by Shagufe Hossain
Women, it has been told, descended from Eve.
Biblical sources say God created Man. And then, from the rib of the first man, Adam, the first woman, Eve, was created.
But there is another story.
According to Jewish mythology, more specifically, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the first woman to be created was Lilith. God created Man. Man wanted a companion. So God made him one.
Except this companion, Adam’s first wife, was a troublemaker.
The couple fought constantly. Among the many reasons for discord was sex. Adam always wanted to be on top, while free-spirited, strong-willed Lilith also wanted a turn at the dominant position. When they could not agree, Lilith decided to leave. She uttered God’s name and flew into the air, leaving Adam alone in the Garden of Eden.
God sent three angels after her and commanded them to bring her back by force if she would not come willingly. When the angels found her by the Red Sea, they were unable to persuade her to return and could not compel her to obey.
It was then that Eve came into existence.
Eve, created as an Other to Adam, was brought into existence to play a supporting role in His-story, careful not to threaten Adam’s ego. The Mother of all creation was created to appease him, agreeing to forgo sexual positions that are not missionary and power dynamics that are too volatile. Eve, maternal, vulnerable and gullible, fell into the traps of Satan, causing Adam to disobey God, be banished from Heaven and follow her to Earth for atonement.
Lilith was erased or demonized. Eve was portrayed as a subset of Adam.
These myths are open to interpretation and imagination. But what is arguably not a myth is that we are all performers.
Each of us performs a script handed down by the societies we are asked to live in. Roles become norms through stories passed from generation to generation, until they begin to feel natural.
The script establishes that sex, like everything else in life, is also a performance: a culturally prescribed template for behaviour.
The story of Adam and Lilith, and later Adam and Eve, sets the myth-historical context to a strange anxiety that many societies seem to have about women’s sexuality. I use the term sexuality broadly to refer not only to sexual preferences, but to female agency itself: desire, autonomy, appetite, movement, refusal.
Sigmund Freud suggested that men often manage this anxiety by dividing women into two categories: the Madonna, the woman he admires and respects, and the Whore, the woman he desires.
Perhaps a more accurate way of saying it is that patriarchy places women into one of two binaries in order to regulate and control them. Then again, normative gender scripts were probably not Freud’s strong suit.
The Madonna–Whore dichotomy splits purity and desirability, maternal goodness and erotic possibility, into mutually exclusive traits. Women become either “good,” chaste and pure Madonnas, or “bad,” promiscuous and seductive whores.
So there are two women.
The free-spirited, adventurous, bold, sexually liberated Whore.
And the shy, prudent, chaste, sexually constricted, abiding, womb-for-my-child-and-nothing-else Madonna.
The Madonna is a trap.
The Whore is an escape.
The Madonna is Forever.
The Whore is For Now, and maybe later, for Sometimes.
One is worshipped from a distance. The other is touched without reverence. Neither is seen. The promise was always false.
As author Orly Bareket puts it, “These men may have difficulties feeling attracted to the women they love, or loving the women to whom they are sexually attracted, leading to chronic dissatisfaction in their romantic relationships.”
But the Madonna–Whore dichotomy is not merely a private psychological problem.
It is one of patriarchy’s oldest operating systems.
It determines which women are believed and which are doubted.
Which women are protected and which are abandoned.
Which women are mourned and which are quietly blamed for their own violation.
The logic is deceptively simple.
Be respectable. Marry. Have children. Dress modestly. Sacrifice your desires. Become a Madonna. In return, society will grant you dignity and protection.
The Whore, by contrast, is presumed vulnerable because she has transgressed.
But there is one tiny problem with this bargain.
It is a lie.
In recent months in Bangladesh, the news has carried story after story of girls and women who should, according to the logic of patriarchy, have been untouchable.
An eight-year-old child in Magura.
An eleven-year-old madrasa student in Netrokona.
A mother holding her child.
And in France, Gisèle Pelicot, a wife, mother and grandmother, was drugged by her husband over many years while dozens of men raped her as she lay unconscious.
These were not women easily dismissed as immoral or transgressive. They were daughters, students, wives and mothers. Women occupying the most sanctified positions in the social imagination.
And still, their bodies were treated as available for conquest.
Motherhood, we are told, is the apex of feminine virtue. The mother is sacred, selfless, respectable. If even mothers are not safe, then respectability was never protection. It was only compliance dressed up as security.
The Madonna, then, is not protected. She is merely more socially acceptable.
This is why victim-blaming persists with such stubbornness. We keep asking what kind of woman she was, as though that were the relevant question.
Was she modest enough?
Married enough?
Maternal enough?
Pure enough?
But violence does not distinguish nearly as neatly as our myths do.
If even the child and the mother are not safe, then the promise of respectability collapses entirely.
Purity was never protection.
It was only obedience, marketed as security.
The woman who wears a hijab, think Tanu murder case and Nusrat Jahan Rafi murder, and the woman who wears a miniskirt.
The wife and the lover.
The mother and the daughter.
The saint and the seductress.
Patriarchy may classify them differently, but it reserves the right to violate them all.
Women are sorted not only by men, but by communities, religious authorities, algorithms and legal systems.
And since women want to be both respected and desired, the female plight becomes just as dichotomous as the male’s.
Women contort themselves to appear pure, but not frigid; attractive, but not “asking for it”; maternal, but not desexualized; independent, but not threatening.
We perform impossible balances, hoping that if we get the choreography exactly right, we will be spared.
But perhaps the greater tragedy is not the split itself. It is the bargain. It is that even when we amputate the parts deemed unruly or holy to be safe or to be desire, we are not spared. Whether we are Madonnas or Whores we will be stripped of our autonomy. And none of us will be spared.
Not the mother, not the wife, not the child, not the student. Nobody.
Even after surrendering to this script written in bad faith, none of us will be protected.
Shagufe Hossain works at the intersection of gender justice, faith, and social change using creative practices to revive and strengthen feminist movements.