[ExI] quote

[William Flynn Wallace]

Mother/son incest is regarded as the worst and is likely the most rare.  So
- let's see - Mother was, gulp, a woman, but not one to be desired, like
the Madonna - pure.

Then in our teens, along comes females who are quite desirable and hence
the conflict.  Sex with Mom is unthinkable and yet here is a woman who
wants it. What is she?  A temptress, a whore, a woman who would lead a man
sinfully astray..

And so is born the Madonna/whore complex.  Women who don't have sex are
pure, like nuns. A woman who has extramarital sex becomes a whore and in
some societies they are killed for ruining the family honor.  (I grew up in
the 50s.  No girl at school who was even suspected of having sex was a
'good girl'.  Bad girl.  Whore.) After having sex and giving birth, the
woman is now a mother.  To jump a bit, some men go impotent with their
wives at this point.  Their wives are mothers and mothers are forbidden, so
you go get a mistress who, of course, is a whore.  (Cue feminist outrage at
this point.)  I assume that most men (unlike Freud's assumption) are not
subject to this complex, but do tend to toss aside easy women - they are
whores, aren't they?  Hence the emphasis on virginity worldwide.  (As an
aside we see here the fear of men of being compared to other men, if some
man or men came before them with this woman - sic)

There is no female counterpart to this complex.

Men invented these ideas to try to sort out their feelings towards women.
Implicit in the quote is the idea that women are no more virtuous than men,
but men have to think another way.  I find it fascinating to look at sex
questionnaires starting in the 1940s:  year after year since then women
have admitted to more and more sexual activity of all kinds.  The results
for adultery in women have risen nearly to the man's level.  Of course
people lie on these things, and so we really don't know if women have
changed since the /40s or just have been mostly lying all along, but now
more of them are telling the truth.

It is telling:  the mixture, the ambiguity of feelings men have about women
have led to many paraphilias.  It is very rare for a woman to be put into
any of the categories.

Well, a full exploration of these ideas really takes book length.

bill w
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