In 1865, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, while a student at Oxford, wrote an essay for his tutor in which he made a bold and interesting suggestion. All beauty, he proposed, “may by a metaphor be called rhyme."

[…] It’s almost a law of nature that things that are balanced and harmonious are relatively likely to endure—not just in the world of biology but in physics too. Things with internal rhymes tend to outlast the competition, so they are likely to accumulate. As the world develops through time, it comes to contain ever more things that correspond to stable arrangements of matter: clouds, oak trees, whirlpools, rabbits, castles. In English alone we have common nouns for 80,000 different kinds of thing: classes whose members bear a family resemblance to each other.

[… Gerard Manley] Hopkins himself admitted that something is missing from his theory that all beauty may be called rhyme. I’ve come to believe that what he left out was that the experience of beauty has a moral or ethical dimension.

Freud coined [the term “Madonna—whore complex”] in the early 1900s to describe the way some of his male patients saw women. These men divided women into two categories: on one side, the pure, saintly mother figure—the Madonna—and on the other side, the degraded, hypersexual temptress—the whore. […] As Freud put it:

“Where such men love, they have no desire,

and where they desire, they cannot love.”

[…] When I first heard the term Madonna—whore complex, it helped me describe that feeling of being ripped apart and unable to please both sides of men’s expectations, let alone being both sides of who I wanted to be. […] The Madonna—whore is obviously a false binary, and it is so damaging to women, but it’s everywhere.

From the earliest days of recorded song, record labels made it clear that women can fit into one of these archetypes or the other. And no matter which one you choose, Madonna or whore, you’ll be punished for it. […] So whether they embodied the Madonna or the whore, each of these women was attacked for it. The roles are different, but the punishment is the same: media pressure, public mockery, and eventually the end of their careers. […] The Madonna role, it seems, was nothing more than an idealized and frankly impossible idea of womanhood.

We can see this dynamic as early as the jazz and blues eras. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith [two of the earliest female blues singers] […] were quickly and unquestioningly sorted into the whore category. […] But even if they had been straight, neither woman could have been considered as a candidate for the Madonna role because they were Black. And in the eyes of white-dominated society, Black women were seen as hypersexual and couldn’t be considered pure. The whore label was the only one available for Black women back then. And arguably, you could say that that dynamic persists even today.

Britney [Spears] was cast as the Madonna—the good girl from the South with her schoolgirl innocence. Christina [Aguilera], on the other hand, was seen as the whore: vocally powerful, but brash, sexual, and uncontainable. From the beginning, the media framed them as opposites and rivals, and the public had to choose which archetype of womanhood it preferred. […] Our culture was merciless in pitting those two women—Britney versus Christina, the Madonna versus the whore—against each other. The message to young women was clear: Don’t be too sexual. And also, while you’re at it, don’t be too chaste. […] In the end, the Madonna–whore complex didn’t elevate either woman. It devoured them both.

Sexual violence shows up in ancient texts across continents in every era of recorded history. And it shows up in the animal world, too. Biologists have documented forced mating in some species of ducks and coercive aggressive mating in orangutans and chimpanzees.

[…] Chimpanzees are one of our two closest living relatives. Male chimps dominate females and they use aggression to coerce sex. Our other closest relative is the bonobo. Same genus, nearly identical DNA. And bonobo society is run by females. Male bonobos are bigger and stronger than females, but female bonobos outrank most of the males in their communities. So even among our closest ape cousins, biology doesn’t produce just one outcome. Same raw materials, completely different societies.

[…] When a male gets aggressive with a female or her baby, other females, often unrelated to her, come running. They band together, chase him down, and sometimes injure him badly. Older females back up the younger ones, whether they’re friends or not.

Of the 95 societies with enough data, almost half were essentially rape-free. Rape was rare or absent. Only about 17% were what [Peggy Reeves Sanday] called rape-prone. So what made the difference? It wasn’t that the men in one place were born different from the men in another. The difference was in the rape-free societies, women were respected and had real influence in public life, including economics, religion, and decision-making. In the rape-prone societies, women were excluded from decision-making and religious ritual. Men gathered in separate male-only spaces and violence was common in general.

[…] When a male gets aggressive with a female or her baby, other females, often unrelated to her, come running. They band together, chase him down, and sometimes injure him badly. Older females back up the younger ones, whether they’re friends or not.

[Peggy Reeves] Sanday’s conclusion was blunt. Rape is not an integral part of male nature. If rape were simply hardwired, it would happen at roughly the same rate everywhere. But it doesn’t. So, we don’t have to settle nature versus nurture to know this. Impulses can be controlled. Cultures can change. And rape is preventable. Even if biology hands us the matches, culture decides whether we light the fire.