MOTHER LOAD

The Madonna-whore complex, coined in 1925 by Sigmund Freud, suggests that men view women as either saintly, virginal “Madonnas” or sexual, seductive “whores.”

“Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love,” Freud wrote, and while it may sound antiquated, the overarching theory could still be considered true today. In modern relationships, as the theory goes, men view their wives as mothers, and therefore, not sexual objects. But before childbirth, before marriage, and in any other capacity, a woman takes the role of the “whore” – a sexual viability.

There also exists a sinister expectation in society that what women are striving toward in our lives is, ultimately, childbirth. After all, that’s what our bodies were built for – right? If that is the case, then what does society make of the woman who works and, more importantly, the woman who chooses not to have a child?

“The mother of all questions” in this case is a sometimes heartfelt, sometimes condescending, always accusatory “why don’t you have children?” Perhaps you plan to one day, or perhaps you never plan to at all. Either way, if the answer is no, the societal response is a rejection, not just of a woman’s choice, but of what it means to be a woman.

In The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit’s new collection of feminist essays, she writes, “Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 per cent of the human species who are as diverse as in their wants as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 per cent, only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species. At their heart, these questions are not questions but assertions that we who fancy ourselves individuals, charting our own courses, are wrong. Brains are individual phenomena producing wildly varying products; uteruses bring forth one kind of creation.”

While it seems to go without saying that a woman is more than her womb, this is also the part of the female body that no longer seems to be her own when it comes to reproductive rights or the way society still traditionally views a woman’s body around the world.

Candid as ever, Solnit admits that she has never wanted children because she desires solitude in life and the room to invest the majority of her time into her work. To have or not to have children is not the question, she explains, but rather to ask the purpose of a woman to begin with. It’s a vicious cycle, and one that can be broken if we even just ask, “Would you ask a man that?”

In her essay Silence Is Broken, Solnit references Susan Griffin’s Pornography and Silence, in which Griffin quotes Norman Mailer on Marilyn Monroe, one of the most iconic celebrity female bodies in American media: “She is a mirror of the pleasure of those who stare at her.” Meaning, Solnit writes, “Monroe can stand in for any woman, all women who silence, hide, disguise, or dismiss aspects of themselves and their self-expression in pursuing male pleasure, approval, comfort, reinforcement. Mailer, in calling Monroe a mirror of pleasure, fails to question what happens when the pleasure is routinely someone else’s. It’s a death of pleasure disguised as pleasure, a death of self in the service of others. It’s silence wrapped in pleasing nothings.”

It’s a silence that all women experience, whether they realize it or not, in the words they speak or through the choices they make.