When I was 18 years old, I spent some time in Dubai, living with my sister in her apartment in Downtown Dubai. The colossal Dubai Mall was a short stroll away, so most evenings I’d head to Kinokuniya in the mall. It was an enormous, magnificent bookstore that I’d get lost in for hours — and one of my favourite pastimes was rifling through overpriced poetry books, brimming with meaning and sentimentality. Of the hours I spent poring over prose in Kinokuniya, this short piece from Pierre Alex Jeanty’s ‘Her’ stood out to me, and stuck with me indefinitely.
For years of my transition from girlhood to womanhood, which felt more like a series of instantaneously heaping expectations, I had embattled a vague sense of moral conflict between the sheer opportunity of being an immoral woman, and the paltry economics of retaining virtue.
I grew up in a world of strict moral conservatism. Women were entirely black and white. You either blossomed into the worshipped paragon of virtue and feminine morality, sacrificing any forms of power in order to climb the piety ladder and win society’s conditional approval; or, you tumbled down the deep, dark abyss of depravity, becoming a woman ensnared by the throes of debauchery, to be eternally cursed by society.
I have lived my life believing I needed to pick one of these moulds to frame who I am.
Popular culture has implicitly placed the archetype of the ‘depraved woman’ on a pedestal, and branded her as ‘empowered’.
I was a little girl who had been brainwashed into the Madonna-Whore complex. I, like most, was suckered into the easy contrast between the two archetypes… but I remained eternally wary. Because I had no idea where I fit in. What if I didn’t want to be one or the other?
I grew up to recklessly reject every element of the traditional, religious and cultural conservatism I was born into. With this rejection, came the rejection of the polarising stereotypes of the ‘Good Woman’, and ‘The Depraved Woman’. The Good Woman was praised by all. She married a man that demanded undeserved subservience, she sacrificed her personal wishes and autonomy for the sake of the family and community. She was demure, quiet, conservative, and balked at the idea of rejecting social norms in lieu of pursuing her own identity and dreams. She lived her life to please others, and to egotistically relish in the moral pedestal society placed her on. She embraced this implicit imprisonment, because it gave her a morally superior sense of self-definition.
The Depraved Woman was the wicked villain we were always warned that we’d become one day, if we lived too individualistically. The Depraved Woman’s descent into the chaotic life of a social pariah was marked by obscene and flagrant displays of sexuality. It was the utilisation and manipulation of your sexuality as a means to an end; it was the desire-driven engagement in prolific sexual activity. It was the sharp rejection of a moral life with principle and grounded goals. It was running into the arms of drug use, men, prostitution, interpersonal conflict, and a disintegration of your home-grown values in lieu of new values centred around sex, money, vices and men. But what happens when contemporary popular culture has put a spin on this characterisation, implicitly placing the archetype of the ‘depraved woman’ on a pedestal, and branding her as ‘empowered’?
Young girls growing up in the age of social media’s advent and immeasurable influence are no strangers to the positive feedback loop that hypersexuality provides. ‘Raunch culture’, as writer Ariel Levy describes it, is the milieu that praises vulgarity and labels it as ‘feminism’, or ‘empowerment’. Navigating the waters of carving your place in society has consistently rewarded immorality and debauchery. Suddenly, the narrative of the Depraved Woman has become one of social acumen; it has become a necessary trajectory for attractive women, who are smart enough to capitalise on their looks, to abandon virtue in the pursuit of making it to the top. Exploiting your own sexuality has become one of the easiest and most commonplace paths to fast-track your ambitions, thirst for power, and capacity for success.
The thing is, every opportunity comes with a cost. When you single-mindedly value power and the ways your sexuality and heartlessness can help you attain it, you reject certain desirable elements of the Good Woman’s narrative. You sell a part of your soul and humanity in order to profit from advantageous, socially acceptable debauchery. Your identity becomes reduced to how commodified you can make yourself.
The economics of being an immoral woman seems to far outweigh the bothersome struggle to be principled
I spent years constantly debating the temptations of entrenching myself in the newly packaged, shiny, ‘empowered’ version of the Depraved Woman. The Depraved Woman always symbolised freedom from conformity, and that’s something I have always valued far more deeply than any sort of societal approval. The Depraved Woman was like a siren, beckoning me into her promises of fulfilment and liberation.
