The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Power of Sexual Surrender, by Marie Nyswander Robinson

THE POWER OF
SEXUAL SURRENDER

By the same author:
THE DRUG ADDICT AS A PATIENT

THE POWER OF
SEXUAL SURRENDER

by

MARIE N. ROBINSON, M.D.

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
Garden City, New York

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-10687
Copyright © 1959 by Marie N. Robinson
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

I believe that the problem of sexual frigidity in women is one of the gravest problems of our times. Over 40 per cent of married women suffer from it in one or another of its degrees or forms. And their suffering, emotionally and physically, is very real indeed.

Those who are most closely related to the frigid woman—husband and children—suffer too. This is so because frigidity is an expression of neurosis, a disturbance of the unconscious life of the individual destructive to personal relationships. No matter how much she may consciously wish to, the frigid woman cannot protect her loved ones from the effects of her problem. Thus frigidity constitutes a major danger to the stability of marriage and to the health and happiness of every member of the individual family.

Despite its extent and seriousness, women who suffer from frigidity generally know very little about their problem. They do not know its nature or its causes nor how or where to find help for it. No adequate book for the lay reader, nor any popular magazine article that indicates a real way out, has yet been written on this enormously important subject. The problem has been surrounded by silence, and this has engendered ignorance, misinformation, and has fostered feelings of helplessness and hopelessness in the suffering individual.

I have written this book to break this unhealthy silence, to bring to the individual woman what science knows about frigidity, to show her that, no matter how much she may have despaired, her problem can almost certainly be resolved.

Marie Robinson, M.D.

November 1, 1958
New York, N.Y.

CONTENTS

THE POWER OF
SEXUAL SURRENDER

Chapter 1
PARADISE LOST

Happiness between men and women has never had such a radiant outlook as it has in this decade. Perhaps for the first time in the history of man the two sexes find themselves in a position to explore together the infinitely varied and rich potentialities of real love.

I am not being a blind optimist in making such a statement. In my profession as a psychiatrist I see enough of daily misery and destructive misunderstanding between men and women to keep a healthy skepticism very much alive in my mind about all human relationships, particularly those that depend for their continued existence, at least in part, on sexual love.

I can make such a statement about the potentialities of modern love for one reason—that women today have, beyond the shadow of any doubt, achieved complete equality with men. Above all, this equality can be observed as fully operative in the realm of love, sexual love. In the past thirty-odd years, and particularly in the last ten, the taboos, ignorance, and misunderstanding which had obscured our visions for centuries and prevented any real knowledge of feminine sexuality have been washed away.

We have been through a sexual revolution of major proportions. In the course of that revolution we have learned, through science, not hearsay, the real facts. We know now that woman has the same need for passion, the same capacity for sexual response that man has. We know that, down to the last detail, she is the equal and fitting companion for all his possible raptures, can know with her entire body and mind and can share in vivid companionship the delighted storms of sexual love that in the recent past were considered to be exclusively his province.

Few, however, realize how recent and how revolutionary this view of womankind actually is. The image of Victorian woman, that sexually frozen, emotionally withdrawn vestal virgin, has faded quickly from our minds. It is important, for many reasons, to recall her, however, if only briefly. She dominated our whole view of womankind up to the beginning of the 1920’s. By taking a quick look at her we can see how far we have come in so short a time. And we can see why the prospect for love has, in our time, brightened so considerably.

The prevailing attitude toward woman and her sexuality throughout the nineteenth century and up to the end of World War I was that sex, as we understand it today, did not exist for her. This belief was held by virtually everybody, and it is nowhere more clearly stated than by the medical authorities of that era. Thus Acton, a leading medical specialist in the functions of reproduction, whose views were widely influential, wrote: “The majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” He also stated that people who believed differently were making “a vile aspersion” against women. Two other doctors of the time agreed completely (and presumably after checking their facts). Fehling held that any appearance of sexual feeling in a young girl in love was “pathological.” And Windschied stated that if a female showed any innate or spontaneous sexual attributes “there is abnormality.”

These men were not crackpots. They were reputable and distinguished. This was the “scientific” view of the matter, and it was shared by most people, men and women alike. It throws into clear relief the potentialities of the present. Woman’s new and revolutionary self-awareness, her knowledge gained in the past thirty-odd years that without guilt or inhibition she may function in an atmosphere of total equality with men and eager acceptance by them, makes the past seem like a nightmare. It is as though man and woman had emerged from a long, long journey through a dreary jungle full of fear and shame to the verge of a paradisal valley where they actually may live, as in the fairy tales, happily ever after.

But now we come to the tragic flaw in this picture. For, though the possibilities lie before them, millions of women find they must stay on the verge of, never enter, the paradisal valley. They find themselves, in an age where true womanhood is highly valued, sexually frigid.

What does sexual frigidity mean? I shall explain the matter in greater detail later, of course, but I can give a preliminary, working definition now. Sexual frigidity is the inability to enjoy physical love to the limits of its potentiality. The frigid woman is, to a greater or lesser degree, blocked in her sensual capacities. Generally she cannot experience orgasm. If she has one at all it is weak and unsatisfying. Many frigid women, however, not only do not have any orgasm but may also lack the capacity to feel even the beginnings of sexual excitement. To some the sexual act is painful.

The frigid woman has learned to fear physical love, to run from it, and this fear has profound repercussions on her relationships with men. The reasons for her fear are hidden from her, are locked in her unconscious mind. Consciously she may wish, above all things, to achieve real closeness with her husband, to give and receive the greatest of all mutual joys between man and woman, sexual gratification. But she has not the capacity to receive this joy. It is beyond her will and control. It is as if she had a million dollars and could not spend a cent of it; as if she were surrounded by the finest foods and must starve. The very fact of the new equality she has won makes her problem even more humiliating, bitterer, more frustrating.

In my fifteen years as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I have treated many, many women who have come to me in despair because of their partial or total inability to enjoy the sexual part of their marriage and because of the repercussions from this inability. I and hundreds of other psychiatrists have been fortunate in helping many of them to overcome their difficulties. We have found that before a woman can be expected to take full responsibility for reaching true sexual maturity she must really know all about herself, her sex and her problem. Then and only then has she the material in hand to start growing up, in all pleasure, to her full feminine stature.

If a woman is willing to work in all seriousness with a psychiatrist there is little question that she can be helped to overcome her sexual difficulty. The information she receives, the insights she obtains into the conditions which have kept her from experiencing real love can sweep away her ignorance, her misunderstandings, her irrational fears.

Her experience with the psychiatrist may help her husband, too, for with his wife’s consent the therapist will often see him for periodic discussions. These talks help him to understand her problem, to see deeply into the nature of his wife and therefore of all womankind. This knowledge allows the husband to be of direct help in effecting his wife’s release from the immobilizing grip of her frigidity. It helps him to be patient where he might have been irritable, tender when he might have been importunate; it keeps him from the major error of believing that he is to blame for her underlying condition and thus complicating the relationship by becoming defensive, as one unjustly accused would become—indeed, should.

The question then arises as to whether the kind of information a woman and her husband may receive during her therapy can also be helpful in book form.

I have given much thought to this question and have had many consultations with my psychiatric colleagues about it. We have come to the positive conclusion that a book on this subject can be of direct benefit to all women suffering from sexual frigidity.

I will go even further and say that the facts about frigidity that I present here—its origins, its causes, and its cures—must be known by every woman with a sexual problem if she wishes to be cured.

