MXMFW 9: The Whore/Madonna Dichotomy

In this episode, your fabulous hosts discuss the two genders, no wait The Two Towers (2002), no wait, the two types of women, Virgin and Whore. Accompany Maggie, Theo, and Bridget, as they figure out if liking milves is subversive, if being hungry is the same as being horny, and if Freud was right?? As always, Gay John and Sara Bareilles come up as they navigate virginity, the difference between Eve and Mary, and whether sex positivity can become a perpetuation of the same false dichotomy used to shame people for their sexualities.

Episode Transcript Available Here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bnP62ine_M0jN7TdFUv-4TKb-R2X3eGm/view?usp=sharing

References:

-Down Girl by Kate Manne

-Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics by A. J. Cahill

-Take and Eat: Eve, Mary, and Feminist Christianity by M. K. Diede

-Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism 

-Milfs

-Maggie’s Feminist Philosophy Class 

-Bridget’s work in Reproductive Rights

-Linn Haralson

Transcript

Theo (singing): In the beginning, God made three lesbians who liked to talk, and they loved each other, and they loved God, but they have a few questions, and they think you might have a few questions too about religion, gay stuff, and life. So, come join me, my ex, and my future wife.

Theo: Hello and welcome to My Ex and My Future wife, I’m Theo.

Maggie: I’m Maggie and I’m the Ex

Bridget: And I’m Bridget, and I’m the future wife

T: We’re talking about Milves today.

M: We’re talking about Milves, we’re talking about me and Bridget’s favorite context—context? Topic

B: Topic

M: The Whore/Madonna a Dichotomy. I hope you don’t make the mistake I did and just look up “Virgin/Whore” on Google.

B: Oh my gosh, no, Maggie, did you really?

M: I did! 

B: Oh wow

M: Cause that’s all it is in my brain, is the philosophical concept

B: You didn’t think it through

M: I didn’t

T: You didn’t realize that other people are living in sin.

M: It’s also called the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy, originally was the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy started by the one and only Sigmund Freud.

B: YES! My man!

T: He invented it! Oh my god, I didn’t even know that!

B: Fucking hate that guy.

T: I wasn’t even ready to talk about Freud this episode, I didn’t even know he was in it at all

B: I’m always ready to talk about my absolute Psycho friend Sigmund Freud

T: I know that Bridget is my enemy, but he is my enemy.

B: He, yeah, god. I had to do my thesis presentation on him, so go me

T: Really, why did you choose that topic?

B: I did not get to choose, it was a whole situation.

T: Okay, I see.

M: Anyways, he described the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy as, like,  sexual issue for men who couldn’t “maintain sexual arousal within a committed loving relationship because they saw women as either the Holy Madonna that they couldn’t wanna have sex with, or a prostitute”. So, kind of iconic of him, of Sigmund Freud, to make the Madonna/Whore complex about men unable to have an erection, but he did, so like honestly props to him for doing that.

B: Really impressive work done there for the psychological community.

M: So, but most people take the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy to kind of represent the double bind of oppression, which is kind of like damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

B: So, you’re not telling me it’s not just the two ways you can be a woman?

M: This is kind of just my basic definition, women are supposed to be good, holy and pure—the virgin or Madonna—but they are also supposed to be sexually available to me—like the whore.

B: And these are the two ways that we tend to see women represented in biblical texts and old theology, is that women are either, you know, the whore is also in line with the seductress or likely talked about like a succubus type figure versus an angelic Madonna figure, the new bride or someone’s child—the sort of virgin woman who’s an object of beauty and desire in a very different way.

T: And also it seems like you’ve got the women are supposed to be the Virgin and the Whore and also women are supposed to not be the virgin or the whore, cause they’re supposed to…

B: You get a lot of women who are not the virgin—which is the ideal standard for women—is a whore.

T: Well yeah, you also get women are not supposed to say no to sex ever. Not supposed to, you know, whatever, and also women aren’t supposed to want sex either.

B: Well, that’s the thing, it’s literally an impossible line to walk.

T: Which is why the Dichotomy is important

B: Because even if you are a virgin or a whore, you’re still never gonna be perfectly exactly what you’re supposed to be.

