The Rawness

Part 1
Part 2

Let me warn you now, this is going to be long. But I’m sure you’re used to that by now. Besides, it’s not like I update this thing daily so cut me some slack. I just didn’t feel like having this spill into a part 4, I just want to finish out the series and move on.

If you haven’t read the first two parts I suggest you do so now. This last installment discussed why men who don?t grow up suffering from madonna/whore complexes tend to be naturally better with women and sexual relationships. This installment is about why men who do have extreme madonna/whore complex anxieties are often horrible with women.

To start, where does the madonna/whore complex originate from? To understand that, you have to understand the nature of female power. As stated in the book Anatomy of Female Power by Chinweizu:

Female power exists; it hangs over every man like a ubiquitous. shadow.
Indeed, the life cycle of man, from cradle to grave, may be divided into
three phases, each of which is defined by the form of female power
which dominates him: mother power, bridepower, or wifepower.

From birth to puberty, he is ruled by motherpower, as exercised over
him by his one and only “mummy dearest”. Then he passes into the
territory of bridepower, as exercised over him by his bride-to-be, that
cuddlesome and tender wench he feels he cannot live without. This
phase lasts from puberty to that wedding day when the last of his
potential brides finally makes herself his wife. He then passes into the
domain of wifepower, as exercised over him by his own resident
matriarch, alias his darling wife. This phase lasts till he is either
divorced, widowed or dead.

In each phase, female power is established over him through his
peculiar weakness in that stage of his life. Motherpower is established
over him while he is a helpless infant. Bridepower holds sway over him
through his great need for a womb in which to procreate; if he didn’t
feel this need, he wouldn’t put himself into the power of any owner of a
womb. Wifepower is established over him through his craving to appear
as lord and master of some woman’s nest; should he dispense with this
vanity, not even the co-producer of his child could hold him in her nest
and rule him.

There are five conditions which enable women to get what they want
from men: women’s control of the womb; women’s control of the
kitchen; women’s control of the cradle; the psychological immaturity of
man relative to woman; and man’s tendency to be deranged by his own
excited penis. These conditions are the five pillars of female power;
they are decisive for its dominance over male power. Though each is
recognized in popular jokes and sayings, their collective significance is
rarely noted.

There is a joke which goes thus:

1st woman: The way to a man’s heart is through his belly.
2nd woman: Aren’t you aiming a few inches too high?

This joke pays tribute to how the womb and the kitchen control the
feelings of men. A man can be controlled by the hunger in his belly, and
by the other hunger which flares up just below his belly. Consequently,
he can be manipulated by whoever controls the kitchen which feeds him,
or by whoever carries the womb through which he craves to procreate.

That man abandons the kitchen to woman, and grovels for access to
a womb, are not ordained by nature or by god, but result from how
woman, who controls the cradle, has chosen to condition boys and girls.
We must remember the saying that “the hand that rocks the cradle is
the hand that rules the world”. That is so because whoever tram. s a
child in its first years shapes it for life. Woman, who rules the nursery,
shapes boys and girls for life; and the ways in which she shapes boys
make them what they become as men.

The more your mother can master female power on all these fronts, the more power she will have on her sons. If you have a mother who is properly exercising her power over the kitchen by cooking, is exercising her bridepower by displaying the behavior of a good wife, has much more psychological maturity in comparison to the man of the house and is responsibly exercising her power over the cradle, what you have is a very powerful woman. She can shape and mold the kids at will. She can wrap the father around her finger because she’s a trophy. Her son sees her as an asexual saint, a perfect woman.

But the boy grows up seeing only a small part of his mother. He never sees her flaws. Even if it’s not just a front and she really is almost flawless now, the boy doesn’t see the road she took to get to her current state. Maybe she was a little bitchier and stuck on herself when she was younger and hot and hanging out with the cool kids in school. He doesn’t see how cruelly she may have used, chewed up and spit out beta males, brokesters and nerds who were trying to date her during her high school and college years. She may have sucked a jock’s dick once or twice behind the bleachers in high school. Or maybe she cheated on a boyfriend once or twice in her lifetime before she met your dad. Or maybe she cheated on your dad once and no one ever found out. Or maybe she is utterly loyal to your dad and does none of those bad things but is just an absolute freak in the bed and was doing all types of kinky stuff with your dad with sick toys and getting every opening used and abused. I mean, you truly never totally know who your mom was before you were born, and especially before she met your dad. This is how the madonna part of the madonna/whore equation gets created.

Another great passage from Chinweizu:

Many a son is only vaguely aware of being ruled, through such precise techniques, by his mummy dearest. A vague awareness makes
it unlikely that he will ever stand up to his mother; and even if, by some miracle, he did, he is not likely to battle effectively against a power he hardly understands. With a daughter, matters are different. As her mother’s apprentice, a daughter learns the game, is privy to its techniques, and could effectively counter her mother’s moves if she got up the courage. The result of such knowledge is that the average daughter can, at some point, shake off her mother’s authority, whereas the ignorant son cannot. Her hold over him usually lasts till his death; even if she dies before him, her hold is maintained through his ingrained desire to please her memory.

