Connor Beaton explains the Madonna-whore complex, where some men unconsciously split women into pure or sexually available categories. It stems from childhood dynamics with parents, and awareness of where it comes from is the first step to changing it.
Foreign.
Team, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here today we're going to be talking about one of the most important psychological principles that you as a man need to understand. And it's a complex that I see so many men in our modern culture dealing with. It's something that I dealt with in my past and that's something called the Madonna whore complex or the Madonna whore whore split. Now, for the sake of this conversation, obviously some of you might not like the W word and hopefully YouTube and Spotify don't, you know, downvote this into oblivion because it's got that word in it. But I'm not talking about an individual, I'm not talking about a sex worker. I am talking about an archetype. So here the whore is an archetype. So we're going to talk about this because this is one of the main reasons why men often cheat. So this split has happened inside of men that has caused them to unconsciously, and maybe you've experienced this, put women into sort of two categories. One is this sort of archetype of this beautiful, wonderful, pure, loving, kind, compassionate woman that you fall in love with. But there seems to be something missing. You struggle to bring, you know, a certain part of your sexual drive or energy towards her. You, you struggle to be assertive or have boundaries around her, but she's sort of hyper pedestaled. And on the other side is the archetype of the, and that woman's usually embodies or sort of engenders this, this archetype of a person or a woman that you can bring the full expression of your sexuality to. It's sort of unbridled. You can kind of express yourself however you want, do whatever you want. But these women are often characterized by you not really having respect for them, you not really wanting to be in long term relationships. There's not a lot of trust. You don't exactly feel safe in that, in that relationship with woman. And so there, there's no commitment. You, you don't want to commit to them, you don't want to be with them long term. You don't really respect who they are, how they've lived their life. But you know, the bedroom time can be a lot of fun. Generally speaking, this is a very unconscious framework. This is not, it might show up that you realize that there's women that you date and there's women that you just, you know, have fun with. I got to censor myself a little bit for the YouTubes because they generally, you know, I can't go buck wild on there. It gets. It gets censored. But, but generally, men that deal with this complex will consciously or unconsciously be putting women into these two buckets. There's the pure, loving, kind, compassionate woman that is sort of the ideal, the. The. The real embodiment of the type of woman that that man wants to be with. And this kind of split can show up for a number of reasons. Um, but in many ways, if you follow somebody like Carl Jung, who talked about the anima, who believed that we all have a masculine and feminine archetype within us, which he called the anima and the animus, right, the feminine and the masculine. This is a sort of splitting of the feminine within you as a man. It's the splitting of how you perceive your own feminine nature that's being projected out onto the women that you date. And because this is unreconciled within you, because there's a feminine character or nature that is within you, that is unreconciled, that then gets projected out onto women. And this can be very frustrating because it can be hard for men to have real fulfillment with women when they have this type of split. And if you're one of those men, you probably know what I'm talking about. Because the real hallmark of this is that when you have this type of split, it's very, very, very challenging to see one woman as being capable of being able to be both. Of being able to be capable of somebody that can be loving and kind and nurturing to you, but that you can also explore the depths of your sexual desires and your own sort of like, shadow in that way. So there's a couple things that create this. The. The main one is parental dynamics, what we're going to call mommy issues or a mother wound. And that is often times texturized or colored by Mom's inconsistencies. So a good example is mom was very loving, but she only gave love when you performed. Or mom was very loving, but also shut down and absent. Or mom was an angel sometimes and it didn't demon in other ways. Right. She was very kind and nurturing, compassionate, but she would criticize you into obliving, and she would be ex. Excessively harsh and demeaning and shaming. And so there's kind of this duality of you not really too sure of what exactly you're going to get. So for me, I had a very loving, kind mom, but she was very shut down and she had some addiction problems. And so there was this duality in her that Was really, really charged and it was really pronounced. She was loving. I, I, you know, we had a great relationship in a lot of ways, but there was a part of her that was completely inaccessible and completely shut down because of the addiction and because of her own pain and her own trauma, et cetera. So that split, that duality in mom can sometimes be very, very confusing for a young boy. And it can split your image and your perspective of the feminine or of women into these two sort of hyper polarized versions, right? Like the far left and the far right in politics right now, they become sort of two opposing forces and polarities that seem to be irreconcilable, that just do not seem to mix. So the first thing you need to do to escape this complex is to develop awareness around the origin of, of the split. Okay, number one, you need to develop awareness around the origin of the split. What actually caused the split to happen unconsciously in the first place? How did the split show up in your childhood? Was mom really erratic? Would she flip flop back and forth between being this very loving, very nurturing, very kind embodiment of a woman and then all of a sudden she was yelling and screaming and throwing things, being extremely volatile or being very hyper emotional and you couldn't save her from those things. Would she be loving on one moment, moment and then, you know, shame you and criticize you into oblivion the next? Was she very controlling? Another one that I see. I'm going to bring this up. This is going to be tough for some people to hear, but we're going to talk about it anyway. A lot of men that I see with this complex grew up in a household with a mother who was a single mom who was telling that young boy to be a certain way, be nice, be kind, be loving, be good to women, be, be all of these things that I'm telling you that you should be as a man. But then who she was dating was the dominant, aggressive, hyper assertive man, right? She'd be telling that young boy, success doesn't matter, money doesn't. Women just want men that are love and kind and caring. But then she's dating the high status, you know, sort of, I don't want to say alpha, but like the high status, wealthy, in great shape, really assertive, dominating guy. Share your comments below. Don't forget to man it forward. Don't forget to subscribe. Like the video if you enjoyed it. And as always, Connor Beaton signing off. I'll see you next week.
Sam.
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