M: It’s also important to note that good women are submissive, feminine, docile, and bad women—the whore—are aggressive, ugly, and demanding, notice that these things have been incredibly racialized.

T: Oh absolutely

M: The virgin, the idealized version of womanhood is a white woman, and Black women are seen as bad women within this dichotomy, so…

T: And are often stereotyped as aggressive, whatever

M: And I think we talked a little bit about those stereotypes in the Purity Culture episode. 

B: So, Martin Luther, you know him, you love him, he’s the guy who did the 95 theses and sparked the Protestant Reformation of the Catholic Church, right? Yeah?

M: He sure did!

B: Martin Luther was the original, but not the last, I believe the original person to refer to the Catholic Church as “The Whore of Babylon”. Have you heard that Maggie?

M: I haven’t but I’m obsessed

T: I’ve heard of the whore of Babylon, but I never knew it was about the Catholic church.

B: This is the reason that I have been familiar with that phrase all my life, my grandma—not my Catholic grandma actually, who was raised Catholic in Pennsylvania –as a child grew up around a lot of people who were protestants and one of her favorite neighborhood playmates was protestant and they would hang out and play in the street or whatever as kids, and then one day when they were six or seven, her friend came over to their house and said to my six or seven year old grandma, “my mom says I can’t play with you anymore because you’re the whore of Babylon”. That’s been a term that protestants use to refer to Catholics in a negative way.

T: So, what is Whore of Babylon mean

B: So, this is where I don’t know anymore

M: I’m pretty sure it comes from Revelation Imagery…

B: I’m also…

T: Let’s do a quick Google

B: I think it does come from something from Revelation, but I cannot give you a whole lot of information on it.

T: It is really funny though

B: Yeah, passage is from revelation.

T: I also feel like we need to do a quick little disclaimer on this episode because we’re going to be saying the word “whore” like a lot, that is currently in its current usage mostly a slur against sex workers

B: Yeah

T: So, I wanna make that known, so we’re gonna say it a lot (laughs), but don’t just go throwing that around

B: Just because a lot of times when we say that word in this context, we’re not actually talking about people who are sex workers, there’s not a good substitute term.

T: The word whore is used when talking about this dichotomy

M: Academic dichotomy

T: So, we’re gonna use it cause that’s the word that’s used. 

B: I don’t think it’s a good word to be using

T: No! I also want to acknowledge it’s context.

M: Similar to how queer is a very academic word

T: Oh god and I want to die every time I think about it

B: And I wish it weren’t

T: I wish it weren’t.

B: I know but they used the word whore in the Bible, and they’re not using the word queer in the Bible

T: I wish they were

M: I’m using the word queer in the Bible

T: I’m queering the Bible

(Laughs)

M: Do you guys wanna talk about misogyny for a little bit?

T: When are we gonna get to talk about Milfs? 

M: We’re gonna talk about misogyny and then we’re gonna talk about Milfs, if that works for you.

B: And then we’re gonna talk about sex positivity

T: And then we’re gonna talk about Milfs again.

B: Okay, sounds like an agenda. 

M: So, in my Feminist Philosophy class, we read this book called Down Girl  by Kate Manne, and in our society the word “misogyny” is like a really pathologized word of like, a man who just psychologically hates women and his brain is off because of that. So, the word misogynist is reserved for, like my mom was like “Donald Trump is a misogynist” and what she means is that “Donald Trump on a deep psychological level because he’s absolutely crazy, hates all women”. But, most men don’t hate all women, because logistically that’s not possible because they need some women to be subservient to them.

B: They can still hate most women, and they can still not respect women on a fundamental level, these are just distinctions I want to draw.

M: Those are good distinctions.

B: You can need someone without respecting them.

T: Also, I think men tend to not want women as they actually are, they want them as they idealize them to be.

M: And that’s kind of this idea of misogyny. So Kate Manne argues that misogyny is not like a psychological hatred of women, misogyny is a punishing women who do not fit in the women box who are not good women, who do not align with the status quo. So misogyny creates a dichotomy of “good women” who are rewarded and “bad women” who are punished, and usually the good woman is the virgin, and the bad woman is the whore. Within the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy, like we’ve talked about before, it’s a very strict binary, you are either a virgin—a good woman, a Madonna—or you are a whore—bad woman, Eve, which we’ll talk about later?