The classic example of the man who is ruled all his life by his mother is the great macho dictator presented in so many Latin American novels, most notably in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. Though a bloodthirsty and ruthless dictator; though a generalissimo and the everlasting patriarch of his nation, he always felt for his mother the obedient, babyish awe he learned to feel for her when he fed at her breast.

But what is motherpower used for? The primary objectives of motherpower are to prepare boys so they can be ruled by their future
wives, and to train girls to rule their future husbands. To this end, the main tasks of motherpower are these:

1) to lay the appropriate personality foundations in the children:
narcissism in girls, and heroism in boys:
2) to secure kitchen power and cradle power for girls; and
3) to magnify wombpower hy teaching sexual restraint to girls,
through codes of modesty, while undermining sexual self-control in boys
by addicting them to the female body.

Consider a”beautiful girl and a strong boy. When they are successfully reared by motherpower, they mature into their respective genderideals: the dolly bird and the macho. To bring this about, the girl is taught self-worship or narcissism; the boy heroism or self-sacrifice. Her narcissism induces an absolute self-centredness which smothers those self-sacrificing impulses which are fostered in the boy by male codes of honour, gallantry and heroism. When they grow up, the dolly.bird will worship herself; but the macho willworship woman and serve her, even to the point of sacrificing his life to preserve hers.

The future dolly bird is trained in narcissism.on the principle that a woman must worship herself if she is to inspire worship, and so elicit service from men. Narcissism is taught her by everything around her. The general admiration she receives is explained to her, in the American case, by the children’s verse which says:

Sugar and spice and everything nice
Are what little girls are made of.

For good measure, the verse concludes with a thorough devaluation of boys:

Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails
That’s what little boys are made of.

This doctrine is reinforced by the sort of admonitions a girl is usually given: that “boys want only one thing” – the jewel box between her thighs – “and nice girls don’t give it to them”; 29 that her virginity is precious; that to lost”:it before marriage is to dishonour the family; that it must be protected by all, and defended, even to their death, by her male relatives. The general message – that she is precious beyond measure – is driven home by the behaviour of mothers and fathers who mount guard over their daughter, jealously protecting their property’s value. Now, whose sense of her worth would not be inflated by such fussing? Whose sense of self-preservation would not be made absolute by such protectiveness?

A beautiful girl so brought up (and all the others who take her as the model of womanhood) inevitably gets the notion that she must be worth all the gold in the world and more; that she is god’s gift to all male humanity. By the time puberty arrives to trigger her nest-making drives, she has already acquired that narcissism which will guide her conduct as maiden, wife, mother, widow and dowager.

The narcissist personality is what makes a woman take it as a matter of course that a man should offer goods and services to her for her contribution to their joint sexual pleasure. He gives her pleasure, she gives him pleasure, but he pays: to her, that is fair! The narcissist personality is what makes a peasant girl of 15take it as quite natural that a general or tycoon three times her age should lay all his hard-won power and riches at her feet when he courts her. It does not occur to her to ask if she is worth such tribute: she knows, in her wombsure narcissism, that she is worth much more, that she holds the most precious thing in her suitor’s world, and should be paid for it with all that he has in the world. This narcissist personality enables a divorced
woman to have no doubt that it is fair for her to collect alimony for services she no longer renders to her ex-husband.

Whereas the mother equips the future dolly bird with a narcissist personality, she equips the future macho with a heroic personality. The hero is a servant who performs extraordinary duties for family, community or humanity: as warrior or protector, as organizer of wealth, or as bringer of vital knowledge. He is, at heart, a sentimental fool who takes great risks, carries out great labours, all in exchange for such vanities as medals, ribbons, statues, and being mentioned in talk and song.

In the course of his training, the future macho is taught to regard women as the weaker sex, to adore dolly birds, and to consider it heroic to provide for and protect his womenfolk. He is also taught that being given a beautiful woman to husband is the most precious reward for heroism. If he is a Fulani or Maasai herdsman in Africa, he learns that lesson from the flogging contests whose victors are rewarded with admiration and love by beautiful maidens. If he will fight and be wounded to earn a wreath; if he willfight and die for posthumous praise; how much more will the macho sacrifice to earn a beautiful bride? It is in this way that he acquires that heroic personality which seeks wealth, honour, power and fame with which to pay for the love of a woman.

This woman-fixated personality makes a macho consider it right and proper for him to give a woman sexual pleasure and pay her too. It prevents a love-smitten general or tycoon from entertaining the thought that the strumpet he is wooing might not be worth one millionth of what he is deliriously offering her for the right to help her put her womb to work.

