Damage of Porn Usage Beyond Bedroom: Madonna-Whore Complex

Pornography, beyond sexual dysfunction, promotes sexless love, loveless sex, by creating a gulf between emotional intimacy and sexual desire.

The triple-A principle-accessibility, affordability, anonymity-facilitates drug use, and porn is a drug with sexual gratification as its effect. Since the appearance of various tube sites all over the Internet, these three A’s have been readily satisfied for any porn user with an electronic device.

Habitual porn usage acts like a parasite, surviving and reproducing at the expense of the host-specifically, it does through a combination of desensitization to visual stimuli, compulsive viewing/browsing, boredom with non-sexual activities, novelty-seeking in sexual activities, compulsive masturbation, etc.

Research has shown that porn use leads to being less aroused by an actual partner and more turned on by porn with its high stimulation levels and novel (unrealistic) sexual scenarios and demeaning (objectifying) fetishes and superhuman expectations of sexual performance and so on. Consequently, in real-life sexual situations, those who use porn frequently experience sexual dysfunction with their actual partner.

Indeed, researchers have found that for frequent porn users, both men and women, sexual dysfunction is a common problem, but only in sexual situations with an actual partner, not when masturbating while using pornography 2. Although in some cases it might be a matter of being conditioned to a certain type and intensity of stimulation when masturbating, in many others these bedroom problems can reveal deeper psychological issues.

Specifically, the damage of porn usage doesn’t stop at the bedroom door. One might develop the Madonna-Whore Complex (MWC) and damage one’s emotional life.

(NOTE: To limit the scope of this blog post, and because of both limited investigations of porn use in women, this article focuses more on men than on women. The same applies to LGBTQ+ experiences, but a certain universality found in human sexuality and emotion can still be extrapolated.)

Madonna-Whore Complex: The Freudian View

Madonna-Whore Complex (MWC) characterizes a dichotomous perception of one’s sexual partner. At the core of this complex lies the unconscious attitude that those who are desirable sexually are also degradable; those who are respectable are, in turn, untouchable or above carnal desires.

This split in attitude has been a long time coming. In fact, Freud himself saw this complex as characterizing trait of men in his time 4.

In Freud’s view, the development of MWC results from the failure to overcome one’s Oedipus complex 4(he was mainly concerned with this problem in men). In the Oedipus complex, men have their emotionality tied up with their mothers, while their sexuality remains undeveloped, primitive, and separate from affection.

Having one’s emotionality tied up with one’s mother means the person is unable to show affection and relate to another human except in the way a child does to his mother. That is to say, one is unable to relate to another person emotionally as equals.

For a man, he projects his mother onto his partner and relates to her as her child. For his partner, reacting to his projection, she, in turn, projects a child figure onto her partner and relates to him as his mother. (Of course, women can experience a father complex or self-identification with their own mothers, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)

As long as this projection of the mother exists and his primary way of intimacy is infantile, in the man’s unconscious, his partner is emotionally indistinguishable from his mother. Sexual intercourse with such a partner is incest, so his moral conscience forbids it.

On the contrary, if all he has for a woman is sexual desire devoid of feelings, the MWC-afflicted man has no trouble with intercourse. The projection of his mother is not happening, and the danger of incest is gone. In this case, the sexuality of such a man remains primitive, animal-not quite human.

Whether the man relates to his partner as though she’s his mother or a mere mate, she is not regarded as a whole human being.

Porn videos are staged performances. The actresses and actors involved engage in most sexual activities to fulfill a fantasy, an ideal image, a thirst for the extraordinary, to appeal to a certain audience, and to achieve certain aesthetic optics. Their personality, vulnerability, and emotionality are excluded from the shot. Sex portrayed in pornography, in short, is inhuman.

In accord with Freud’s view, porn encourages one’s sexuality to operate autonomously, separate from one’s emotions. Therefore, frequent use of porn encourages loveless sex and sexless love.

The Freudian theory on MWC-and by extension, on sexual problems with a partner pertaining to porn use-relies on the assumption of a strong emotional attachment with an actual mother or maternal figure. Hence his cure is to come to terms with the idea of incest with the mother.

The Freudian cure does not encourage incest, but the overcoming of one’s infantile idealization of one’s partner, which results from the projection of the mother figure, so as to achieve a relationship with an equal partner. By engaging with the idea-not action-of incest with the mother, one breaks the ideal maternal figure itself by making it more human. Since projection, to Freud, is inescapable, he thought this was the only way to overcome the Madonna-Whore Complex, the only path towards a satisfying intimate relationship.

In reality, however, Freud’s treatment of the MWC and related sexual dysfunction is problematic. Though in principle more human, the de-idealized projection is still a projection, which serves as a veil that obscures the real individual. Even if the sexual aspects with a partner are resolved, there still remains the infantile emotionality that’s problematic.

A man who relates to his partner in the same way as he did his mother when he was a child-what a disturbing image.

Moreover, who’s to say that by breaking the ideal image one holds for women-which includes maternity, innocence, and many other virtues one might associate with a mother or stereotypical femininity-he will not fall to the other extreme and become unbearably cynical towards women? Wouldn’t this cynicism only brew hatred or resentment for women?

Thus, the Freudian cure just doesn’t cut it.

Contrasting Freud, Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, offers different insights.

Madonna-Whore Complex: Jungian View

While Freud thought that one projects one’s personal mother onto other women, Jung maintained that it is a collective, impersonal mother image-a symbol-that is projected. Furthermore, he stressed that this image may take on the appearances of one’s actual mother, but its true identity is the Mother archetype.

The Mother is a symbol that represents nurturance, hearth, creation, destruction, and all-encompassing containment. The full symbolism would take a tome to even outline, as the analyst Erich Neumann did in his book, The Great Mother, where he discussed in depth the four afore-mentioned meanings.