T: Eve’s a whore??

B: Mary is the Madonna

M: Mary and Eve are a very good example of the Madonna/Whore complex.

T: Like you’re tattoo

M: Like my tattoo!! I have a tattoo of the virgin/Madonna—no, of the Madonna/Whore complex on my arm. I’m saying so many words. It’s a really good one. A woman named Cahill—well last name Cahill, wrote about how the issue for pregnant women and mothers and the issue that brings to the Madonna/Whore complex, because pregnant women are good women, mothers are good women, you know society says they’re good, but women who have sex???

T: Bad women

M: No sex!!!

T: Which is interesting!

M: This is a problem!

B: It’s confusing

T: Because you actually need to have sex in order to be pregnant, sometimes.

M: So, what society does is says, you know what, mothers the least sexy, mothers no sex, pregnant women no sex.

B: I feel like also part of that comes from the Christian idea that it’s okay to have sex for the purpose of procreation, but not for pleasure, so as long as the reason you had sex was for motherhood reason, and you weren’t having a good time, then it’s fine, but if you were having sex for fun, whore time.

M: Whore time (laughs)

T: Also, obviously, that’s why they love Mary so much because she did not have sex and still was a mother, so the ideal woman basically.

M: And also, interestingly enough, during the Victorian Era, pregnant women couldn’t be in public because it was a sign that they had sex, and that shit just did not fly

T: That’s so insane to me

B: That is insane

T: Like people don’t understand how they cycle of life works, like you have to do that

M: Women who have sex bad, Theo. Think about that for a second.

B: There’s nothing else to it.

M: So, in response to this binary that pregnant women break every day, society says, you know who the least sexy people are? Milfs. No, not Milfs

(Laughter) 

M: Society says, do you know who the least sexy people are? Mothers and pregnant woman

T: And I single handedly…

(Laughter)

M: So, the term Milf is actually arguably somewhat of a sexist term because it implies in general moms are not fuckable

B: That you would not love to fuck moms expect specific ones

T: Which is so not true.

M: Would you like to give us your lesbian feminist interpretation of Milfs, Theo, for this podcast?

T: So, here’s the thing, is Milf a sexist term? Definitely yes. Is it great to use for me to express how I would fuck some moms, yes it’s great. That’s all, I think.

B: So what you’re saying that people finding mothers sexual and attractive is subversive, but calling them subversive, but calling them a Milf makes it less subversive.

T: Yes, except when I say it because I think it’s funny, but ummmm

B: Everyone thinks it’s funny, that’s the only reason we say it. 

T: It is funny, and I think we’re turning it into something that is less misogynistic and more funny

M: Are we reclaiming?

T: Are we reclaiming Milf???

B: Here’s the thing, the song Stacey’s Mom never uses the term Milf, so I would actually like to say that the song Stacey’s Mom is an extremely subversive piece of media that changed the culture around mothers being sexual

T: I agree, I do. I also understand the sexist part of it because it’s like well if that’s a mom you want to fuck, then I guess you don’t want to fuck any other moms

B: It’s the by default moms are not fuckable, but this one different situation.

T: And then I think now all the lesbians and such, the women who love women you could say, are taking that and being like, well actually, every woman…so if you’re mom you’re Milf and those are the rules, and I think that’s fun.

B: I also think it’s really funny that people are like…I just feel like there’s a big thing where people are like, moms are so manipulative and give you terrible body image and a bad attachment style, but I would have sex with them though, and here’s where we circle back to Freud. 

T: NO! God, listen

B: What Freud did consider, what Freud did not fail to consider was that people will find moms inherently sexual (laughs).

T: If Freud came and took a look at my life, he would know he is right.

B: He was right, but Freud was also really wrong

T: But Freud was also really wrong, you’re right. Because he would say that I probably have a problem with my mother figure, so take that.