These two types of personality (heroic macho and narcissist dolly bird) are complementary in serving female power. Narcissism imbues the dolly bird with a sense of her natural right to be worshipped and served by men; heroism imbues the macho with a sense of his natural duty to serve women. She displays the self-confidence and self-centredness appropriate to an absolute ruler; he the self-diffidence and self-sacrifice of a loyal serf. When a boy so trained and a girl so trained do encounter, isn’t it obvious who shall rule who?

Mothers who are great at creating the madonna image are experts in reputation management. They put up a great front. But think back to my piece on “face management.” Is the face that she portrays to you the same face she sees in herself? What is her core like? For example there can be two guys driving an identical Mercedes-Benz. They have the same front. They’re both “fronting” equally. But one guy is so rich he bought his by paying in full up front and he has a special garage he uses to park it next to his small mansion. The other guy lives at home or in an apartment with three roommates, lives from check to check at a shitty job and had to take out a huge note he can barely afford to front in that car. Both are fronting equally, but their cores are radically different.

If even adults can get fooled by people whose faces don’t match or whose strong fronts are masking totally weak cores, what chances do children have of spotting such inconsistencies? None. Children take what they see at face value. Maybe the son’s mother really was always virtuous her whole life. Maybe she only became virtuous later in life after spending her youth as a celebrity groupie or as a human sperm receptacle for neighborhood bad boys. Or maybe his mother is still secretly slutting it up without her husband or children know it. Regardless of what the truth is, the son only sees the virtuous front. The “naturals” with women I discussed in the earlier installments are men who at a young age had the illusion created by the front broken and got a glimpse of their mother’s less virtuous core. As a result of this early disillusionment they learned to not put women on a pedestal. I just used virtue as one example, but it could also be mental or emotional weakness. The boy who grows up believing his mother is of extraordinary mental or emotional strength can easily grow up to have a madonna/whore complex. The natural, like Ahmed in our previous installments, could be someone who learned early that his mother was much weaker emotionally and mentally than he initially believed and became disillusioned by that.

Picture a boy who never breaks through his mother’s perfect “front.” Growing up she always knows when he is lying. She always catches him when he sneaks his hand into the cookie jar. He begins to think she has supreme intuition and is all-knowing and wise. He not only grows up continuing to believe her divine omniscience and intuition, he extrapolates such traits to all women and begins to deify them. What he doesn’t realize is that the reason she always knows he is lying, the reason she always catches him in his mistakes, the reason she always seems two steps ahead of him is because he was a child. He was ridiculously easy to outsmart.

There is a story about circus elephants in fires that I read in a self-help book and I don’t know if it’s actually true or not, but it teaches a great lesson regardless. Supposedly baby circus elephants can be kept in place with nothing more than a stake driven into the ground and a rope. The baby circus elephant tries with all its might to pull out the stake hour after hour, day after day, to no avail. After a while, it accepts the fact that it will never be able to uproot the stake and stops trying. As it grows to its full size, it becomes powerful enough to pull out the stake with ease, but because it has been conditioned as a baby to believe it can’t pull out the stake. So strong is this belief that there are even records of circus fires where elephants tied to the stake stayed put, died and were burnt to a crisp when they could easily have uprooted the stake and escaped with their lives. So strong is that limiting belief that even to save their own lives they won’t even attempt to pull out the stake. The man with the madonna/whore complex is the elephant who never learns the truth about the nature of the stake and the rope. The “natural” who doesn’t worship women and put them on pedestals is an elephant who discovered early on that he could now pull out the stake after all.

Men with madonna/whore complexes are men who so buy into the myth of an infallible, asexual mother that they look to recreate her in their life partner. Since their mother image is so perfect and devoid of all whorish traits, anyone who does anything to break this idealized model must automatically fall into the whore category. They compartmentalize all women into two categories, the “madonna” like their mother or the “whore,” Ginger or Mary-Ann, not being aware that most women have traits of both the madonna and the whore coexisting in them to varying degrees. It’s hard for them to accept any middle ground. In very extreme cases, any woman who seems to enjoy sex too much period becomes a whore in their eyes. The problem is, every man and every woman has a social civilized side to them and a primitive, savage side, and both sides demand feeding. So while the madonna satisfies a man’s social needs as mother to his children and lady he can take around on his arm with pride, he finds his primal side incredibly bored and unfulfilled by the vanilla sex he has with his madonna. Even if the madonna wants to try to be less vanilla in the bedroom he won’t allow it because he has an illusion to preserve, and if she breaks it she is no longer the reincarnation of his mother. So he then finds himself seeking out women to fulfill the whore role for him, whether in porn, in prostitutes, in freak mistresses.

