Quotes / Madonna-Whore Complex

It's not your fault that they hover
I mean no disrespect
It's my right to be hellish
I still get jealous
You're too sexy, beautiful
And everybody wants a taste
That's why (That's why)
I still get jealous.

— Nick Jonas, "Jealous"

Oops, I did it again
I played with your heart, got lost in the game
Oh baby, baby
Oops, you think I'm in love
That I'm sent from above
I'm not that innocent.

— Britney Spears, "Oops I Did It Again"

"You have a strange sense of nobility, Captain. You'll lay a man out for implying that I'm a whore, but you keep calling me one to my face."

— Inara Serra, Firefly

"Sodom and Madonna-ism are two halves of the same movement, the mere tick-tack of lust and asceticism, pietism and pornography. If you're not pious, you won't be pornographical, and vice versa. If there are no saints there'll be no sinners. If there were no ascetics, there'd be no lewd people. If you divide the human psyche into two halves, one half will be white, the other black. It's the division itself which is pernicious. The swing to one extreme causes the swing to the other. The swing towards Immaculate Madonna-ism inevitably causes the swing back to the whore of prostitution, then back again to the Madonna, and so ad infinitum."

— D. H. Lawrence, review of Solitaria

"I say this with the utmost respect, but male writers tend to write female characters as either the angel or the whore."

— Natalie Dormer

"It's kind of a double-edged sword, isn't it?...Well, if you say you haven't, you're a prude. If you say you have, you're a slut. It's a trap."

— Allison Reynolds, The Breakfast Club

"Darling! ... Whore!"

—Eddie Gluskin, Outlast: The Whistleblower

"So you're saying my only choice as a girl is nun or whore?"

— Tip, Emerald City

"Now, can we finally stop with that virgin-whore nonsense? There are so many other interesting things about me!"

— Cecilia, Jane the Virgin

"EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM IS A WHORE! NOW TAKE A CHASTITY BELT AND SIDDOWN!"

— Kinshiro Morooka, Hiimdaisy

"Either courtesan or housewife (I say housewife and not servant), [but] I see no middle ground: what then is humiliating about this alternative?"

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"All of those things pale in comparison to my mom having sex! Okay? Alright, my mom's a fucking saint! Moms don't like sex! They're not supposed to. Okay? Moms are supposed to bake pies, and, fucking... make paper bags with, fucking, ham sandwiches in 'em; with, like chocolate milks in 'em, and shit? Moms are wholesome! There was nothing wholesome about tha-that fuckshit I saw in the bathroom!"

— BlastphamousHD, "BHD Storytime #59 - The Worlds Scariest True Horror Story"

The only kind of girl they see
Is a one-night or a wife.

— Taylor Swift, "Lavender Haze"

"You will find, if you look carefully into any human’s heart, that he is haunted by at least two imaginary women — a terrestrial and an infernal Venus, and that his desire differs qualitatively according to its object. There is one type for which his desire is such as to be naturally amenable to the Enemy — readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, coloured all through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness which we detest; there is another type which he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally, a type best used to draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even within marriage, he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice. His love for the first might involve what the Enemy calls evil, but only accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else's wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully. But in the second type, the felt evil is what he wants; it is that 'tang' in the flavour which he is after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he likes, and in the body, something quite different from what he ordinarily calls Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour, describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession."

— Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters

"You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood."

— Gloria, Barbie (2023)

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