M: To be a feminist, sexualize your local mom today, with consent

(Laughs)

M: That’s my notes on Milfs

T: Well, that’s good, I think my notes on Milfs are that uh….call me. So

(Laughs)

M: So my notes on Mary and Eve, my first note on Mary, also known as the Madonna, is I love Mary of Nazareth so much it hurts me, so

T: That seems good

M: Just so you know my perspective, as Bridget mentioned before, the church and patriarchal society in general thinks Mary is really cool because she is a mother and a virgin

T: I said that

B: Theo said that

M: I’m so sorry, as Theo said before, that they were like “oh my gosh, perfect woman alert”

T: perfect women, not sex but baby

M: (laughs) even though she was a Jewish probably woman of color who was poor

B: But, she was perfect

T: But she was perfect because baby no sex 

M: No sex baby, we paint her, pretend she’s white

T: And Jesus also

M: And Jesus also white, then we win, so.

T: Then we win, white supremacy, another win for it.

M: So, the church did this really weird thing where they were like, Mary is so holy because she is a virgin. And then there’s this very weird Catholic theology that is this idea that Mary is the “second Eve”

B: Eve 2.0

M: Eve 2.0. Because sometimes people are like, Jesus is the second Adam, Jesus is the perfect Adam, which is weird, but makes a little bit more sense.

B: He’s at least the third!

M: Right?

T: Who’s the second?

B: Noah?

B: Wait that was not a crazy thing for you to say, that makes sense.

T: That makes sense, he was like the second first man in the world.

B: Jesus is like at least the third

M: Well, there’s one letter of Paul where Paul’s like Jesus was the second Adam, and that’s a different—me and Destiny had like a two-hour conversation about this, so this is like a different theological discussion.

T: Well, if the same theological discussion said that Jesus was the second Adam and Mary was the second Eve, Freud wins again and that’s not okay.

M: So, in the scripture, at least the scripture, it was just about how Jesus is the second Adam, but then people were like, you know what? That means Mary was the second Eve, even though no one really ever said that.

T: No it doesn’t!

B: How!

T: Eve wasn’t Adam’s mom that makes no sense, don’t say that.

(Laughter)

M: There is also this long association between women who eat and women who have sex, like women who “induldge”

T: Oh my god, yeah, I could yell about this.

M: Indulge in their “sinful” appetite

T: Oh my god, what if I killed everyone

B: What do you have to say about that Theo, I’m curious.

T: Well it just affects so much about society and how we perceive women and treat women and how the world is structured and how fatphobia exists and how women aren’t allowed to eat and how eating disorders get passed down through mothers and how eating disorders affect women a lot and how

B: Do you wanna like dig in on any of this a little bit?

T: I don’t know, there’s just so much of that that affects everything all the time that I don’t, there’s just a lot, and I could talk about it for so long. I don’t even know where to start. Just the fact that in terms of both sex and eating, it’s sinful for women and not for men and that’s a huge problem. 

B: And it kind of within the language of indulgence

T: When it’s not like, eating is a survival need, so kind of fucked up so that you…

B: And on a larger scale, so is sex

T: Survival of the species, yeah.

M: Now I’m thinking about all the things that Theo said. Okay, I’m looking at my notes, so Medieval Theologians reinterprets Eve’s sin as eating the forbidden fruit as her appetite, as her sexual appetite, and in contrast, Mary was sexually pure

T: Allegedly

M: Mary’s sexual purity and her resistance of indulging redeems Eve’s sinful eating. Which is just divine justification of the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy.

T: And also reminds me of the whole Jesus died for your sins thing

M: It’s almost like Jesus is the one who saves us from our sins and not Mary. As much as I love Mary

T: That doesn’t even exist in the first place

B: Mary did divine conception for our sins.

M: And also, Adam also ate the fruit???

T/B: Yeah!

M: So my favorite quote!

T: Just like in Sara Barellis’s song Armor, how the hell did Eve end up with all the damn blame? She does say that in there, when Adam ate the fruit too?

M: Remember when I ranted to you guys in the car and I was like “Eve had to be tempted by the literal devil, and Adam saw some titties”.

T: Which like, can’t say I relate to Eve more than Adam on that one, and it’s really important I think in Feminist Theology and also interpreting the Bible correctly, that’s not really a thing, in reading the Bible correctly, like reading the words, like Eve was not the only one who ate the fruit, that’s important to know.