A perfect example of this is the Sicilian-American gangster, as typified by the tv show “The Sopranos.” Sicilians are very much a matriarchal society. Few cultures idealize the mother figure as much as Sicilians do. And if you watch the show, every single one of the Sicilian-American gangsters has a “gumar” or mistress that fills the exciting whore role for him, and does all the things that satisfy his primal side that he is not comfortable with the mother of his children, who is basically a proxy for his own mother, doing. Another great example of this dynamic is John Leguizamo’s Sicilian-American character in the movie “Summer of Sam.”

Like men, women also have a social, civilized side and a primal, savage side. One of the great ironies of the madonna/whore dynamic is that these men who are paranoid about keeping their wives virtuous end up only satisfying their madonna wives’ virtuous sides, which can cause them to grow bored and desire adventure, which can often drive them to cheat in an effort to satisfy their own primal sides. Many bored housewife affairs begin like this. Casanova for example understood this dynamic and targeted many of these types of wives, who on the surface would seem too virtuous to cheat. Thus by trying to create the perfect woman who would never cheat, men often create the perfect conditions to awaken the urge to cheat in their madonna wives.

People put their “good girl” on a pedestal, are afraid to do anything kinky with her for fear of defiling her or making her “filthy,” which ends up boring her and just leaves her open to swept off her feet by some cad willing to bang her like a beast and give her a sense of adventure. History’s biggest rakes like Casanova were able to succeed in defiling so many mens’ “respectable” wives primarily because their husbands bought into this good girl, bad girl Madonna/Whore thing, which (1) caused them to let their guards down too much because they were overconfident about their wife’s purity and (2) created a profound boredom in the woman, making her into a bird in a gilded cage vulnerable to the promises of sexual abandon and romantic adventure the rake provides.

This is why one of the worst pieces of advice women often receive is to find a man who adores his mother. There are plenty of guys out there who love their mothers and treat the women in their lives like shit. The Sicilian-American gangsters for example. Or some of the worst criminals and cheaters around. There are some mentally and physically abusive men who absolutely adore their mothers. There have been bloodthirsty dictators and killers whose mothers can do no wrong in their eyes. This is because such a guy was raised to revere his mom way excessively, which caused him to want to recreate her in his wife. And since he naively believes his mom to be some unerotic saint who never had a whorish thought in her life and only had sex to procreate and please her husband, he foolishly tries to recreate this imaginary ideal in his wife, who also foolishly encourages this saintly myth because she knows that’s how to get him to marry her. But chances are it wasn’t 100% true in his mom’s case and it’s not 100% true in his good girl’s case. It’s a cliched cycle that’s been repeating itself since the beginning of time. Even his actual mom, if he knew every dirty secret about her, probably couldn’t even live up to this ideal. So either he gets disappointed by his wife’s lack of perfection because unlike when his mom created her perfect front, he is no longer a naive child and is harder to fool, and he takes it out on her either aggressively or passive-aggressively each time she shows any defect that doesn’t conform to his madonna ideal. Or he does totally buy into his wife’s madonna front just like he bought into his own mother’s, and with his social, civilized needs met at home he ends up seeking out ways to satisfy his primal, savage needs through porn, dominatrices, hookers, mistresses, whatever. Meanwhile she’s unhappy because she’s only getting half her needs met at home as well, her social, civilized needs.

Another problem that happens is when the former mama’s boy becomes a late-bloomer ladies’ man. It becomes the sexual equivalent of finding out that Santa Claus isn’t real at 30 instead of at 10. The kid who discovers that Santa Claus isn’t real at 10 doesn’t take it so hard and doesn’t grow up with a chip on his shoulder about it, but I’d imagine the guy who finds out at 30 the hard way is going to feel like a fool, be pretty pissed off and have a chip on his shoulder about it. You find a similar phenomenon with “natural” ladies’ men versus late-bloomer ladies’ men who learn to understand and game women later in life. Both can understand a woman’s flaws, but the natural ladies’ man has more of an acceptance of womens’ somewhat mercenary natures, even if only a begrudging acceptance, and doesn’t dwell on them. He’s learned to adjust to their flaws early, and sometimes can even learn to appreciate them on some level and see past them to some positives. The late-bloomer, or former beta, because he feels like he’s been lied to so long and thinks of all the grief and embarassment and heartache he could have avoided for so long, obsesses over the mercenary nature of many women and the many ways they can be less than virtuous because he feels like it’s more of a betrayal, and a deeper and more recent one than whatever the natural ladies’ man may have experienced. So for him, he develops a mission statement of revenge against women. He goes from dividing all women into madonnas and whores to just lumping them all into the whore category, or at least over 80% of them. His life becomes a giant exercise of confirmation bias looking to gather more evidence of women’s whorish and mercenary ways, which just feeds into his self-righteous sense of betrayal even more, which then motivates him to search out even more evidence, aaaaannnd….vicious circle. I think every late-bloomer needs to go through this stage at some point to properly exorcise his formerly beta male ways, but this stage should be a means to a better end, and not an end in and of itself. Men who never move past this phase end up becoming toxic to everyone.