Frigidity is always rooted in incomplete knowledge gained in childhood and adolescence. We are not, as I have pointed out, far from the Victorian age. Any woman of thirty or more had, in all probability, parents who were reared in the traditions of Victorianism, which denied the sexuality of woman, connived with every available force to deny it, repress it, stop it at its source. These efforts were extraordinarily successful. And, too, any woman now in her twenties probably had parents who were deeply affected by the equally mindless and vicious protest against Victorianism which characterized this country from, roughly, 1920 to 1930—the period we now call the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age.

This era, too, was full of destructive misinformation about sex and love. A program of sexual promiscuity for women was openly advocated and found far too many adherents in the younger generation after World War I. The moral climate created in the Jazz Age was alien to the very nature of truly feminine love. It led to serious sexual conflicts in millions of individuals, and these conflicts were duly visited on their offspring.

This book then, I firmly believe, can help the individual to undo the early harm caused by improper upbringing. I have tried to design it in such a manner that a woman who reads it completely may achieve a deep understanding of frigidity, an understanding that can lead to a profound inner change, a complete reversal of those attitudes that are always at the root of frigidity.

I have designed it, too, to be read by the husband of the woman who suffers from frigidity. It goes without saying that the success of his marriage is dependent on the resolution of her problem. He can help greatly to ensure this resolution by fully informing himself of the nature of the problem and by discovering the most helpful role he can play during her recovery.

But the problem of frigidity does not concern only the married. Thus I have also aimed this book at those young people who are about to enter their first love experience. We have found that this first experience can be of vast importance for the further emotional growth of the individual and of the relationship upon which she has embarked. Young women who find they have problems in the sexual sphere may be spared years of misery if they are given a real understanding of the matter in the beginning. Many of my patients, had they been given an insight into the nature of their difficulties at the start, might have avoided the inevitable and innumerable poor choices and often disastrous decisions which are so characteristic of the woman suffering from a sexual problem.

Since I have designed this book to answer the needs of a specific audience I should like to ask you to read it through and not skip around trying to find the material that seems to apply directly to you or to someone close to you. For, if you follow me as I go, you will see that frigidity is not a single, simple, local symptom. It is a complicated and profound problem involving many factors and having profound consequences. One can grasp the nature of this problem, understand it, and cure it. To do so, however, you must have very specific and complete knowledge of it in all its complexity. It may take all your powers to master this complexity. To do so, however, will be more than merely worth while. It can be the first great step toward real love, upon whose threshold you have tarried already far too long.

Before we advance into the subject itself, I should like to dispose of a few widely held and thoroughly incorrect notions about frigidity. I do this to clear away some of the underbrush which can impede those of you who are seriously seeking a resolution of the problem.

In the first place, let us look at this problem of a woman’s sexual “responsibility,” as it has been recently called. Much has been written about it and much of what I have read is pure nonsense, based on a sort of mechanical conception of what love is and of what the act of love means. I fear that such books encourage women who have deeply rooted sexual difficulties to approach the problem from the wrong direction and before they properly understand the real nature of their difficulties. Such an approach leads them to attempt abortive “solutions” which can only further discourage and disillusion them. The basic error here is in trying to make the individual woman “responsible” without giving her any real information about her condition.

The fact is that no woman who suffers from frigidity consciously desires to. Nor can she be, for a single second, held accountable for the fact that the problem developed. The word “blame” cannot by any stretch of the imagination be used in connection with her problem. I strongly urge you to let that point sink deeply into your heart and mind.

How could it possibly be that you had any responsibility in the matter? This problem always develops in childhood or even infancy. It is partly a product of early family and historical influences over which you had not the slightest control, and it is partly a matter of the biological heritage of all women everywhere. And you certainly can’t be held responsible for that.

Here is the attitude I have found most helpful to take toward this matter of sexual responsibility: You are not responsible for having developed a difficulty; you are not responsible for the existence of your frigidity any more than the stutterer is responsible for his stutter. However, once you realize it is a problem, that it is having repercussions on you and those dear to you, you are responsible for finding out everything you can about the problem and then, on the basis of this information, taking whatever action is necessary.

I have already mentioned another important misconception about frigidity and should like to go into it a bit further now. I have said that it is highly unlikely that the husband of a frigid woman is responsible for her frigidity problem. I can’t emphasize that enough. Of course if he is impotent, was when his wife married him and has continued to be, she might have a case. But true sexual impotency in the male is quite rare. Even, however, if he were truly impotent, the fact remains that this particular woman did marry him—we have found that when a woman marries an inadequate man she has done so because she, all unknown to herself, was deeply afraid of true male virility.

In saying the husband is rarely if ever to blame for a frigidity problem I am running counter to a vast body of information that has been published; in the 1930’s in particular, book after book appeared, each showing conclusively that a happily married sexual life depended on the male’s skill in arousing the woman. In such books the husband was instructed to manipulate or caress her for X minutes in Y number of erotic zones. By then, presumably, she would have reached such a state of excitement that true sexual satisfaction could not possibly fail her. Any failure of a woman to respond adequately in the marital bed was always supposed to be due to faulty technique on the husband’s part.

This is simply not true. Caressing or manipulating the genitalia or secondary erotic zones of certain types of frigid women would only result in exacerbated nerves or in a condition of inwardly screaming protest. In other types, caressing might give temporary satisfaction but in the long run could really be harmful from the psychological standpoint, deepen or encourage immature methods of gratification.

In short, while a husband, through tenderness and understanding, may help a woman face the true nature of her problem, he is never responsible for the existence of her frigidity and cannot, through any mechanical means, get her over it.

I might add that neither can any man other than her husband.

Another misconception about frigidity: Women who suffer from a greater or lesser degree of frigidity often come to believe that there is something wrong with them glandularly. Through a misunderstanding of something they’ve read or heard, they get the idea that somewhere, somehow, there is a drug that will cure them. A gynecologist I know tells me that he has at least three women a week ask him to give them hormones to step up their sexual responses. On the basis of his statement I have checked with several other gynecologists and also with five obstetricians. They all tell me that the request for hormonal injections from women is a daily constant.

Let me say here that frigidity is rarely a problem of glandular malfunction. Much work has now been done in this area and, unless your case is relatively unusual, you may rest assured that your problem is basically a personal and psychological one.

How can I be so certain of that last statement? Because real frigidity reacts to psychological treatment; it can generally be cured in a psychiatrist’s office without the use of any drugs whatsoever.

If you reply: “Well, perhaps the mind has caused a glandular shutdown in women with a frigidity problem,” we would answer: “Even if that were true the mind would still be the ‘cause,’ and a real cure can be effected only by getting at the cause.”

A far more serious misunderstanding of the nature of true feminine sexuality and of the nature of frigidity is shown by the following case, told to me by a psychiatric colleague.

A pretty young woman came to him stating that she had been unable to have sexual satisfaction in intercourse. She had told her physician of her problem two years previously. He had examined her and told her that her clitoris was too far from her vagina. He informed her that this biological fact made it impossible for her husband to contact the clitoris with his penis during intercourse and that this was causing her frigidity. The physician advised an operation which would bring the clitoris and the vagina closer together, thus allowing the penis to contact the clitoris during intercourse.

The woman, in all good faith and with a laudable desire to be a good wife, had gone through with this grotesque surgical procedure. After the operation, when she was able to have intercourse again, it had apparently worked. For two months she had had orgasms during intercourse. Then slowly but surely her ability to respond disappeared. Within three months she had become totally frigid.