M: And if you think it’s important that the woman was the first one to eat the fruit, as Linn Haralson says, who was the first one that Jesus—the risen Jesus came too—it was the women. So, if you wanna go that route, Jesus

T: Likes women better

M: Like fixed that

T: Women are better and closer to God, like we said in Genesis

M: The only people left at the cross were the women and gay John!

(Laughter)

M: Linn Haralson

T: The women and gay John!!!!! But I was gonna say, I think it’s important to note about Mary that when you think about the amount of stigma at the time around having sex, not being a virin, especially when they were not married—cause Mary and Jospeh were not married, correct?

M: No they were engaged

T: They were engaged, okay. If you think about the about of stigma and the amount of shame that would be put on a woman if she accidentally—

B: Accidentally had sex

T: Well accidentally conceived after having sex before marriage, it would be like a lot, it would be rough, so if you could get people to believe that you conceived without having sex, that would be a lot better for you. I’m not saying that she didn’t conceive immaculately, she maybe did

B: It’s like a common thing that people say for sure.

T: And I think it’s kind of a good point.

M: I guess it does point out, it doesn’t matter if Mary was a virgin or not. Like, Mary did not need Mary to be a virgin to do what he did, kind of

T: I think that’s important. Also, I’m gonna tie Buddhism into it, this is crazy. Jesus could have been born, like been conceived through sex and he still could have been all that he was. In Buddhism, when Siddhartha’s mom was pregnant with him, she had a dream about like I think a white elephant, regardless, basically as soon as he was born, like the night before he was born, and as soon as he was born, there were clear signs that he was gonna be special. So, like, that was a person born from sex but still really super important and also divine, so you know. It’s not the Mary being a Virgin that makes it important, I think is the main point.

B: But it is something cool, like interesting

T: But I think the reason Mary being a virgin and a mother is mostly just serves to uphold the whore/Madonna thing. I also think that a lot of the cool stuff about Mary is that she really gave moms a good name and I think that’s great for society.

M: Right? Go moms!

T: I think they deserve it!

B: Mary is a really pro-mom figure

T: Which seems so great because everybody wants to put women down, especially moms I feel like, because when they’re like “moms are unfuckable” that translate to “moms are undesirable in general”

B: And not good for anything except raising children.

T: And then you have the whole stigma against stay-at-home moms, stigma against working moms, like you can’t win. I just think that it’s cool that Mary is for sure one of the best women in all time in Christianity, and she is also a mom. Nice. Win for moms everywhere. 

B: Except lame to valorize only virgin women is the downside

T: Which makes it cool, when you’re like it doesn’t matter that Mary was a virgin, it matters that she was a mother

M: She also had children after Jesus, but the Catholic Church

B: Which we never hear about

M: But the Catholic Church, after the 1800s, started saying “Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin”, so in the 1800s they believe that Mary was always a virgin, which is weird.

T: Also, why weren’t her other kids special if she wasn’t a virgin, if that’s what made Jesus special. But then it kind of, makes you think that isn’t what made Jesus special. There’s like a lot going on

M: Stop thinking. 

T: So that’s interesting to think about!

M: Bridget I want to hear your thoughts about sex positivity, and your other thoughts always.

T: I’m positive about sex with Milfs always, thank you.

M: And Theo’s thoughts on sex positivity (laughs)

B: This is something that I talked about with Lila all the time when it was important that we had opinions about this kind of thing, basically, which is that we both had some issues with the concept of sex positivity, and Maggie I feel like I’ve talked about this before

T: You’ve talked to me about it

M: I think we have because we’ve talked about the Madonna/Whore complex a lot.

B: But basically, the idea, the movement for sex positivity was a reactive movement against a slut-shaming culture, so in the US, we have certainty had a big culture of slut shaming and also whore-shaming in a way where it’s very easy to invoke the Madonna/Whore or Virgin/Whore Dichotomy because we had a culture that upheld virgin women and women who were not sexual or not outwardly sexual, and condemned women who were sexual. So that was a big part of American culture, which obviously traces roots back to we were founded on Puritanism and a lot of the Fundamentalist Christianity that is a big part of the way that our sexual values are expressed in American culture. So, when people started to combat this, and they were like “hey, all this slut shaming is bad, we need to be able to celebrate people’s sexual freedom and it’s okay to be a slut or whatever, destigmatize being very sexual, especially as a woman”. And again “women” in so many quotes