There’s a great article here about this phenomenon, talking about how men can change once they get some game later in life by joining the seduction community:

Trading one set of misguided ideas about women for another
Before they get into the Community, the typical guy has beliefs about women such as:

• Women are special, beautiful creatures.
• Women need to be saved and protected.
• Women need to be loved and nurtured.
• You need to make women feel special.
• Women need to be wined and dined and romanced.
• Women want nice guys.
• Women don’t like sex.

A little too naive and romantic in other words. Then they get into the Community and before long they’ve been exposed to ideas like:

• Women are flaky and unreliable.
• Women are emotional and illogical.
• Women only live in the emotion of the moment, do what feels good at the time, and justify their actions to themselves after the fact.
• Women are manipulative and use guys for free drinks and dinners.
• Women are fickle and have short attention spans.
• Women are self-centered and self-interested.
• Women primarily go to clubs for attention and validation from men.
• Women constantly test men, try to devalue them, and try to make them jump through hoops.
• Women try to make men suck up to them and put them on a pedestal.
• Women think their pussies are made of gold and sell them to the highest bidder.
• Women don’t know what they really want.
• Women are confused and hypocritical. They’ll profess to dislike whorish behavior then blow a guy in a bathroom that night.
• Women are programmed to want to get knocked up by an Alpha Male then ensnare an unwitting Beta Male into raising the child for her.
• Women will cheat on their partners coldly and unemotionally.
• Women are slaves to how their friends and society sees them. They want to sleep around, but have to be discrete about it.
• Society’s expectations have given women all kinds of weird hang ups up about sex and hooking up. Their minds are full of strange rationalizations and justifications.
• Women are powerless to resist the right type of guy. Even if they’re married, they’ll get sucked along.
• Women are easily manipulated by simple magic tricks and talk of new agey topics.

I’m not saying there’s no truth at all in these statements, of course there’s some. These statements do describe some women, or the way some women act in certain circumstances. But taken as a whole, you gotta admit this set of beliefs is pretty negative, misogynistic even. Just as all women aren’t special creatures that need to be rescued, they aren’t all fickle, emotional, and selfish either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and it depends on the girl. Some girls are really normal and cool and easy to talk to.

You’ve made it to the end of this long-ass post! I’m proud of you fools. Now was it awesome or was it awesome?

P.S. If you want to download and read Chinweizu’s whole book for yourself, don’t forget to go here.

Part 1 over here. I originally said it would be two parts. Screw it, it’s gonna be three instead. This installment is going to discuss why people who don’t grow up suffering from madonna/whore complexes tend to be more naturally good with women and sexual relationships. The next installment will be about why men who do have extreme madonna/whore complex anxieties are often horrible with women. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not a fan of either extreme. Ideally I think one should be somewhere in the middle. A man should be somewhat cynical and skeptical and screen against sluts to avoid cuckolding and raising kids that aren’t his, but neither should he be so cynical that he thinks that all women are untrustworthy at best and whores at worst, as that leads to its own set of problems.

In the last installment we had two womanizers who appeared on the Tyra Banks show, Ahmed the superstar and Shawn the Slumdog Hundredaire. Two ladies’ men who were as different as darkest night and brightest day. As I was watching the show, I figured out that Ahmed, who came off as a guy who was effortlessly natural at wooing and attracting women, had detachment issues with his mom. And I came to the conclusion the Shawn was more of a momma’s boy. Shawn mentioned calling his mom every day earlier on, so I had no doubts about him, but I figured I’d never find out what Ahmed’s situation, but luckily near the end of the show the following exchange happened:

Tyra: So you say that marriage is not biological for a man and x,y,z, but tell me?there?s a reason why you think in your life with your childhood as to why you are a womanizer??

Ahmed: I think there is a detachment with me and my feelings when it comes to women, based off of maybe feeling a void I did what i did. At a young age me and my mother were tight, she was a single parent, and she was independent and I looked up to her. She was my mother and my father. She did what she had to do, masters? degree, blahblahblah. Then she got married, then put her career and herself on the back burner for a man, had his kids and he just broke out on her. So misery loves company, and I didn?t like that, and I was neglected in the situation, so ever since then, I was like ?You know what, I might do what I do, but?

Tyra: Did you become detached from your mother?

Ahmed: Yes, me and my mother didn?t get along. So I left at a young age and ever since then my attitude was like ?[Fuck] women??

Tyra: If you had a different childhood, do you think you?d be a different man?

Ahmed: I think so. I think all my friends that are cool with their mothers and respect their moms have a different outlook when it comes to dealing with women.

