No Self-Respecting Woman Loses Herself In Love

Instead, she creates an atmosphere centered around her pleasure

The Wisdom of Whores

Sanaa Lathan’s character in Something New told her blind-date-turned-landscaper-turned-boyfriend, “My mother said colors are for children and whores” when asked why her house was so beige. This line amused me the first time I watched this movie because it encapsulates the binary high-achieving, respectable women often find themselves in: color, and fun by extension, are for women of low rapport; women of high standards, by contrast, live in black, white, and everyone’s favorite, beige.

You’ll see this binary manifest in the puritanical imagination of goodness: virtuous, hardworking, and a follower of every rule in every book. However, if your goal is to live a life tailor-made for you, following all those rules written in all those books will not serve you. If it is your ambition to live a life only you could have lived, it is imperative that you choose only the choices that add to your pleasure, your fun, and your joy. Your aura should be your unique imprint of colors, because unlike Sanaa Lathan’s character, you don’t need to live in beige. If you, like her, are worried that you’ll be labeled a whore, or worse, a child, for living an expressive, fun-filled life, then perhaps that’s the price you pay for living a life you actually want.

With the religious and cultural programming we are raised to internalize, the lives African women are expected to live is usually filled with suffering. Girls are raised to be wives, and wives are expected to endure. I always rejected this notion. I didn’t believe societally-sanctioned suffering should have anything to do with me. As a young woman who did want to be married, however, this meant I had to imagine a new reality for myself when it came to holy matrimony. What I visualized was a woman whose happiness was self-directed, whose beauty was maintained, and whose desires were always met. When I looked into the world and the archives for such a woman, I kept coming across the archetype and historical records of the mistress, the woman who gets what she wants.

From this visualization and research, I developed a hypothesis that collapsed the religious binary of my African upbringing: If wives borrow from the wisdom of whores, they can have just as much fun as mistresses. The first wisdom is to never deny your desires. Desires usually form from our subconscious wounds. In failing to honor our wants, they will begin to wreak havoc in our lives through our unexamined self-destructive behavior. Carl Jung theorized this as the unlived life. Thus, allowing ourselves to be overtaken by our desires, meaning that we make an effort to materialize them, is the first and most crucial path to living a life rooted in joy, fun, and pleasure. A woman who is joy-filled, fun-loving, and pleasure-centered is a woman who would never settle for living a life less than perfectly tailored for her.

Side Bar —

The idea of desire as an appetite shows up best, for me, in Nosferatu (2024). Here, Ellen Hutter has this sensitivity for the magic of life. It leaves her lonely as she’s the only one who can experience this sensation. Thus, she unwittingly conjured the vampyr Nosferatu as a playmate to rid her of her loneliness. In rejecting him, now that she’s older and married, Nosferatu tells Ellen that he is not a demon but “an appetite.”

I analyze his words to mean he is her desires manifested and embodied, and it scares her to even look at him. Truly, a Victorian woman repressing all of her desires.

Women like this have often been termed audacious, or in my culture, “selfish.” But what if this innate sense of rebellion is their superpower? The scent that makes them most erotic. In The Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin paints a portrait of women such as this:

“Mathilde was a hat maker in Paris and barely twenty when she was seduced by the Baron. Although the affair did not last more than two weeks, somehow in that short time she became, by contagion, imbued with his philosophy of life and his seven-leagued way of solving problems. She was intrigued by something the Baron had told her casually one night: that Parisian women were highly prized in South America because of their expertness in matters of love, their vivaciousness and wit, which was quite a contrast to many of the South American wives, who still cherished a tradition of self-effacement and obedience, which diluted their personalities and was due, possibly, to men’s reluctance to make mistresses out of their wives” (Nin, 1977).¹

It is true that some men are reluctant to make mistresses out of their wives. It is also true that some wives have chosen to don a cloak of self-effacement and obedience, which, as Anaïs Nin rightly articulated, dulls their personalities. In my widely-read essay, The Wisdom of Whores, I told you about an alternative world. This world came to me through memoirs and memories. It’s an atmosphere of never needing to be useful. While others barter their lives away for prestige and favors, you and I exist in a realm where we’re never asked to be useful—our presence is enough. The Economy of Love is what I call this dimension. Here, goddesses rule among barons, and the only asset a woman needs is her personality. Diouana Women like you and me find ourselves at ease in this place due to our social and situational awareness; our emotional intelligence; our mastery of weaponized patience and political humility; and our ability to maintain a creativity so potent it conjures fantasies disguised as casual conversation. You’d be surprised how far an innuendo can take you.