Nothing could be more mistaken than such an approach to the solution of a sexual problem in a woman. In the first place, surgery performed on the genitalia of a woman who is already sexually disturbed can cause profound shock to her psychologically, deepen her disturbance immeasurably—such was the case with this woman, my colleague told me. Second, the fact that the clitoris and not the vagina is responsive is a form of frigidity in itself. Even if this maddeningly ridiculous operation had worked in the manner the physician had hoped, it would only have perpetuated a situation that was in itself, psychologically speaking, pathological.

The psychiatrist did not have an easy time with this patient. The traumatic experience caused by the operation and its failure had taken a toll, and it took several months for her to recover from the psychological effects. But she was a determined young woman.

When she became convinced that the solution of her problem lay in discovering the hidden misunderstandings about sexuality that had occurred earlier in her life, she set about this task with a will. In a relatively short time, through insight and understanding, by getting the entire picture of frigidity and its meaning, she began to undo the Gordian knot that even the surgeon’s keen knife could not cut. At the root of her problem lay a totally hidden fear of pregnancy which she was able to face and dispense with. Today she has two children and, according to my colleague, is not only sexually normal but very happy in her marriage.

Let me make myself absolutely clear, even at the risk of repeating myself. Frigidity is in the vast majority of cases, essentially a psychological problem. The only way it can be approached with any hope of resolving it is through the mind, by understanding it. Anybody who tells you differently is, to put it plainly and simply, wrong. And, if you have a real frigidity problem and try to ascribe other than psychological reasons for it (such as that your husband is the cause of it), you are doing your cause (that of getting over the problem) a grave disservice.

When I say that the problem of frigidity is a psychological one I am not overstating the case; I am, to simplify matters, rather understating it. The greatest contribution of psychiatry in the past sixty years has been the discovery of the central importance of sexuality in the development of the individual.

Dr. Therese Benedek in her classic work, Psychosexual Functions in Women, states the whole matter succinctly when she says: “ … The sexual drive … is the axis around which the organization of the personality takes place.”

When all goes well in the development of the young girl, both her personality and her sexual passions will flower, she will achieve a beautiful and integrated maturity. But if, as so often happens, thwarting or blighting experiences take place, the development of her personality and her sexuality will be frozen at their sources, and maturity will remain a never-never land whose very existence she will come to doubt.

If she wishes to resume her growth she must be fearless, she must find out and face the events that blocked her growth, the misunderstandings and ignorance that prevent her from reaping the rewards of true womanhood. She must insist, deep within herself, on achieving that true and passional relatedness with her man for which there is neither simulacrum nor substitute in woman’s journey through life.

The bridge to emotional and sexual maturity is built of many facts—hard, scientific facts. Master these facts, gain information on this subject, and you can pass from a land of bitter deprivation to the richness that is your due, your heritage. It is waiting for you on the other side of your fear.

SECTION I
The Normal Woman

Chapter 2
THE NORMAL ORGASM

The first thing I am going to do on this, so to speak, journey with you is to give you a view of your destination. I am going to describe an orgasm to you. I am going to describe it in detail.

We occasionally do this in psychiatry when dealing with a frigidity problem, and sometimes it has astonishing results. I have seen women who, after hearing for the first time a complete description from an authoritative and objective person of what to expect of themselves in the act of love, almost immediately win through to the sensual goal they had been deprived of.

On one occasion a patient of mine, who over a period of months had worked through a rather severe frigidity problem, detailed to her younger sister the wonderful sexual experience she was now able to have. The younger sister had been married only two months and had not once reached sexual climax. She had seriously contemplated consulting a psychiatrist about her “problem.” The very night her older sister described true orgasm to her she was able to achieve her own first complete satisfaction with her husband.

However, my chief motive in approaching the subject of frigidity by describing the normal orgasm is not to try to bring about a sudden or miraculous cure. In cases where such a sudden release of mature sexuality is achieved and thaw comes like a sudden spring, the frigidity problem is generally, even though it may appear to be deep-seated, a superficial one, lightly rooted in the personality.

The real reason I start with the orgasm is that a picture of the normal is an absolute necessity if you are to understand deviations from it with any real clarity. It is a truism that in order to understand illness in the body it is first necessary to understand health. Every doctor knows this and so do his teachers, for in medical school he first learns, through classes in anatomy and physiology, the structure and functions of the healthy body.

I think you will understand frigidity more thoroughly if we pursue the same technique here, first describing the genital anatomy of woman and from there proceeding to a description of the normal orgasm, what it is, where it is located, its function in the healthy man and woman, and other pertinent material.

Despite the wide dissemination of sexual information in our time, many women often show an astonishing ignorance of their own genital region and of the character and meaning of sexual response, including orgasm. I have had patients who did not know that they possessed a clitoris, others who made no distinction between their urethra and their vagina; some have not known of the existence of the uterus as a separate organ, and some, in confusion about their uniquely feminine secretions, have believed that women can have a seminal ejaculation as men do. Perhaps most of the readers of this book will have no such misinformation, but nevertheless I feel it is wise to review the simple facts pertaining to the feminine genitalia.

Before making a detailed description of woman’s sexual apparatus, I should like to make a preliminary observation which can help you to understand the sexual nature of woman. It is this: that while women are capable of having true sexual gratification in the same sense and with the same intensity as men, they have one important difference in their responses. The man, when he is aroused, feels the sexual desire directly in his genitals. A woman’s first sexual sensations are not usually genital but are felt over her entire body, on her skin surfaces, everywhere; this is followed by sexual excitation in her genitals, and this is an important fact for both men and women to understand. Ignorance of this fact has given rise to many misunderstandings between the sexes, for of course it makes the woman somewhat slower in reaching the moment when she is ready for intercourse than the man is. It must be taken into consideration by both parties to an act of love.

A woman’s genital apparatus is both internal and external. The external genitalia are called the vulva when they are referred to all together. The most obvious part of the vulva is the part we called the major (or sometimes outer) lips, which enfold the rest of the genitalia. If these lips are parted we see two smaller lips; these are called the minor lips and have a very high degree of sexual responsiveness. Even in books for laymen the Latin words are often used for these two organs: labia majoris and labia minoris, which mean, simply enough, the major lips and the minor lips.

The labia majoris also contain within their folds the rest of the external genital structure of woman. Here we find the clitoris, the vestibule, and the urethra, or opening to the bladder.

The clitoris is by far the most important and most widely misunderstood part of the external genitalia. It lies immediately above the top fold of the labia minoris and is a little piece of tissue slightly less thick than a pencil. This organ is enormously important to the whole psychological and sexual development of the individual woman. It is often called the “homologue of the male penis,” and this simply means that in the embryo the cells which form the penis in the male are the same cells which form the clitoris in the female. Thus the two organs have the same cellular derivation.

The clitoris, like the male penis, is made up of erectile tissue, and when a woman is sexually excited it becomes erect in the same manner that the penis does. It also has a head and a foreskin covering it, and the head of the clitoris, at least in children and adolescents, is generally extremely sensitive to stimulation. In the fully mature female this sensitivity often diminishes, giving way to the vagina as the primary source of the greatest sexual pleasure. However, many women who become fully mature sexually maintain much of the original sexual responsiveness of the clitoris.

The remainder of the external genitalia is contained within the vestibule. This is the entrance proper to the vagina and is very susceptible to sexual excitation. The vestibule lies between the minor lips and is directly beneath the clitoris. It contains the hymen, the urethral opening, and the openings of the glands of Bartholin.