So how did I predict Ahmed had problems with his mother? Well first let me make something clear. I don’t think that everyone who is good with women has problems with their mother. Some people are good with women because they are late bloomers who studied hard or found good mentors as adults to cure themselves of politically correct reassuring fictions and undo a lot of counterproductive conditioning they had growing up. Some are good with women because they had the rare type of mother who was not politically correct and was willing to tell them some ugly truths about men and women. So I’m not trying to say every good womanizer has mother issues. But what I do believe is that people like Ahmed, the true naturals who don’t get emotionally hung up on chicks no matter how hot they are, who are effortless in their confidence and game, tend to have some emotional distance with their mothers, whether it’s just some aloofness to all-out rage.

I first stumbled on this notion in world-famous master pimp Robert Beck AKA Iceberg Slim’s autobiography Pimp. In it, the young Iceberg Slim grows up with a loving mother and his nice guy stepfather. It is the happiest time in his life. His mother has just been left by his philandering, unreliable father and times are initially hard for young Iceberg and his mother.

There were no jobs in Indianapolis for Mama and for six months we barely made it on the meager savings. We were pennisless and with hardly any food when a tall black angel visiting relatives in Indianapolis came into our lives.

He instantly fell in love with my lissome beautiful mother. His name was Henry Upshaw, and I guess I fell as hard for him as he fell for Mama.

He took us back to Rockford, Illinois with him where he owned a cleaning and pressing shop, the only Negro business in downtown Rockford.

In those tough depression times a Negro in his position was the envy of most Negro men.

Henry was religious, ambitious, good and kind. I often wonder what would have happened to my life if I had not been torn from him.

He treated Mama like she was a princess, anything she wanted he got for her. She was a fashion plate all right.

Every Sunday when we all three went to church in the gleaming black Dodge we were an outstanding sight as we walked down the aisle in our fresh neat clothing.

Only the few Negro lawyers and physicians lived as well, looked as well. Mama was president of several civic clubs. For the first time we were living the good life.

Mama had a dream. She told it to Henry. Like the genie of the lamp he made it a reality.

It was a four stall, opulent beauty shop. Its chrome gleamed in the black-and-gold motif. It was located in the heart of the Negro business section and it flourished from the moment its doors opened.

Her clientele was for the most part whores, pimps and hustlers from the sprawling “red light” district in Rockford. They were the only ones who always had the money to spend on their appearance.

The first time I saw Steve he was sitting getting his nails manicured in the shop. Mama was smiling into his handsome olive-tinted face as she buffed his nails.

I didn’t know when I first saw him that he was the pin-striped snake who would poison the core of our lives…

There was really nothing out of the ordinary that day. Nothing during that day that I heard or saw that prepared me for the swift, confusing events that over the weekend would slam my life away from all that was good to all that was bad.

Now looking back remembering that last day in the shop as clearly as if it were yesterday my stepfather, Henry, was unusually quiet. My young mind couldn’t grasp his worry, his heart break.

Even I, a ten year old, however, knew that this huge, ugly black men who had rescued Mama and me from actual starvation back in Indianapolis loved us with all of his great, sensitive heart.

I loved Henry with all my heart. He was the only father I had ever really known.

He could have saved himself an early death from a broken heart if instead of falling so madly in love with Mama he had run as fast as he could away from her. For him she was brown-skin murder in a size-twelve dress.

Steve was a sleazy, sneaky low-level pimp that had Iceberg’s mother dripping wet with lust and eating out of his hands.

Yes, poor Henry’s fears had foundation. Mama had never loved my stepfather. This kind wonderful man had only been a tool of convenience. She had fallen in love with the snake all right…

One scene in my life I can never forget and that was that morning when Mama had finished packing out clothes and Henry lost his inner fight for his pride and dignity.

He fell down on his knees and bawled like a scalded child pleading with Mama not to leave him, begging her to stay. He had welded his arms around her legs, his voice hoarse in anguish as he whimpered his love for us.

His agonized eyes walled up at her as he wailed, “Please don’t leave me. You are sure to kill me if you do. I ain’t done nothing. If I have, forgive me.”

I will never forget her face as cold as an executioner’s, which she was, as she kicked and struggled loose from him.

Then with an awful grin on her face she lied and said, “Henry, Honey, I just want to get away for a while. Darling, we’ll be back.”…

As the cab drove us away to the secret rendezvous with Steve sitting in his old Model T, I looked back at Henry on the porch, his chest heaving as tears rolled down his tortured face.

I’m sure it surprises no one to hear that things just got worse and worse from there. Steve convinced Iceberg’s mom to search out and reunite with Iceberg’s dad under the pretense of reconciliation, so that they could set him up to be robbed. Iceberg’s dad had straightened up and gotten a good job and was in a nice house and had accumulated belongings worth stealing. She not only double-crossed his dad, she acted as if she didn’t have anything to do with the double-cross, and cried hysterically when she “discovered” the robbery alongside Beck’s dad, who had no suspicion of her involvement. Iceberg AKA Beck recalled

For many tortured years she would suffer her guilt. She had made that terrible decision on that long ago weekend.

