The deep mythology of Woman is maiden/mother/crone. Many women these days, and the men around them, would rather talk madonna/whore. This is because the md/wh conversation isn't about women. It is about males - our psychology. I am male. So if you are talking md/wh, you are on my turf.
And you're wrong. Mostly.
Males don't divide women between virgins and ho's. We divide between "stay away" and "make a play". Sorry, ladies; but that's the animal kingdom. If you don't like it, try being a vegetable or a mineral - or maybe fungus, or whatever this thing was. I am unsure it runs so different for womens' views of us, on that maiden/mother boundary.
As far as male authorship of female characters, I am straining my brain to think of any entertainment in the last century as idealises the madonna. Unless the whole point is some kind of spiritual Platonism, like in Ambrose Bierce' "Haïta the Shepherd" (and if you are looking for idealism in Bierce... hoo boy).
md/wh might exist for teenaged boys who don't know anything, and maybe WANT to fall down before a holy feminine. But nobody is publishing lit from teenaged boys - at least I hope not. Other than that, uh. The lives-of-saints which the likes of Jerome and Palladius were spreading around early Christendom. But who's reading any of that in our day? (Apart from me.)
I think we have to put the md/wh stuff down to what upper-middle-class strivers want to say about our culture. These strivers should be mothers, but are still "maidens", even if they have slain their children. They feel like whores and they resent that the maidens can claim to be madonna - even if actual maidens never had any intention of this claim.
BACKDATE 6/26
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