T: Always

B: But the sex positivity movement then sort of…reacting to the society that had elevated the virgin side of the dichotomy as the ideal and treated the sexually promiscuous side of the Dichotomy like it was a bad thing. So, in sort of a reaction, a lot of the way that the sex positivity movement has manifested is by then elevating the other side of the dichotomy, this is the problem with binaries. When you work within a binary and you’re using a binary framework, which we’re addicted to in the US, we fucking love binaries it’s all we do

T: It’s so true

B: It’s literally pretty much always extremely reductive because human experience is on a spectrum, it’s really hard to delineate one hard line that goes between, “okay these people are in this category, and these people are in this category, and there’s only two categories”. And obviously, I don’t think this has been super intentional, but because when you’re working from the framework of a binary, when one side is elevated and the other side is being put down, and you want to change that, a lot of times you end up doing an imbalance in the other direction. So a lot of the sex positivity movement has just basically idealized, like, sexual promiscuity as the only type of sexual freedom—not even promiscuity, but just being very sexual and whatever—but then if somebody is on the other side of that dichotomy, if someone is on the virgin/Madonna side of that dichotomy, they then become…people will be like “Oh they’re just not liberated”, they’re more looked down upon in this framework.

T: It’s like the virgins are lame thing, but kind of taken to another level, where’s it’s like virgins aren’t woke because having sex is woke

B: Yeah, exactly, it’s more insidious than just saying virgins are lame, but saying that virgins are not liberated

T: They’re not being true to themselves

B: The only way to express your bodily autonomy and your sexual autonomy is to be having a lot of sex, and not the other way around.

T: Which, it makes sex and the amount of sex that you have into some kind of display of your personal…your comfort with your identity and your personal freedom rather than a choice about your sexual activity, which is all that it is

B: And your own feminism sometimes, and your own ability to be literally liberated as a person, or a lot of times, as a woman—this is something that I see women doing to each other a lot. So, Lila and I, when we were having these conversations, we were like, we’re not going to try and promote sex positivity because sex positivity culture can also be really toxic, and it’s something that people don’t love to bring up very much because sex positivity is very much seen as, so this is the right thing to do, and you want to be a sex positive feminist to be woke. But, what that really means a lot of the time is that you want to be, you know, having so much sex to be woke and that’s the only way, and I just have known a lot of people who kind of been on the other side, where they’re in very sex positive communities or spaces, and people have been very toxic towards them for making choices that are not having the most sex they could be having at any given time. I knew a good amount of people who literally had experiences with their friends virgin-shaming them when they got to college.

T: Which is weird.

B: Like pressuring them to have sex when they didn’t want to because, like, people would be like, oh you just really need to experience this and then you’ll be able to embrace your own bodily autonomy.

T: Which, I feel like, is, then you’re making sex, into, again something that it is not. The important thing I feel like, rather than sex positivity, is just like seeing sex as what it is, which is a thing that can be fun sometimes and also you use it to make children. Sex neutrality.

B: Exactly, so I feel like because coming from the framework of the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy, and then sex positivity being a reaction to that, instead of a way to embrace everybody’s own autonomous choices and decisions to do whatever they want with their own sexuality. It just becomes toxic in the other direction, and I feel like socially we’ve managed to flip it in the other direction and still not be helping people. I mean, a lot of people feel really good about sex positivity, but I’ve found that as a movement, it’s not very nuanced and not very helpful.

T: I totally agree. I also think, this is a great opportunity for me to say, that what it is, is black and white thinking 

B: It kind of is, and that’s the problem with working in the binaries like that, binaries are always black and white

T: Every time you have a binary, it’s always black and white thinking because it has to be one extreme or the other, and to try to combat it, you just go to the other extreme, which is still bad, still black and white thinking

B: And I shouldn’t know so many people who were ashamed of being sexually inexperienced that they hid it from their friends because they were afraid of being judged.

T: It’s not working like you intended it to

B: It’s clearly just loosing where the shame is, and I feel we need to work harder to completely erase shame from conversations around sex instead of just going back elevating different ends of the dichotomy like a seesaw.

