In the past few years, there’s been a clear shift towards a cultural emphasis on traditional marriage values, particularly traditional wives — a stay-at-home mother with a focus on homesteading and domesticity. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be in a traditional marriage, it seems that more often than not, men seeking a conventional wife, or a ‘trad-wife,’ seldom go after women with corresponding, conservative values. Rather, they usually seek out girlfriends with more modern values: spontaneous, work-focused, educated, and outspoken. This endlessly hypocritical paradox speaks to a contemporary evolution of the Madonna-Whore Complex.
The Madonna-Whore Complex is a psychological phenomenon in which men place women into two categories: Madonna or the Whore. The theory posits that men with the Madonna-Whore Complex desire a sexual partner who is degraded and debased, yet a romantic partner who is benevolent and saintly. Famous Austrian neurologist and psychologist Sigmund Freud, who coined the term itself, described these complex holders, writing, “Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love.”
In essence, a man with the Madonna-Whore Complex uses the so-called ‘whore’ for sexual release, but can never imagine making an honest woman out of her. In his eyes, she becomes tainted, impure, and unworthy the instant she consents to sex. The whore exists to be degraded and defiled, but never loved. On the other hand, the ‘Madonna’ serves the purpose of being a respectable wife and mother, yet cannot be seen by the man in a sexually explicit manner. He can imagine a white picket fence surrounding their shared home, but cannot imagine remotely exciting sex with her outside of the context of conceiving a child.
While the theory of the Madonna-Whore Complex first emerged in the early 1900s, it remains relevant in contemporary society. The rise of trad-wives, alongside the paradoxical want for a modern girlfriend, has bred a sort of neo-Madonna-Whore Complex in which men crave a sexually adventurous, spontaneous, and fun-loving girlfriend, but a submissive, loyal, and trustworthy wife. This unrealistic standard requires that women — when they are girlfriends — be independent beings with a lust for life, but when they become wives, they must somehow shift their values entirely, taking on the role of the loving wife and mother who doesn’t advocate for her own needs, instead prioritizing the interests of their husband, children, and home.
The old Madonna-Whore Complex led men to crave two, distinct types of women — or at the very least, distinct in their own minds. Now, men crave both archetypes in one: a woman who fills the role of the ‘whore’ as a girlfriend, and a ‘Madonna’ wife.
We see this represented in our contemporary era often. We all know a girl who met her boyfriend at the local clubs, scantily clad in her best “going out” attire. Yet, when they begin dating, the boyfriend restricts her behavior, insisting that her outfits are ‘disrespectful to him.’ He urges his girlfriend not to go out with her friends, but to stay in with him, implying that the very same conditions in which they met become inherently ‘unfaithful’ when they start dating.
Or, a guy who meets his wife on a college campus, both pursuing higher education to excel in their field. Yet, upon graduation, he hopes that his once studious, career-oriented girlfriend is ready to settle down, give up years of work on her degree and livelihood, and birth roughly 2.5 children and have dinner on the table before her husband’s return.
This rebirth of the Madonna-Whore Complex speaks to the innate and harshly human tendency to desire both stability and excitement, despite these adjectives being antithetical to one another. Now, that’s not to say that a wife cannot be both stable and trustworthy, as well as exciting and spontaneous. Rather, this is the belief of those subscribing to the views of the Madonna-Whore complex.
Men crave the neo-Madonna Whore, and in turn, women do too. In our patriarchal society, it is incredibly difficult to separate the rising trends surrounding womanhood and homemaking from the dominant perspective of men seeking a marriage with traditional roles. We see this aestheticization of the housewife through influencers like Nara Smith, trad-wife of Lucky Blue Smith, or the pinnacle of the neo-Madonna-Whore, Hannah Neeleman, better known as ‘Ballerina Farm.’ Neeleman, who attended and graduated from The Juilliard School for her extraordinary talent as a ballerina, gave up her successful career as a professional dancer to birth eight children and marry Daniel Neeleman, heir to the JetBlue Airlines fortune.
Neeleman’s biography on her Instagram page serves as a case study in itself of the new era of the Madonna-Whore Complex: ‘Married to @hogfathering… Mothering 8 littles… Juilliard School graduate… City folk turned ranchers.’ In her own description of herself, her accolades follow in what appears to be alleged importance — a wife, a mother, a Juilliard School alum, and a country girl.
I cast no judgment on Neeleman or her choices to prioritize creating a family over career success, and you shouldn’t either; this piece is not to say that there is anything wrong with choosing a life of homesteading and traditional roles within a family, but rather to critically examine exactly the type of women men seek to transform into housewives. More often than not, they aren’t meek or mild-mannered. They’re outspoken, they’re educated, they are everything that a man dreams of stripping from them, turning them into a submissive, breedable housewife and babymachine.
“The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. ‘He’s like an exotic bird collector,’ she said. ‘He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.’’’