexual inhibition because it is incestuous. Most men don’t want to sleep with their mother, so this man may feel his romantic interest in his wife wane. The part of him that longs to be a man finds his attention wandering to other women. He needs mom, but he feels trapped by her. He is an adolescent in suspended animation.
A woman who ‘manages’ her husband is unlikely to be especially aroused by him. She gains a sense of purpose by ‘helping’ him, and likely feels unworthy of love from someone who doesn’t need her to look after him. She doles out sex like a mom doles out cookies, a reward for good behaviour. Another possibility is that they both have to get so drunk that the incest taboo loses its power.
No wonder sex seems dirty.
One way women fall into the trap of selling their sisters out is by being out of touch with their own sexuality. They may have understandable guilt about being fully sexual beings. Perhaps they are haunted by a past ‘mistake’ or they have fallen prey to the idea that only women who deny their inner Joan Holloway, the feminine form of sexuality - receptive and related, deserve respect.
A woman who is uncomfortable with her own sexuality will see it magnified in other women. She pushes them to carry her shadow. The shadow, a Jungian concept, is the sum total of unowned parts of ourselves that dwell in our unconscious. We project our shadow onto others until we are ready to see it in ourselves. A woman who calls other women ‘sluts’ likely unconsciously fears that she herself is one step away from slut-hood or that her sexuality will only get her into trouble. Perhaps she regrets her own sexual history and manages her shame by essentially telling herself, “at least I’m not like her.” Unable to forgive herself, she has little compassion for others.
Some women are easy hangers for the invisible slut costume. Find the woman with the most need to be seen, the most need for validation by a man and desperate for love, the ‘attention whore,’ and you have your resident ‘slut’. I don’t necessarily mean a sexually promiscuous woman, I mean the woman most easily manipulated by the unconscious needs of people around her. The woman with the least grounded integrity. Without the inner psychological structure of the archetypal Father (psychic boundaries), she is too permeable. It is the psychic equivalent of a tied-up woman in pigtails and a pastel pink teddy with a sign over her head that reads “rape me.” She is a fertile home for the free-floating shadow energy around her, and like a true scapeslut, she lives it out. We have all seen her before: the girl who always takes it too far at parties and who thinks body shots are a great networking opportunity. She can also take a less sexualized form, answering to men’s emotional needs and begging for scraps of adulation won by being a man’s child-like playmate.
It is very tempting to sit in silent judgement, or at least feel embarrassed for her. But, we need her. We need to lean in conspiratorially the next day over coffee, exchange knowing looks that convey schadenfreude and self-satisfaction and be silently grateful that we’re not her. She makes us a little more madonna, a little less whore. Good little Jackies.
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