One should note an important distinction between the Jungian and Freudian views on the image of the mother: For Freud, this image comes from and stays focused on the actual mother; for Jung, this image is a collective representation, consisting of cultural notions of maternity, maternal qualities observed in other motherly women (e.g. grandmother, a nurturing teacher, nurse) in one’s life, and the image of the personal mother.

It’s from this Mother archetype Jung believed the emotional capacity of men originated. Echoing Freud, Jung also thought that this emotionality originally was restricted to an infantile attitude, appealing to and wishing for a woman’s nurturance, tolerance, and coddling. But unlike Freud, Jung didn’t think engaging in incest imagination would help at all.

To Jung, the Mother gave birth to men’s emotionality, to begin with. And it was She who taught him the ways of affection within the confines of a Mother-infant relationship. So engaging in incestuous ideation pulls the man further back towards the infantile state-it is regression.

Jung studied and derived his theory of archetypes from various mythologies, from Greek myths to Hinduism to Buddhism. So he was convinced that a hero becomes his own person only after he’s left home. Therefore, for the man to develop his own ways of affection with another woman who’s his equal, he must actively pull away from the Mother, thus his infantile ways of relating emotionally.

In practice, this would mean to diminish the focus on one’s own needs (which is pretty much all that a child cares about most of the time) and tailor his ways of relating according to her emotional needs. Jung maintained that encounters with real women in real human ways are the only way to break out of the Mother complex.

Further, Jung also posited that where power is present, love is not, and where love is present, there’s no space for power. This brings us back to the Madonna-Whore Complex. To Jung, all one-sided sexual encounters are in essence an infantile attempt at gaining power over the object of erotic desires.

For men with infantile emotional capacities, they feel like a child when they see Madonna in women and a master when they see the Whore. That is, they try to get the women they desire through power dynamics because they’re not capable of love as equals. Whether they behave like children or overpower her like they’re the master, the feeling conveyed is that she has to do what he desires, or else. This echoes Freud’s view that MWC is in essence a sickness of the capacity for love 4.

These toxic dynamics manifest themselves in the devaluation of either partner as an individual, discourage personal growth, and cause both emotional drainage and damage.

Pornography, Patron of Whore and Adversary of Madonna

It is clear that the use of porn encourages Madonna-Whore Complex by advocating sexuality devoid of emotions and objectification of sexual partners while shunning out the human connection that marks healthy, wholesome relationships.

Combining Freud’s and Jung’s theories, the damage porn can cause is extensive, as follows.

First, in terms of sensation, porn use leads to desensitization when with an actual partner. Both the intensity of intercourse and the novel situations in which porn sex happens are largely unrealistic. It also conditions the brain to respond primarily to visual or situational stimuli as packaged and presented in videos or images.

Second, chronic use of porn, combined with singlehood, may lead to porn addiction, which in turn can result in boredom with other activities unrelated to sexual pleasure. In this way, porn use and masturbation preoccupy one’s life and grow more and more severe over time.

Third, porn exacerbates MWC, which according to psychoanalytic theories is an inherent danger in our psyche. In both Freudian and Jungian views, MWC prevents the person from integrating sex and emotional intimacy. As a result, one is doomed to be in loveless sexual relationships and sexless loving relationships.

Finally, note that in Jung’s view, the Madonna and the Whore would be seen as archetypes that represent opposing approaches to a relationship and are present in all aspects of life. Because there is not a real person present when we watch porn, we are essentially practicing sexual gratification through power (porn stars are there to please us one-sidedly), not love (requiring reciprocation from participating parties). Consequently, porn use eventually leads to the general stunting in our ability to love and relate to others in a wholesome, human way, tailored to each individual with all the idiosyncracies.

Ramifications of porn usage run deep into our psyche and extend beyond the confines of romance and sex, damaging our capacity for love.

What’s worse, porn usage and masturbation are termed unapologetically as gratification of a basic biological need; amateur porn is being seen as a free expression of sexuality; hookups and polyamory are seen as a progressive new norm of modern romance, a new stage of enlightenment that defies outdated patriarchal traditions. All of these combine to devalue the individual and feed into the Madonna-Whore Complex.

Many people, myself included, get uncomfortable seeing these now-normative behaviours under the microscope. But perhaps that’s exactly the clue that we’ve probed into some unsavoury truths and that these behaviours should change.

As Jung said, and I paraphrase, it is only in the blackest of mud one finds the most invaluable gem that opens the path to higher consciousness and personal growth.

References

1. De Alarcón, R., de la Iglesia, J. I., Casado, N. M., & Montejo, A. I. (2019). Online porn addiction: What we know and what we don’t-a systematic review. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 8(1), 91–110. Find the article at: doi:10.3390/jcm8010091
2. Park, B.Y., Wilson, G., Berger, J., Christman, M., Reina, B., Bishop, F., …, & Doan, A. P. (2016). Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports. Behavioural Sciences (Basel), 6(3), 17–41. Find the article at: doi:10.3390/bs6030017
3. Hilton, D. L. J. (2013). Pornography addiction-a supranormal stimulus considered in the context of neuroplasticity. Socioaffective Neuroscience and Psychology, 3(1). Find the article at: doi: 10.3402/snp.v3i0.20767
4. Hartmann, U. (2009). Sigmund Freud and his impact on our understanding of male sexual dysfunction. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 6, 2332–2339. doi: 10.1111/j.1743–6109.2009.01332.x
5. Neumann, E. (2015). The Great Mother (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.
6. Jung, C. G. (1990). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (10th ed.). Princeton University Press.

Originally published on Bill’s mental health blog, Psych Word on October 7, 2021.