The second piece of wisdom is to prioritize your pleasure. You must cultivate and sustain a relationship with satisfaction. The anticipation of it, the arrival of it, the reemergence of it. Once you’ve done this, you must then be comfortable with materializing this pleasure as the atmosphere of your relationship. A musk that engraves both of you, and lingers on him long after he’s left the house. As the director of your relationship’s mise-en-scène, you have the artistic liberty to curate a relational culture that centers your rapture, and this euphoria will get him high, too. Thus, you become the woman who has reprogrammed herself to not accept suffering, exhaustion, and self-sacrifice as a virtue. You may not ever be anyone’s definition of a “good” wife, and that’s exactly the point: this distance between what is assumed a “married woman” should be and should act, and how your life as a married woman actually unfolds; the distance between the patriarchal imaginations people project onto the idea of marriage and the milieu of play, fantasy, and eroticism you imbue into your marriage just by insisting that your pleasure be centered over and over and over again. To others, you’re a bad wife, but to him, you’re such a good mistress. Isn’t it the case that mistresses always get what they want?

Mistresses, Wives, Oh My…

By now, it should be clear that my prescription to the issue of “…wives who still cherish a tradition of self-effacement and obedience, which dilutes their personalities” is archetypal and rooted in Jungian psychoanalytical goddess worship. Jung, you’ll know from theories such as the collective unconscious and the idea that the subconscious is what actually rules our behavior. Goddess worship might be unfamiliar to my non-pagan readers. In short, mistresses, whores, and even girlfriends all travel under the same lineage, which traces their origins to the Goddess Inanna in Western mythology and older, Eastern traditions. A point of contention for those uninitiated might be the grouping of girlfriends with mistresses and whores. Surely, you might suggest, a girlfriend is simply a “wife-in-training” waiting for her day; but legally, historically, and biblically speaking, that has never been the case.

Legally, girlfriends do not have legal standing to make decisions within the personal affairs of their partner. Historically, girlfriends never received legal recognition—only mistresses.² Biblically, the first concubine was not pursued for romantic affection but for her ability to bear her slave master an heir. Girlfriends, as a social category, are new and a question of the easing of the rigidness of our Western society.³ Archetypically, she’s a whore. Freud explored this with the Madonna-whore complex: “where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love."⁴

Side Bar —

In the first episode of the show, Ramy, the titular character, goes on a date with Nour. In the backseat of her car, she tells him:

“We had this really nice night, and you felt weirded out by the idea of kissing me…I’m like in this little Muslim box in your head. I’m like the wife, or the mother of your children. I’m not supposed to come.”

I analyze her words to mean that because of the sociocultural expectations of their community, respectable women are those who do not receive sexual pleasure. Their purpose in society is to reproduce, and if the men want sexual gratification, they find it with their girlfriends—not their wives. Thus, a girlfriend is a whore; a wife is not.

Thus begins this fallacy that wives are for respecting but not loving, and whores are for loving but not respecting. This fallacy breeds the mindset that anything that hints at a commitment, let alone a marriage, will be an arena where the woman will lose time and time again. Lose out on pleasure, fun, and joy, in exchange for responsibility and social respectability. Herein arrives my thesis—that wives can have just as much fun as mistresses if they borrow from the wisdom of whores—to provide women with a solution against the twin problems of loss of self and loss of pleasure.

These problems are intertwined as they share the same mother: self-effacement. In my under-rated essay, Power Is Not A Young Woman’s Game, I introduced my concept of weaponized patience as cultivated through political humility. The use of political humility works extremely well if you’re in a hierarchical environment where those who have power over you do not care for you, or at the very least, are not on your side. Luckily, you married a man who adores you, is very much on your side, and wants nothing more than to see you receive everything you desire. In this type of collaborative environment, you’re functioning as a peer and not a subordinate. Therefore, this is not the time to play small. You two are both executives in the business that is your household and you must act like someone with an equity stake in the enterprise, even if you’ve never paid a bill. This sense of ownership, and the feeling of dignity that comes with it, is crucial to not losing your sense of self. Further, when you both act like owners, your interests will align, and a sense of fealty will emerge that influences every decision you each individually make. This ensures an understanding that if you go down, he’ll go down with you and vice versa. Thus, the third wisdom is to act with high agency and never forget that you can change the dynamic whenever you desire.