I know my lousy old man deserved what happened to his goods. I know Mama got her revenge and it was sweet. I am sure, but it was bitter for a kid like me to know that Mama was part of it.

Perhaps if Mama had kept that burglary cross a secret from me, in some tiny way I might have been stronger to fight off that pimping disease. I don’t know but somehow after that cross mama just didn’t seem like the same honest sweet Mama that I had prayed in church with back in Rockford.

Can you picture a child going through such experiences and still growing up to put women on a pedestal and seeking their approval? Me neither. Late in his life, long after he left pimping, Robert “Iceberg” Beck gave an interview reminiscing on his life and career:

Koblin: Do pimps hate their whores?

Beck: Well, not necessarily consciously. The best pimps that I have known, that is the career pimps, the ones who could do twenty, maybe thirty years as a pimp, were utterly ruthless and brutal without compassion. They certainly had a basic hatred for women.

My theory is, and I can’t prove it, if we are to use the criteria of utter ruthlessness as a guide, that all of them hated their mothers. Perhaps more accurately, I would say that they’ve never known love and affection, maternal love and affection. I’ve known several dozen in fact that were dumped into the trash bins when they were what?…. only four or five days old.

Koblin: You say you loved your mother in your book.

Beck: Of course, but underneath the threshold of consciousness, I know that I must have hated her, as demonstrated by my neglect of her through the years.

In reading Robert “Iceberg” Beck’s autobiography, you notice that long before he became a pimp, he was already an effortless, smooth-talking “natural” with women. Since reading the book and Iceberg’s interviews, I began looking at naturals and many of them had dysfunctional relationships with their mothers. In the case of some of these naturals, they had good relationships with their mothers but had even stronger relationships with a very alpha male father. This helps one become a natural as well, but by and large the somewhat dysfunctional or distant relationship with the mother seemed to be the biggest factor in creating naturals, especially if it was interspersed with periods of pampering (Iceberg also claimed that his mother, for all his faults, pampered him as best she could and that this also contributed to his becoming a pimp). The power of this combo is that they dysfunction keeps the man from growing up putting women on a pedestal because he’s sees his mom as weak and flawed, meaning he doesn’t have some ideal maternal model as an example for his mates to aspire to, but the pampering and coddling aspects train him to expect favors from women without any guilt, hesitation, shame or repentance. In fact, a natural doesn’t even view it as a favor so much as something he’s entitled to.

The extreme natural like Iceberg can turn off his emotions at will like a faucet because he has no mental division between the Madonna and Whore archetypes. The Madonna and Whore archetypes became one and the same for him at a young age. Sometimes even when I see brothers who handle women very differently despite growing up in the same family, I can look at their birth orders and examine how their relationships with their mother differed and see reinforcement that the one with the more natural skills with women is the one with a more complicated or less warm relationship to the mother, making him less likely to deify the feminine mystique.

What is the mechanism at work here? Well, do you remember way back when I discussed the Mystery/Mastery Paradox? That’s where I described how something is a mystery to you, which makes you love it and drives you to master it. However once you master it, it loses it’s mystery and you start to fall out of love with it. This boredom and frustration drives you to reframe the challenge in a way to make it interesting to you again or to chase a whole new challenge. Well that can also work in reverse. Sometimes something gets demystified to you first, and then the fact that it’s no longer a mystery to you allows you to fall out of love with it and master it easily. To people like Iceberg Slim and Ahmed, women were demystified to them at an early age, which made them fall out of love with them as a noble ideal and allowed them to master them.

It was my readings of Iceberg Slim that first made me notice this dynamic. This is they dynamic I immediately noticed when watching Ahmed and Shawn on Tyra’s show. It’s no surprise then that one of the first things Shawn, obvious late bloomer with horrible game, mentioned was he was close to his mom. And it’s no surprise that Ahmed, super natural with his arms around both his ex-fling and his current squeeze, said losing respect for his mom is exactly what made him great with women. And if you notice in the clip above, when Ahmed makes the same observation that Iceberg made about men and their mothers, Shawn immediately protests. Very telling.

Recommended Reading:

This post is the first in a two-part series on madonna/whore complexes, both parts going up today, and it’s going to be video heavy, with five, yes five, 6-8 minute clips. So let me warn you up front, it’s going to be time-intensive, but it’s so worth it. Watch every video. Then read the analysis.

I was watching the Tyra Banks show a while back (don’t ask) and saw an episode on womanizers. In particular, it was about women confronting the womanizers who wronged them. It turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected, as the two womanizers they showcased were actually night and day in terms of approaches.