The hymen is generally referred to as the maidenhead. It is a thin membrane which partly covers the entrance to the vagina. There is no direct sexual sensation on the hymen, and sometimes pain is experienced when it is perforated, usually during the first intercourse, although the hymen can be broken by an accident in childhood, through the insertion of surgical instruments, etc. Because of the pain associated with its perforation and the stories that a young girl often hears about this pain, it can be a source of much anxiety to her and condition her attitude toward sex in general.

The glands of Bartholin are of great importance to the act of love. These glands discharge a thin colorless mucus in sexual excitation, and this lubricates the vaginal opening and canal during intercourse. The amount of secretion varies greatly with each individual. Sexual frigidity often affects these glands adversely, causing the secretions to be inadequate or nonexistent. However, the amount of secretion will also vary rather dramatically at times in the individual who has no basic sexual blocking, and therefore the glands of Bartholin cannot be taken as a final criterion of sexual adequacy or inadequacy.

And now we come to the most important part of a woman’s anatomical sexual equipment: the vagina. This is a passageway of some three to three and a half inches which extends from the vestibule on the outside of the cervix, which is the bottom end of the uterus. The vagina is, of course, the canal which accepts the penis, and it may interest you to know that in Latin the word literally means “a sheath for a sword.” The sexual act in its purest form expresses the essential passivity associated with women and the aggressiveness of the male, the actor and the acted upon. The Romans understood this basic difference at least linguistically.

It may have surprised you to learn of the relatively short length of the vagina. The tissue of its walls are extremely elastic, however, and not only can it contain a penis of virtually any thickness or length, but it can stretch enough to allow the newborn infant to pass through it. The penis presses against the cervical end of the uterus, which may be forced upward until the penis gains full entrance. Contact with the soft tissue of the cervix is a source of great pleasure for the male, and the pressure can be an equal pleasure for the woman.

The vaginal walls are lined with a soft skin, not unlike mucous membrane, but it does not secrete as mucous tissue will. A secretion is, however, released from the cervix, and this also helps to lubricate the vaginal canal during intercourse.

I have said that the vagina is the most important part of a woman’s sexual equipment. This is so because it is within the vagina that the orgasm of the truly mature woman takes place. Upon it and within it she receives the greatest sensual pleasure that it is possible for a woman to experience.

And this brings us to the subject of orgasm. I think you will understand it more fully if I describe it in the context of the sexual experience as a whole.

The sexual instinct in both men and women is marvelously complex. When it is unencumbered by neurosis it gives color, shape, brightness, charm, vividness, and direction to the entire personality, and the mechanisms by which it operates encompass both body and mind.

Desire can be set off in a woman either in response to a touch or by some act, sight, or thought which she has been exposed to. One of the chief things to which a woman responds is a cumulative tenderness expressed in words or in acts.

Whatever the stimulus, however, the brain receives the signal and, through the nervous system, sends out preparatory reactions throughout the body. The response of men to stimuli perceived by the brain as sexual is amazingly fast; some men arrive at full sexual preparedness for intercourse within three seconds—that is, their penis becomes fully erect and ready to enter the vagina within that time. Women react, on the whole, somewhat more slowly, though full preparation for intercourse, under the best of conditions, is often only a matter of a few more seconds than the man’s.

As the sexual excitement increases, tremendous changes go on throughout the body, changes that might frighten you if they occurred under other circumstances.

The pulse rate goes up astonishingly. There are records of its reaching 150 and more as the individual approaches and then reaches the sexual climax. Such pulse rates generally occur, in health, only in athletes who are performing prodigious tasks of speed or endurance.

The blood pressure, too, goes up precipitately. In a matter of a few seconds it can rise well over 100 points. Breathing also becomes much deeper and swifter. With the approach of orgasm the breathing becomes interrupted; inspiration comes in forced gasps and expiration occurs with a heavy collapse of the lungs. It is as though the sexually excited person had been in a race.

As the sexual act continues there is a general shortage of oxygen throughout the body, which accounts for the unusual breathing. This gives rise to a tortured expression on the face, as if the person were undergoing severe pain. This fact has been observed by Kinsey in his famous study of female sexuality, and I quote here an interesting paragraph on the phenomenon:

“ … Prostitutes who attempt to deceive (jive) their patrons, or unresponsive wives who similarly attempt to make their husbands believe that they are enjoying coitus, fall into an error because they assume that an erotically aroused person should look happy and pleased and should smile and become increasingly alert as he or she approaches the culmination of the act. On the contrary, an individual who is really responding is as incapable of looking happy as the individual who is being tortured.”

Within seconds after sexual arousal the blood supply in the veins and arteries lying close to the skin increases, causing the body to become flushed and the temperature to rise slightly. Certain areas of the body are engorged with this blood, become swollen and erect, notably the penis of the man, which swells, often to twice its size. In women, this also happens to the clitoris, which becomes firm, and to the nipples of both sexes. The firmness of these organs increases as the sexual climax approaches.

Muscles throughout the body begin to tense at the onset of sexual excitement, and this tension increases as the excitement grows. Certain glands and tissues also increase their secretions as the sexual act commences and moves closer to completion. The salivary glands and the nasal mucosa flow freely, and it is this latter fact which causes, in conjunction with the engorgement of the surface blood vessels, the characteristic nasal stuffiness so many people notice after intercourse. In some women the secretions of the glands of Bartholin and the mucus from the cervix of the uterus become amazingly copious as sexual excitement rises, and particularly during orgasm itself. This profuse flow may have given rise to the widely held and entirely mistaken idea I have mentioned—that in orgasm women have an ejaculation similar to the male’s. There is no such ejaculation—nor indeed any female organ that could make one possible.

One of the most amazing aspects of sexual intercourse is the fact that all five senses become extremely dulled as the act increases in intensity. The ability to feel hot and cold, to feel pain, or to hear sounds becomes almost nonexistent. The eyes take on a characteristic trance-like stare, and vision becomes constricted. The entire mind and body are concentrated fully on the mounting sexual feeling and exclude all else. In orgasm itself the anesthesia of the senses is almost total. Indeed many people experience a temporary loss of consciousness for a matter of seconds. Some, according to Kinsey’s findings, remain unconscious for two or more minutes.

This last fact brings us to our examination of the experience of orgasm itself. If you are to understand frigidity in women it is of tremendous importance to grasp the nature of orgasm and what it means physically and psychologically. The importance of such understanding is due, of course, to the fact that orgasm, of the type described here, is the very thing the frigid woman is unable to have. In fact, its absence from her experience is the usual definition of frigidity. Certain kinds of frigid women may experience one, two, or all of the physical and psychological reactions described above, which normally would terminate with orgasm. But the final experience eludes them; at the vital juncture the body, despite an agonizing need to come to a climax, refuses to respond; it draws back, goes dead.

Orgasm is the physiological response which brings sexual intercourse to its natural and beautiful termination. It is preceded by a very dramatic increase in all of the phenomena noted above. In the moment just preceding orgasm, muscular tension suddenly rises to the point where, if the sexual instinct were not in operation, it would become physically unendurable. The pelvic motions of the man and the movement of the penis back and forth within the vagina increase in speed and in intensity of thrust. The woman’s pelvic movements also increase, and her whole body attempts with every move to heighten the exquisite sensations she is experiencing within her vagina. According to many women with whom I have discussed this experience, the greatest pleasure is caused by the sensation of fullness within the vagina and the pressure and friction upon its posterior surface.

At the moment of greatest muscular tension all sensations seem to take one further rise upward. The woman tenses beyond the point where, it seems, it would be possible to maintain such tension for a moment longer. And indeed it is not possible, and now her whole body suddenly plunges into a series of muscular spasms. These spasms take place within the vagina itself, shaking the body with waves of pleasure. They are felt simultaneously throughout the body: in the torso, face, arms, and legs—down to the very soles of the feet.