But following her path meant liberation from everything except my own mind. I couldn’t live in that kind of polarity. I couldn’t embed myself into the narrative of a woman who rejected integrity in order to satisfy my worldly, selfish pursuits. Nor could I reject my ambitions and individuality, and fall into the equally wretched realm of the pious Good Woman.
Morals can maketh a stupid woman. Morals can keep you under the iron fist of subjugation, eating out of the hand of idiotic superiors who dish out rations of validation to you. Morals can leave you broke in the dust when you deem yourself too virtuous to engage in office politics or psychological warfare at the workplace. What you think are ‘morals’ can have you entrapped in a debilitating, crippling life of pathetic self-sacrifice for the imaginary collective.
The illusion of morality has, for centuries, convinced women to inhibit assertiveness, strength and stubbornness for the sake of appeasing others. So why wouldn’t the new narrative of embracing selfishness and manipulation be empowering?
Because it means we have to sacrifice a whole other dimension of potential and goodness in our lives. It means we have to neglect altruism, inner peace, wholesomeness and authentic love and relationships. This opportunity cost is not small, nor is it minor. It is the all-consuming, malevolent discarding of the life of genuineness. Depravity Lite promises you glittering fortunes, power, success and status, but underneath the shiny exterior lies a rotten core of betrayal, ambivalence, erosion of the self, and the overarching disintegration of true emotion. Because if you don’t signify the value of genuine relationships and emotion in your life, you are condemned to a ceaseless cycle of craving, which is met with consistent emotional dissatisfaction and emptiness. There is nothing sexy or glittery about feeling detached from any sense of true, wholesome meaning in your life.
The Depraved Woman values superficiality and satisfaction of vices, because it symbolises her value for all that is surface level. By choosing the path of depravity, you willingly embrace the moral peril of never being accepted or understood for who you truly, deeply are. Nobody will care enough to commit to understanding you when you’re a commodity.
As the breakdown of the nuclear family ensues in society, it’s an undeniably tempting and alluring notion to embrace the ways my immorality can help me succeed in life.
It has never been easier for young women (and old), to eschew empathy, dignity and integrity on their scramble to the top of the modern ladder of success. Being the paragon of virtue no longer pays the same dividends it used to, not in our age of wildly popular risque Instagram models, and the cherishing of conspicuous consumption. As the breakdown of the nuclear family ensues in society, it’s an undeniably tempting and alluring notion to embrace the ways my immorality can help me succeed in life.
My life has been a perplexing battle between the dimensions of my Middle Eastern upbringing and the values of modernised, Western society. I felt like each arm was being pulled by each of these archetypes, playing a game of tug of war to embed me into the throes of their black and white self-definition.
I refuse to abandon my grit and ambitions, but I will not eschew my morality in the process. It takes years of painful self-discovery to realise the two can indeed coexist. Because in my eyes, a woman steeped in depravity is not a truly powerful woman. She is a slave to her own tyranny and vices. She lacks the self-respect to amplify her true personhood and character, and seeks to manifest approval or success through the moral corruption of using people, stepping over others, ceaseless conflict, ethically dubious business practice, and succumbing to the vices of worldly promises.
The prospect of morphing into a solely self-interested wicked woman occupied a vague association of cautionary tales and attributes in my mind. If there’s one word I can use to clearly define the way it existed in my subconscious, it’d be: emptiness. The ceaseless scramble for external power at the cost of your humanity and innate goodness will reward you in ways visible to the eye. It will destroy you in ways visible only to the soul.
Smart women with morals know how to circumnavigate the dog eat dog world of modernity without losing who they are in the process. They trailblaze through their authentic pursuits while staying grounded, and deepen their sense of self worth in the process.
I have embattled the deep, dark, twisted world of paranoid and confused inner conflict at the intersection between good woman and bad chick. I tumbled from a rigid world that worshipped blind piety and abhorred self-sufficiency, liberation and female freedom. From this world, the tsunami of glorified immorality and a power-hungry abandonment of the holistic self overwhelmed me into a dimension of lostness.
There are a lot of things I’m willing to sacrifice to retain my morality in a world where depravity fast tracks me to the top. But in the words of Pierre Alex Jeanty; I will not ‘wrestle with the idea of being a good woman’. A life of moral depravity grants seductive dividends… but none that I value more than the integrity of self respect.