The first womanizer is named Ahmed, and the woman “confronting” him had little bad to say about him:

This kind of surprised me. This is Tyra’s show, which is pretty feminist and “You Go, Girl!” so I thought they’d be totally setting up the guy to get punked and embarrassed and shamed. But the girl has no hard feelings and has nothing bad to say about them. A lot of the women in the audience seem to be disgusted and are shaking their heads in shame when they hear the woman saying nothing but nice things about Ahmed before he actually comes out, but once he does come out the audience and Tyra seem to warm up to him. He seems to be a guy who is very naturally good with them, and is brutally honest about who he is and what he wants. The most impressive thing about the whole exchange is the intellectual honesty of the girl. She doesn’t try to remake what happened into a narrative that makes her into a victim, makes him into a manipulative predator or excuses her from responsibility. She doesn’t seem to be lying to herself or the audience.

Then it got more interesting. They brought out the dude’s current girlfriend, to make her sit there on the couch with Ahmed and one of his past flings.

This guy is really master of his domain. Pretty unflappable, doesn’t seem to get unhinged or made nervous easily. Even Tyra’s relationship expert, whose job it probably was to bash the womanizers to score points with the audience, says he thinks the guy is a “good guy.” This is even after the details of his past cheating has been revealed.

The next womanizer is Shawn. The clips speak for themselves. First the intro to Shawn:

Shawn “out on the prowl:”

I’m not going to spend time dissecting Shawn’s approach and pointing out specific mistakes he makes, because honestly there are just so many in that short clip that it would require a whole separate post (if the commenters want to go ahead and dissect his awful game, go to town on it). But the guy is cheesy, kind of like a broke Bollywood Fabio. I’m talking cringe-inducing cheese. He’s playing a numbers game, and not very well to boot, and he does finally get some interest, but from a girl who seems somewhat cheesy and desperate too. Honestly, I think she’d be game for any half-decent guy who showed interest. She doesn’t really strike me as a very challenging target. And unlike Ahmed, he is horrible at handling Tyra, the crowd, the women on the panel, and Tyra’s relationship expert. He also gets defensive, which just digs his hole deeper.

So I’m watching the fucking Tyra Banks show and shockingly it’s intrigued me way more than I ever expected to be intrigued by a Tyra Banks show. I felt a real mystery here: why were these two guys so night and day in their approaches and the responses they got from the crowd? What was the X-factor that allowed Ahmed to excel that Shawn lacked? My guess, based on some preexisting theories of mine about men and women, was that Ahmed was probably a guy who was a “natural,” someone who is naturally good with women, while Shawn was a late bloomer who tried to teach himself to be a player later in life, did a bad job and ended up with creepy, cheesy results. But because he’s articulate, shameless and probably approaches a LOT of women, he’s gotten his share of successes and thinks he’s better than he actually is. But if you compared the number of women he hooked u with to the number of women he approached, you’d see he probably gets a low return on investment. Plus the quality is probably not as good as it could be because he seems to be doing more of a numbers game than trying to go for quality. Most importantly, I figured like most naturals Ahmed had some issues with his mother, while I figured Shawn the cheeseball was a mama’s boy. This is a theory of mine, that men who are naturally good with women usually have some sort of mother issues that creates an emotional detachment in the mother-son link, while most late bloomers are mama’s boys who are very emotionally attuned to their mothers and put them on pedestal.

I figures this would just remain speculation, as I couldn’t imagine Tyra digging deep enough to find out about Ahmed’s relationship with his mother. After all, this is daytime fluff TV. But to her credit, then came the next part, which touched on exactly that. You can watch all of the following clip if you want to see the shenanigans of Dick Masterson, professional chauvinist, but the key part for the purposes of this blog post starts at 4:45:

Tyra: So you say that marriage is not biological for a man and x,y,z, but tell me…there’s a reason why you think in your life with your childhood as to why you are a womanizer…?

Ahmed: I think there is a detachment with me and my feelings when it comes to women, based off of maybe feeling a void I did what i did. At a young age me and my mother were tight, she was a single parent, and she was independent and I looked up to her. She was my mother and my father. She did what she had to do, masters’ degree, blahblahblah. Then she got married, then put her career and herself on the back burner for a man, had his kids and he just broke out on her. So misery loves company, and I didn’t like that, and I was neglected in the situation, so ever since then, I was like “You know what, I might do what I do, but–

Tyra: Did you become detached from your mother?

Ahmed: Yes, me and my mother didn’t get along. So I left at a young age and ever since then my attitude was like “[Fuck] women”…

Tyra: If you had a different childhood, do you think you’d be a different man?

Ahmed: I think so. I think all my friends that are cool with their mothers and respect their moms have a different outlook when it comes to dealing with women.

BIN-fucking-GO.

I’m going to post part 2 to this series later on tonight, where I discuss naturals, late bloomers, and their relationships with mothers, and what it all has to do with the madonna/whore complex.