These spasms, which shake the entire body and converge upon the vagina, represent and define true orgasm. At this moment the woman’s head is thrown back and her pelvis tips upward in an attempt to obtain as much penetration from the penis as is possible. The spasms continue for several seconds in most women, though the time varies with every individual, and in some women they may continue though with decreasing intensity, for a minute or even more.

Many women can repeat this performance two or more times before their partner has his orgasm. The pathway, neurologically and psychologically, has been set for orgasm and, if her partner continues she can respond. I have had women report that the last orgasm is sometimes more intense and satisfying than the first.

If the woman is satisfied by her orgasmic experience she will discharge the neurological and muscular tension developed in the sexual build-up. When satisfaction has been achieved, her strenuous movements cease and within a short period blood pressure, pulse, glandular secretion, muscular tension, and all the other gross physical changes which characterize sexual excitement return to normal, or even to subnormal, limits.

There have been detailed studies made of the physical reactions of both men and women during intercourse. I think it is important to realize that in almost every detail, including orgasm, these reactions and the subjective experience of pleasure parallel each other in the sexes. The major differences are that the woman is slightly slower to respond at the outset than the man, and the orgasm of the man is characterized by the ejaculation of sperm into the vagina.

Full sexual satisfaction is followed by a state of utter calm. The body feels absolutely quiescent. Psychologically the person feels completely satisfied, at peace with the world and all things in it. The woman in particular feels extremely loving toward the partner who has given her so much joy, such a transport of ecstasy. Often she wishes to hold him close for a while, to linger tenderly in the now subdued glow of their passion.

As you can see from this description, orgasm is a tremendous experience. There is no physiological or psychological experience that parallels its sweeping intensity or its excruciating pleasure. It is unique.

There are many who take a mystical view of this ecstatic coupling of man and woman in love. They think of it as a symbol of a lost unity between the sexes that strives to reassert itself in the act of love. Others see in it a foretaste of heaven, the carnal representation of endless spiritual delights for mankind. Many who are able to experience orgasm in intercourse find it difficult not to ascribe some purposive intent on the part of the Creator; the experience is that profound.

The individual perceives orgasm as a reward equal to none. It puts the sacrifices and compromises necessary to an enduring marriage into their proper perspectives, makes the constant giving done by the woman seem not only worth while but highly desirable. It is the strongest link in the unbreakable bond between two who love.

Do you recall Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire? In one of its most famous passages the frigid (and promiscuous) older woman attempts to break up the marriage of her younger sister, appealing to a spurious pride of class, pointing out that the younger woman has married beneath her, married a beer-drinking, poker-playing common day laborer. The younger woman is almost convinced that she should act on the false values of her sister. After all, these values had been inculcated in both women by the same parents and they went deep. The young girl’s husband saves her, however; he simply reminds her of the pinwheels she sees, of the high music of the bells she hears when they embrace in love. It is enough. She returns to him without a word. The bond of their wonderful sexual life is unbreakable, far stronger than the powerful and subtle assault the envious and destructive sister can make upon the marriage.

The ability to have a full orgasm is, in most cases, the hallmark of the psychologically mature woman. It is the sign that she has successfully weathered the storms of childhood and youth and come, unscathed, into full womanhood, with all that it implies.

Chapter 3
THE NOT IMPOSSIBLE SHE

What is the mature woman? Who is she? What are her characteristics? Her personality? Her role in life?

It is of vital importance to an understanding of the frigid woman to answer these questions, for again, only by understanding what health is, can we truly grasp the meaning of any departure from it.

There have been great arguments about what the word “normal” means. Millions of words have been written about it. I fear that most of them have only clouded the issue. Odd definitions of normalcy have led millions of women down very odd and unhappy paths. You will recall, for example, that Victorianism elevated frigidity to the position of the norm for all womankind—with disastrous results.

At the start of my practice I encountered another strange and tragic view of the normal that has had a powerful influence on American women. This view, which we will encounter in more detail when the feminist movement is discussed later, still has wide repercussions and is intimately bound with the subject of frigidity and divorce.

In my introduction to it a lovely woman of forty came to consult me. She was deeply disturbed and could hardly speak, she wept so. Somehow I felt at once that there was a deep rage behind those tears. I recognized her name when she was able to get it out; she was a successful lawyer whose name many would still recognize in all probability.

In her thirty-ninth year she had fallen in love for the first time with a fine man, another successful lawyer. Her dormant sexuality and true femininity had been awakened completely in her since their marriage a year before, and they both now wanted children badly. However, a physical examination had indicated (as unhappily it so often seems to do for women who postpone their first pregnancy for too long), that she would have to have a hysterectomy, for she had developed a tumor in the wall of her uterus.

She felt cruelly deprived, and I saw her for several sessions. During these periods she told me of her background. Her father had died when she was an infant and her mother had been a militant leader of the movement for women’s “rights.” The whole emphasis in her early upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (à la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is.

Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man. For years she sedulously avoided men entirely. Gradually, through her grown-up experiences, she learned of other values, but by the time the right man came along it was too late to have children.

I was right that her tears had been tears of rage. They were directed at her mother’s authoritarian but totally mistaken view of the feminine role in life and were, to my mind, justified. When she had sufficiently vented her righteous anger, but not until then, we were able to move on to more practical matters. Her marriage was a happy one, and finally she adopted two children. With some of her values revised she made a wonderful mother for them. I visited this family only recently, and it seems to be one of the happiest and healthiest, psychologically speaking, I have ever seen.

Most women who have been reared with such ideas of what is normal are not so fortunate, however. They cling to their defensive and self-destructive values to the end, which is often bitter.

And there are, still, passionately convinced and often eloquent purveyors of these ideas. After reading the brilliant best seller, The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, the French authoress, I was saddened to see such clarity and brilliance in the service of such a mistaken cause. Her tacit conclusions seem to be that woman’s historic role of wife and mother are degrading to our sex, have kept woman from her true destiny. As she describes what that true destiny is, however, her clarity departs, and the role and function of this woman of the future become more than merely vague. Their foggy contours remind me of the glamorous-sounding but totally evanescent and mist-enshrouded goals that many of the frigid and lonely women I treat have when they first come for help.

There is no vagueness about the goals, functions, and needs of the normal woman. Science in recent years has thrown a bright light on her, and that is why we can be certain of many fundamental details about her. She is a mature, fully functioning woman, a woman who has realized the better part of her potentialities, who knows how to achieve and handle love and happiness, who has won through to a fully satisfying mental and sexual life.

I very frequently draw a word portrait of such a woman for patients who come to consult me about their sexual problem. It often makes them angry, and they deeply resent some of the characteristics of this idealized woman. They call her all sorts of names: “a victim of the male,” “an impossible ideal.” One eloquent younger woman called her “a faceless tramp,” and I have heard older women, brought up under a more inhibited code than exists now, call her “a shameless hussy.”

And yet despite the hostility that my portrait is often greeted with there is soon other evidence in my troubled listeners that they have been touched deeply by the idea that such a picture of womanhood might conceivably be a possibility for them. “Do you really think I could ever get to be anything like that?” The yearning question, phrased in any number of wistful ways, will inevitably come, despite the obvious hostility, the bristling defenses, the fact that the speaker is scared blue of sex and motherhood and all they mean.

You see, women want to find themselves, desperately want to. And in this portrait they get a hint, often the first they have ever had, of what to aim for, of the real potential inside themselves.

