She is Madonna; She is Whore.

In Jewish folklore, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She was a fire of defiance, believing she and Adam had been created as equals. A prominent story of Lilith tells of her refusal to lay beneath Adam during coitus, refusing subservience, and fleeing the Garden of Eden to escape submission. It goes that God sent out three angels to look for her, finding her in a cave bearing children but unwilling to return. The angels promise to kill 100 of her children every day until she obeys.

And she did - after years of stealing the lives of young human children, driven by profound grief - but found Eve in her place. In revenge, she raped Adam, and fled, once more, with his seed, birthing earth-bound demons through masturbation and dirty thoughts.

It is a dark story, one without a happy ending.

Monster Theory, in brief, is the idea that the monsters we see in our media are all the things that we as a collective society are deeply and violently afraid of. These creatures represent our differences; our most deep-seated desires which we cower from; and our wounds. According to Professor Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monster is always this: the one who escapes, the one who returns, the one who is impossible to understand, the one who is inhuman, the one who is forbidden.

Lilith is the monster.

Then you get Mary, the young girl who gave birth to a King. She was childlike and virginal, and she committed a life of self-sacrifice to raise an embodiment of God. It, too, is a sad story. Of a mother watching her child hammered to a cross, of a woman - grown old before her time - grieving the loss of a human who was part of her, who carried the light of her womb.

Mary is the girl.

In society, we are told to either be Mother Mary, or dark demon Lilith. For we all see what

happens to the villainous brunette in small, black dress. She is volatile; she is outcast. She is shunned for her sexuality; she is the mistress and never the wife.

How many of us have done this to ourselves, creating a dichotomy with a chasm so deep, we could drown ourselves in it? How many of us have quietly sworn off either Madonna or the Evening Spirit, swearing her into the shadows of our hearts?

Freud first coined the theory of the Madonna-Whore complex, explaining his notions that men cannot maintain sexual arousal in long-term committed relationships. Freud believed that men perceived women as either virtuous and unable to create arousal, or debauched and unable to achieve respect. He writes, “ Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love”.

After all, we see it all around us; we hear it in the way we talk about other women. The thot; the girl-next-door. ‘Wifey material’; temptress.

This sentiment is repeated in the media, from songs that talk about the lady in the street and a freak in the bed, to a Law & Order SVU episode that portrays an unhappy husband stabbing to death the prostitute that he’d been seeing for over a year.

Perhaps, in less dramatic, more mundane circumstances, we see it in men that sleep with vixens but marry the docile girl in the corner. We see it in men who despise their pregnant wives but will not leave their marriages for the courtesan.

The institutions that uphold patriarchy are so powerfully able to permeate circles of minorities over which patriarchal norms and values serve to oppress.

Meaning this: the dominant views held by men in hegemonic or ‘toxic’ communities infiltrate our own.

We as women come to believe, because of this narrative, that we cannot be both the untouched angel and the sex-hungry devil. That we cannot both be the girl who lives simply and sweetly; and the girl who wants to curse, fuck, and get stoned.

This narrative was something we’ve been taught by our mothers over generations - that we cannot love that which we desire in ourselves, and that we cannot desire in ourselves something which is righteous or blameless.

For some of us, we have struggled to accept our Lilith: our provocative nature; our wildishness.

For others of us, we cannot justify the virgin within us: childlike and gentle.

And in turn, we project that narrative back into the world for men to appraise us. Are we desirable enough? Mysterious enough? Are we worthy enough of your regard? Are we vulnerable enough?

The thing is, sometimes we are saying this to men and to each other for no reason other than to confirm our perceptions, our fragmented understanding of what it is to be Lilith or Mary. And that choice to be either/or - to be of only darkness or to be of only light - is based upon two assumptions: firstly, that indeed this binary does exist, and secondly, that there are institutions and communities that place qualitative values on either side of this binary with norms and sanctions.

Of course, we can and do collapse these binaries within ourselves and our relationships. As more opportunities open up for communities of women to express our sexuality - as more awareness grows about the sacred femininity in all of us, and all its beasts and flowers -, so is there more push and momentum to challenge narratives that refuse the nuances of womanhood.

But we cannot defy this discourse when and how it suits us. The monster and the girl reside within us somewhere, resolute and wilful; one with daisy crowns and the other with devil horns - and they will each sing to you their whims. And it must be you who confronts them; to dare them to submit to wholeness, to the yin and yang circle of the moon.

Look at your light. Brave your darkness. Bring them so close that they could almost kiss, their complexity and their colour in cohesion. Whatever this looks like for you - whether you are the good girl who craves to not give a shit; whether you are the bad bitch who secretly longs for someone to look upon you and see something untouched -, do it. Flaunt your sexuality; find an angry opinion. Admit your vulnerability; seek tenderness. For it is not up to the world to decide which half of us we get to be, and you should not seek to succumb to only one part of the magnificence and colour and messiness that is the entirety of you.

Soften into the knowing that you are the demon, and you are the saint. That there is a heaven of sweetness, and a hell of savagery, and you are both. Be a woman who strives - independently, maddeningly - to be both.