T: I also think it’s important

B: I don’t think the seesaw should be balanced either, I think we need to break the seesaw!

T: No more Seesaw! Break it and burn it!

M: Anti seesaw podcast!

T: Also it’s important to say, people can use sex…like have a lot of sex as a harmful behavior, that’s also something that’s not talked about in sex positive spaces at all. Many, many people use sex as self-harm and that’s important to acknowledge, when you’re constantly saying that sex is a really important thing to be having all the time and you just encouraging people to have a lot of sex, which is fine if you want to, it’s like people who use that as self-harm, it’s going to be a very hard environment for them to be in, just not at all accommodating. The important thing is breaking down the seesaw, the whole thing. Just, having everybody be able to have whatever experience that they are comfortable with and that’s fine.

B: That’s my way of saying that the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy is more pervasive than you might think it is, and if you think you’ve never interreacted with it, think again

T: You have

B: Because if you’ve interacted with the sex positivity movement, you porbably have interacted with the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy

T: Also, if you’ve ever had any sexual shame in any way, you probably have

B: You probably have

T: If you’ve ever used sex to cope, you probably have

M: Especially if you’re a woman adjacent person.

T: Yeah, a woman in quotes

M: A woman in quotes, or a guess if you’re a man and can’t have sex because you only see women as the Madonna or the Whore

(Laughter)

M: To loop us back

T: And you’re so confused, you’re like “Oh god I can’t have sex with any of these women because they’re too good or too bad”. And that’s why it’s important again to not using black and white thinking. Women are just okay sometimes. 

B: Does anybody have any closing thoughts on the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy

T: I think that black and white thinking is bad always. So, when there’s a dichotomy and there’s two of them and there’s a binary, probably bad. Probably you should think about how that is bad probably

B: This is an anti-binary podcast

T: We hate the binaries here, no binaries allowed.

M: I love Mary of Nazareth, Mary Mother of God so much I’m almost Catholic.

T: That’s true and I think that’s great

B: You should become Catholic about it

M: My tattoo and my two pictures 

B: I don’t know why I’m always trying to get you to become Catholic, I’m not pro-Catholic

T: Well, it seems like you want to become Catholic, like a little bit

B: Me? Oh Maggie

T: Not you

M: I love. Ritual and I love Mary, but I don’t like the rest of the Catholic church

T: That’s fair

B: But, listen up, do you like the rest of…which one is good?

T: I feel like the one you’re in right now is like worse

B: Catholicism is much chiller Maggie, you can literally, they’re super pro-immigrant, and I used to go to banquets with pro-choice Catholics and we would have such a good time, and I’m still on their email list

T: Maybe you should become Catholic

B: My really cool grandma who genetically gave me a lot of her personality was Catholic.

M: Maybe I’ll be Catholic, stay tuned

T: I think that would be cool.

B: I mean, you could never be a priest and the Catholic church is super homophobic, so that could be better, but I just feel like less bad about Catholics than some other Christians

T: But protestants, like the one you’re in right now is pretty bad.

B: I didn’t get to say my closing thoughts.

T: Okay say them

B: Um, I think that the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy or the Madonna/Whore Dichotomy has really kind of complicated origins and I think that we don’t acknowledge enough how we still feel that was as a society and a culture, and if I don’t like you, I’m gonna call you the Whore of Babylon. 

T: That’s hilarious

M: That’s a good closing ntoe

T: And if you’re a milf, call me

M/B: call Theo

M: Tweet our podcast

B: @mxmfwpod at twitter.com

T: I feel like email might be a little more private, don’t worry about it.

B: I do want them to email us, if you want to tell us anything, like that you’re a milf or your own feelings about milfs or any other topics you want us to talk about on the podcast, please email us at mxmfwpodcast@gmail.com, or tweet at us @mxmfwpod at twitter.com, or Instagram DM at us @mxmfwpod at Instagram.com

M: Slide into our DM’s

B: except email we are mxmfwpod

T: Slide into our DMs (laughter). Thank you for listening to My Ex and My Future Wife

M: I’m Maggie

B: I’m Bridget

T: We’ll see you next time and in the meantime, be gay and question God.

Theo (singing): My Ex and My future Wife