I call this subject of my sketch “idealized,” and she is. But I want to emphasize that she is not a personal idle daydream of my own, based on airy nothingness; very much the contrary. Her characteristics are based on exact and thoroughly checked psychological and biological facts, facts upon which the leading scientists in this field are in general agreement. And she is a composite based on observations of women I have known, and not always clinically. If you stop to think as you read about her, you may realize that you have known such women too.

What, then, is she like? First of all to give us a frame for our portrait so that we can see what we do know more clearly, let me state what we cannot know about her; what, in fact, is irrelevant.

We don’t know what she looks like. She may be tall or short, red-haired, blond, or brunette. She may have large breasts and round hips and sloping shoulders, or she may be small-breasted (or even flat-chested), have wide shoulders and narrow hips. She may have a career or not have a career, be more intelligent and better educated than her husband or less intelligent and less well educated. She may have children or be unable to have children. She may be rich or poor, come from the “400” or from the slums. She may be a bit shy or quite at ease socially. She may be athletic or totally unathletic. These things we don’t know about her and, for our purposes, they do not matter.

Here are some of the things we do know.

In the first place, she is very much “at home” in the world. Deep inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can’t imagine what it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her husband makes the world safe for her.

This feeling may seem unrealistic, in view of the very clear insecurities in the world today. As you will discover, however, it is based on a far deeper understanding of reality, on a far deeper reality than the one reflected in the alarums published in the daily newspaper.

This sense of reality almost invariably leads her to select a husband who is good for her, often near perfect, in fact. He might not be perfect for another woman, nor perfect in any ultimate sense, but he is near perfect for her. He loves her and intends to go on loving her. He may be a carpenter or an architect, a lawyer, a dock hand, or a poet, but he, with her, is passionate and loyal, a good companion and a good father for her children. She has an infallible sense about this matter, and though she may have had an adolescent or college crush on a no-gooder, she simply never will marry him.

Of course marrying a good husband adds to her sense of “at-homeness” in the world. Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.”

As you will see, it too has its roots in woman’s biology, is, on its deepest level, a need in her that must have expression. The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it.

It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her equilibrium, to hold onto her joie de vivre despite whatever may befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life is going to make on her—and they will be considerable. When a woman does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life’s continuous small misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself with self-pity.

Another fact about her which you may be surprised to learn is that she is deeply religious—though not officially or even consciously. In fact, if her husband’s background has been antagonistic to formal religion and he is still reflecting his background, she may pay lip service to his agnosticism or even atheism. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Just beneath the surface is an absolutely firm belief in the existence of a Creator and in some form of heaven. She’s not so clear about hell.

She also believes firmly in the fact that marriage is a sacrament, binding forever. Given the slightest encouragement or support, she will formalize these beliefs, join a church or develop a kind of personal pantheism. Why? Biologically speaking, she is the carrier of immortality, of the generations of man. This gives her a close affinity to and appreciation of the awesome and creative mysteries of the universe: moonrise, tidal flow, the growth, death, and rebirth of things.

Sexually she almost always reaches a climax during the act of love. Sometimes she reaches two or, if she and her husband are feeling particularly lusty, even three. But the number of times is unimportant, despite the Kinsey report.

What is important is the kind of orgasm she has. It is of the kind described in the previous chapter, of course; the kind that starts deep within her vagina and extends to all parts of her body. She doesn’t talk about it very often, but when she does it is always poetically. I have heard one woman refer to it as “a sensation of such beauty and intensity that I can hardly think of it without weeping”; of it another said, “It’s like a mounting symphony, rising in tremendous and irresistible rhythms till your whole being feels as though it has been swept away.” One woman, less lyrical but still exact, said, “It’s like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” Nobody can ever quite evoke the exact sensations in words, but, as one woman told me, “Nobody who has ever had it will doubt whether her experience is the real thing.”

What else characterizes her sexually? Well, she’s not very modest, I’m afraid. In fact, she’s quite a show-off and likes sexual compliments from her husband, dressed or undressed, verbal or otherwise. Her nineteenth-century sister would have been vastly shocked by her whole attitude in the bedroom.

She’s not sexually shy at all. She wouldn’t demur a moment at initiating love with her husband, though she will immediately change her amorous direction if she finds he is too tired or is preoccupied, without feeling the least bit rejected. Don’t forget that, for one thing, just under the surface (and sometimes on it) she considers her marriage a heaven-made arrangement that is going to last forever, and she need not look upon any one experience as too important in itself.

However, there is another very important point. I have indicated that sexually she takes her cue from her husband. What does she know, do you suppose—know deeply and instinctively—that makes her do this, while other women refuse to?

She knows this: that it is the man who, from the purely physical viewpoint, has to be ready before sexual intercourse can take place. No matter how many books have been written that ignore the fact, it is nevertheless true that, if the man does not have an erection, love-making cannot take place.

Just think about it for a moment. A woman can make love at any time; a man only when he is ready. There may be psychologically preferential circumstances for a woman, but there is no physical prerequisite.

That is why (by virtue of that deeper sense of reality we spoke of) when her husband is ready to make love our lady is nearly always willing, barring sickness or certain difficulties that may come up during pregnancy. And that is why she is always willing to forgo love-making if he is not ready. Her deep altruism makes her extremely sensitive to his moods, and she will not find it in herself to treat him as if he were a robot, become angry or feel rejected when, if the button is pushed, he doesn’t respond.

On this same point: she knows how much store men put on their potency, how vulnerable they can become if they are made to feel inadequate to the needs of a wife. She would die a thousand deaths rather than have her husband gain any such inference from her actions. It’s her altruism again.

Her eternal acquiescence, her ever-readiness, never lets her in for a painful sexual experience, however. She knows that ninety-nine times out of one hundred even negative sexual feelings in herself will soon turn to eagerness, and eagerness to desire. And even if that once in a hundred times occurs, she will still get a profound satisfaction from the pleasure she is able to give her husband, the very obvious pleasure. Once more that deep altruism.

But she not only takes the lead from him about whether they are going to make love—the kind of love they are going to make is also usually his decision and, in pure delight, she follows him completely. If he feels purely lusty, soon she does too; does he feel gentle and tender, then she picks up that mood. Experimental? Let’s, by all means, experiment. Passive? She’ll be active. It takes her little time to find out that a geisha has the tremendous disadvantage of believing that techniques are more important than love and the love of following one’s partner.

Despite her very pronounced wantonness with her husband, however, she has no promiscuous urges whatsoever. She is realistic about other men and finds them attractive or unattractive, as the case may be. But she neither desires them nor has any fantasies of a sexual nature about them. One woman put it this way to me: “I like other men if they’re attractive,” she said. “Their attractiveness does honor to the sex my husband belongs to.”

Nor is she ever tempted to indulge in self-masturbation, at least not after one or two tasteless and pointless experiments she may make during her first absence from her husband. To her, sexuality is devoid of any meaning whatsoever if there is not mutuality, if it is not shared.

Lest you think that our paragon’s altruism could end up by making her a martyr, a person without any real regard for herself, I must hasten to nip that idea in the bud. In her quiet way she is quite self-centered. In the first place, she’s contented with all aspects of her body, all the details of a female anatomy that gives her so much pleasure. If in her cultural background there were influences which tended to inculcate disgust with certain natural functions, she finds herself rejecting them. For example, I have had several patients who, during the course of their therapy and as they found a new maturity developing in them, find themselves ruminating on the word “curse” as it is used to describe the menstrual flow. Reflection almost always makes them drop the word from their vocabulary entirely. In the end they are far more likely to call it a blessing.