“…Love as an atmosphere, not a moment of focus…”

Patriarchal society thrives off low agency women and husbands who prefer the company of men over their wives. In this system, women are programmed to be passive participants in their lives, but this simply will not do for a Diouana Woman. Although women frequently warn other women against being male-centered, there’s rarely a playbook given for women who, despite no inclination to structure their entire lives off the whims of one man, still desire to be partnered with men in a traditional sense. My solution here is to become the expert in all things pertaining to your chosen partner while embodying wisdoms one and two discussed earlier. I understand this sounds counterintuitive, but walk with me—and Madame de Pompadour, who was Louis XV’s Chief Mistress (a pensioned job, might I add) for six years, on this principle:

“Madame de Pompadour became an avid student of the king’s moods, his every facial expression, the cadence of his words. She knew when he was hiding boredom, anger, or frustration behind his mask of royal calmness. The twitch of an eyelid, the lilt of a syllable, would tell her the behavior necessary to please him. Did he want a comfortable silence? Should she recount an amusing story, play a somber tune on the harpsichord, stand up and perform a monologue?

…Beautiful, gracious, brilliant, and kind, Madame de Pompadour practically ruled France for nineteen years. She encouraged artists and writers, produced plays in which she sang and danced, invested in French industry, designed châteaus, cut gems, made engravings, experimented in horticulture, and ran the army during the Seven Years’ War” (Herman, 2005).⁵

In The Wisdom of Whores, I wrote about how anticipating the needs of others is an underrated skill. In corporate work, this shows up in executive positions such as Chief of Staff and can often lead to great revenue generation through product innovation—Hailey Bieber’s introduction of the lip gloss phone case, for example. Who thought they needed to have their phone hold their lip gloss? Hailey did! I believe that in a committed, monogamous relationship, the partner who knows the other best is the one who often runs the show as they’re the creative director of the relational mood. This is a hard skill to cultivate as it requires you to study your partner as you would a book or a piece of art and to deepen your understanding of their ticks and quirks each day. What’s even harder is avoiding losing yourself in this skill once cultivated, especially if your relational dynamic is such that you do not pay the fixed expenses of the household. You’ll lose your edge the more you believe his provision is at the expense of your authority. Take this passage from Grazie Sophia Christie of her domestic life as a keen example:

“…I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say ‘thank you’ — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there…Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor” (Christie, 2024).⁶

‘It’s frightening to think of oneself as vapor,’ and yet, the young Christie does. Madame de Pompadour, however, never saw herself as a genuine plaything for the king. His mistress, sure; but that was simply her job. A means of financial security. She treated her profession with the gumption that any serious professional would treat their occupation. Even as her libido declined, she still maintained her maîtresse-en-titre status because their dynamic was intellectual, not strictly physical. He found another lover who could roll in bed with him, and de Pompadour focused on what mattered to her most: being a patron of the arts; her donations financed by the king, bien sûr. That’s the nuance I want you to take away. That the devotion you have towards your relationship and being the one person in this world who knows your husband better than anyone else does not make you a tradwife-conservative-right-wing-women à la the critique of Andrea Dworkin. No. It makes you a woman invested in her relationship, who cares to understand her husband and make him feel cherished; who, when the moment arises, understands how to set the mood such that you arrive home one day with the piece of jewelry you had eyed not too long ago. That is what I’m advocating: relationships rooted in sensuality, absurdity, and fantasy. An endless tango danced to life’s highs and lows. Who knows, if you play your cards right, you two could be the Comte and Comtesse de Sallure…always embroiled in titillating negotiations:

“…After reminding her husband of his infidelities and his earlier claims that ‘marriage between two intelligent people was just a partnership,’ the Countess agreed to rekindle their relationship, but at a price. Sallure would have to pay her five thousand monthly francs, approximately what he had spent on each of his mistresses.

When the husband protested, ‘that the idea of a man paying for his wife is stupid,’ the Countess explained the bargain: ‘Well, you want me. You can’t marry me because we are already married. So why shouldn’t you buy me? . . . Instead of going to some slut who would just squander it, your money will stay here, in your own home. . . . By putting a price on our lawful love you’ll give it a new value . . . the spice of wickedness.’

Sallure relented, tossing her his wallet with the francs inside, asking only that his wife ‘not make a habit of it.’

The Comtesse insisted on her terms, adding that “if you’re satisfied . . . I’ll ask for a raise.’” (Zelizer, 2005).⁷

And who said mistresses had all the fun?

Sweet dreams,
A Diouana Woman

A Nightcap Before You Go…

If you enjoyed the mood and tone of this essay, these essays may be up your alley:

1. Nin, A. (1977). Delta of Venus. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

2. Abbott, E. (2010). Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman. Duckworth Overlook.

3. Zelizer, V. (2005). The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton University Press.

4. Freud, Sigmund (1912). “Über die allgemeinste Erniedrigung des Liebeslebens” [The most prevalent form of degradation in erotic life]. Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen. 4: 40–50.

5. Herman, E. (2004). Sex With Kings. HarperCollins Publishers,

6. Christie, G.S. (2024, March 27). The Case for Marrying an Older Man. A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-marriage-younger-women-older-man.html

7. Zelizer, V. (2005). The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton University Press.