This self-love, her pride in and love of her body, is reflected in her outward appearance. She likes to be as clean as a cat and as neat as a pin. She enjoys dressing well. She is very aware of the things that bring out her special attractiveness. She also knows how to make herself up to the very best advantage. But she does not spend hours daily on her toilet in front of the mirror. She is far too confident of herself, has too much self-love, to feel that such a production is necessary.

Here’s the way I’d put it. She accepts and is pleased with the way she is and the way, as time passes, she is going to be. This is true of her mental capacities as well as of her physical attributes, but we can see it most clearly in her attitude toward her physical self. As I said at the beginning, we don’t know whether she has small breasts or large breasts, rounded hips or narrow hips. We only know that, whatever she’s got, she enjoys.

You see, she knows perfectly well that it is passion and response which spin the plot of love and not, ever, fetish or fashion. She really feels sorry for women who worry about what they haven’t got or the effect of growing older. If she were small-breasted she would never disguise that fact, and you can be certain that her husband, at least after the relationship had got under way and he’d had a chance to experience her pleasures, would soon drop any adolescent predilections he had imagined he possessed.

The husband of one such woman said to me: “When I was in college I had a conviction that really beautiful women had to be redheads. I can’t imagine now what made me believe such a thing.” I know his wife well; she’s a brunette, and you and I might not be the least bit impressed by her looks. But he knows better; he knows her real beauty. And, I happen to know, so does she.

The confidence and pleasure our fair lady has in her person and in her other attributes (her self-love) have one very odd quality. And it is an all-important one. This self-love is detachable.

With a flick of her psyche she can project practically all of it onto her children, take as much joy from their beauty, achievements, and pleasures as she ever got from her own. She detaches it, too, on behalf of her husband, often will exaggerate his good qualities and minimize any weakness he might have, as long as the weakness is not a danger to family and home.

Her detachable self-love and her need to give unrestrainedly are two chief components of the maternal instinct. To put it mildly, as perhaps you have noticed, she is pervaded with this instinct. To her the fulfillment of it is the most central and all-important function of her life. It colors and deepens and enriches her sexual life with her husband. Her unconscious fantasy with every intercourse is that he might make her with child, and her psychological and biological gratitude to him for this richest of all potential gifts is boundless. Her fantasies about becoming pregnant may excite her directly.

I have paid particular attention to this connection between the sexual instinct and the maternal instinct in many patients of mine who have come to therapy because they were afraid of childbirth. When they have been able to rid themselves of such fears they are almost always struck by the new dimension that is added to their sexual life. The things they say about it are often poetic or even mystical.

One woman, who because of childhood experiences had been scared to death of bearing a child and whose fear was causing a partial frigidity, said to me of her new sexual experience: “I was living in one room of a whole mansion, and now I have the whole mansion for my own.” Another woman, who had believed her love life complete despite her deep fear of pregnancy, said of the change in her feelings during love-making: “Oh, it was fun before, but now the idea that I might become pregnant makes me feel at one with the whole universe. It’s strange. There are almost no words to express it.”

Our ideal woman carries this characteristic feeling of a deep identification with nature, with all things that grow and bud and blossom, through her pregnancy and long thereafter. Childbirth had no real terrors for her; she sails through it proudly, like a clipper made especially for such weather.

And she usually wants to nurse her child at her breast. She does, too, unless a breast abscess or some other unforeseen difficulty arises. And, though I have no statistics to prove it, I would bet that her milk is both plentiful and good.

I know that today there is a tremendous emphasis on the importance of careers for women, but I am afraid that our mature woman cannot get terribly excited about the subject. I don’t mean that she’s antagonistic to this whole modern movement. She may be a career woman herself, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, a fashion designer, whatever. But now, happily married and with children in the offing or already here, she can’t feel that its of central importance. If it’s necessary for the family welfare she will keep her job, but any drive she had after high school or college to go far in it is sacrificed, if necessary, to her love-making and homemaking instincts.

She is not the least bit jealous of her husband’s work. As I pointed out earlier, she may be smarter than her husband or may basically have a much higher intelligence quotient, or she may be far more thoroughly educated than he is. Or she may be highly talented in some art form—writing, music, painting, sculpture. You will never, however, hear her complain that she gave up a career for her family, or angrily envy the daily adventures of her man in the market place. Her joy and satisfaction in the fulfillment of her own biological destiny make all other personal achievements pale for her, any other considerable use for her energies almost a waste.

As she grows older and her family grows up and the children learn to stand on their own feet and use their own wings, she may return to work. However, even then, interest in her now-grown children and their children will be far greater than any she can summon up for her job.

As you might expect, our paragon ages very gracefully. Those sure instincts which led her to successful love in marriage and to success in rearing her children stand her in good stead now. She still loves to give, and she perceives the right time to give her children up, to let them stand on their own, learn the difficult uses of freedom. Admittedly this is a great sacrifice for a mother, but she is deeply pleased to make it. And in doing so without fuss or feathers, she wins her children’s regard and love forever.

I am very pleased to say that the menopause brings no diminution in her ability to enjoy her husband sexually. Contrary to what many people still think, her orgasm does not decrease in intensity or in kind. Increasing age and the absence of children in the home now bring her and her husband closer together again and, great companions, they develop a whole series of shared pleasures consistent with their years.

As she goes down into the other side of her middle years, she is not troubled with regrets for things left undone. She has a deep sense of fulfillment, of life lived rightly. And, whether she has become consciously religious or not, she is still, basically, a believer in immortality, for she has served it with her whole being. She looks on death totally unafraid, wondering perhaps what the Creator who has made her life such a marvel is like on an even closer view.

This, then, is the idealized picture of the truly feminine woman. While granting that the plane of maturity she has achieved is rather too exalted for most women to attain, I have given her to you for some very concrete reasons.

With merely this ideal to follow, I have seen many women reap immediate rewards some time before they were able to come to grips with their frigidity per se. The characteristics and neurotic goals that accompany frigidity often cause obvious domestic frictions that can be greatly reduced when the woman begins to see new horizons for herself—that she need not be blaming others. Her grateful husband will reward her at once for her change, with renewed affection and tenderness, a new solicitude, a new caring.

Our idealized portrait can help you, too, to grasp more thoroughly the rest of this book. We have found, in psychiatry, that when a goal has been clearly defined half the battle has been won. As we come now to the chapters on frigidity, its history, its whys and wherefores, kinds and causes and cures, you will have before you a picture of what the potentialities of women are, a landmark to show you how far our sex can stray from real femininity, a guide to keep you from confusion, from ever subscribing again to false and destructive ideas of what it is that constitutes real womanhood.

SECTION II
The Psychology of Frigidity

Chapter 4
WHAT IS FRIGIDITY?

Now that we have seen the real potential of woman, how she can flower and blossom in the climate of love, what she can be like when she embraces her true destiny, we may turn to an examination of frigidity with some perspective. This section will deal with what frigidity is, specifically, and why it can and does occur in women, blighting their capacities, stunting their personality, chilling and killing their ability to love at the heart’s deep core. When a woman gets a clear picture of such matters, and only when she does, can she find her way back to the highroad of real womanhood.

If we take the word “frigidity” in its most general sense it means, as I have already stated, an inability to enjoy sexual love to its fullest potentiality. This means, purely and simply, the inability to have an orgasm of the type described in Chapter 2. But the matter is more complicated than that, for there are degrees of frigidity, and I think it is very important to understand what this means.

Perhaps I can make this idea clearest by first describing the symptoms of a woman who came to see me several months ago. She was an example of total sexual frigidity.

In our first interview she described herself as having absolutely no sexual reactions whatsoever. She did not respond to her husband’s caresses in any way at all. Neither her clitoris, vagina, nor labia was capable of the slightest sexual response. She received no stimulation from kissing or physical closeness. Her breasts and all secondary erotic regions were, from the standpoint of sensual response, dead. Her vaginal passage never became lubricated before or during intercourse. The act of love was very painful for her. An examination by a competent gynecologist showed no physical condition which would explain her pain. Her external genitalia were all fully developed. Her reproductive organs—the vaginal tract, cervix, uterus, tubes, and ovaries—also were normally developed and showed no pathology.

This woman’s sexual unresponsiveness was entirely psychological, and on a scale showing the degrees of frigidity she would represent absolute zero. (This is no longer true of her, incidentally; she has made progress in therapy in a relatively short time, considering the extent of her difficulty, and her final prognosis promises to be excellent.)

At the opposite end of this frigidity scale is the woman who trembles on the verge of sexual maturity but cannot quite step over the line. In the act of love she has all the responses which I have described as taking place in normal sexual intercourse, but she cannot come to orgasm, or at least orgasm happens quite rarely—say once in ten or twenty times—and it is generally a mild and unsatisfactory one. You will be interested to know that her sexual problem is a relatively easy one to resolve. This is the kind of frigidity that may disappear entirely after the birth of a child. I have seen it dispelled, too, by a single conversation with a wise counselor or with just time and a minimum of insightful understanding which she can obtain by taking thought or learning more about the nature of her problem and dispelling certain misunderstandings she has had about the nature of sex, marriage, men, and love.

In between these two types there are all degrees of sexual frigidity. The severity of a woman’s problem, or the lack of it, can be calculated in terms of the degree of response she has to her husband’s caresses and the frequency with which she achieves satisfaction in intercourse. Also important in estimating the degree of the problem is the orgasm itself. This is purely a subjective matter and can of course be judged only by the individual. If the orgasm is weak and chronically leaves one with a dissatisfied feeling, a certain degree of frigidity is present.

In addition to the degrees of frigidity there is a type of frigidity that it is very important to understand. We call a woman suffering from this form of frigidity a “clitoridal” or “masculine” type. To make her problem clear to you I shall have to describe her typical sexual reaction.

This woman’s responses to sexual stimulation are usually quite passionate. In the foreplay preceding sexual intercourse and even in the first part of intercourse her reactions parallel the normal to a greater or lesser extent. This type of woman, however, can always be identified by the kind of orgasm she has.

This orgasm takes place on her clitoris exclusively. She does not feel the orgasm in her vagina, nor do the sexual sensations spread very strongly to the other parts of her body. The sensual experience is primarily localized at climax, and though, owing to her lack of experience with the mature form of orgasm, she may defend her orgasm as perfectly normal and adequate, it is not. Therapy has helped many women with this constricted reaction to sexual intercourse and, once they have experienced the profound pleasure of the true orgasm, they will admit quite freely their former deprivation.

The clitoridal woman seeks to obtain her typical orgasm in two ways. In intercourse she will sometimes strive to bring her clitoris into direct contact with the penis, thus obtaining the stimulation necessary for her to achieve climax. Most women, however, are not able to gratify themselves in this way. Intercourse seems to deaden their sexual feelings, even their clitoral feelings. It is as though the male penis in the vagina represented a dangerous and hostile presence. Such women are only able to come to their clitoridal climax either by masturbating themselves or having their husbands do so before or after intercourse.

The clitoridal woman—that is, the woman who experiences orgasm on her clitoris alone—is very definitely suffering from a form of frigidity. Indeed this form of frigidity is extremely widespread, and we will devote much space to it later, tracing the origin of the difficulty and the indications for treatment.

Since we have a name for the clitoridal type of sexual frigidity, let us, for the sake of clarity, also give a name to the form of frigidity first described, that which is characterized by a subnormal degree of sensation in the entire genital area and weak and infrequent orgasm. This form of frigidity is called sexual anesthesia in textbooks, and I will use that phrase here when I refer to it. The word “anesthesia,” as you probably know, simply means the absence, or relative absence, of sensation.

Now that we have named names I should like to say that I wish the problem of frigidity were as uncomplicated as this description makes it sound. If it were we’d simply have the problem of a large number of women who weren’t getting all the pleasure out of life that is possible. But there is far more to it than that.

The sad fact is that frigidity usually has a profound psychological repercussion on the individual. Her inadequacy is rooted in her childhood or adolescence, in early fears and misunderstandings, in events largely forgotten now. Around these early experiences, as crystals around a string, have clustered a whole series of personality traits that make life very hard for her and, much too often, unbearable for those nearest and dearest to her—her husband and her children.

To put it most directly, frigidity is generally a product of neurosis. And, most importantly, the frigid woman’s neurotic behavior is in direct proportion to the degree of her frigidity. I have found it to be true that, the more frigid a woman is, the more neurotic her behavior becomes, the more inimical to her own good and to the good of her family.

It is these psychological repercussions that make the problem of frigidity a serious one for the individual and society. The frigid woman’s often grossly neurotic psychological traits are raising havoc with our marital institution in the form of unhappiness, divorce, and maladjustment in her children.

Women will usually face the fact that they are sexually frigid; generally they have to; the knowledge is forced upon them. But they will rarely face the fact that they have personality difficulties that are directly related to their obvious sexual difficulty.

Let me give you an illustration.

Last year a very intelligent woman came to see me. She was an associate professor of history at a leading university and, according to her, her only complaint was that she could not have an orgasm during intercourse. She was unusually frank in describing the sexual aspect of her problem in her first interview, and when she had finished the description of her reactions and lack of them she had described a woman with a rather severe sexual anesthesia. She had neither clitoral nor vaginal sensation and could claim only some vaguely pleasant sensations on her labia. She had nothing approximating an orgasm.

Actually she was a very fine woman, but she was totally confused about this area of her life. “If I could only break through this silly little block,” she told me, “our marriage would be ideal.” I could get no further real facts from her. She insisted that she and her husband had “a whole community of shared interests” and two “wonderfully normal” children. I asked to see her husband.

I got the real story from him. He was, he told me, quite worried about his wife and about their marriage and had been for a long time.

She had always, he said, been an extremely competitive woman, but since his promotion from associate professor to full professor four years before, this characteristic had become almost unendurable. “I hardly dare to open my mouth any more,” he told me, “because I know she’s going to contradict me.” Quarrels had become extremely frequent, and their oldest child was definitely showing neurotic signs. I inquired about her reactions during her pregnancies, and he told me that she had been constantly ill physically and, while she would not admit it, had clearly been deeply frightened of the whole experience. Indeed, after the birth of the second child she had become severely depressed for over two months. He told me that yes, indeed, they had had a community of interests for the first couple of years of their marriage but that her competitiveness with him had become so pronounced that any mutuality, from his standpoint, was now almost impossible.

Any psychiatrist knowledgeable in such matters could have guessed from the woman’s description of her sexual problem pretty much what I learned about her from her husband. For, as I have pointed out, the kind and degree of frigidity a woman may confess to are also an open statement of the kind and degree of personality distortion she is subject to.

As one might guess, this patient was not easy to treat. She had developed a powerful tendency to handle her fears by denying their existence. When she was finally able to see through this self-deceiving trait, however, she came to grips with her problem. She was able to see that she had been in a ten-year competition with her husband instead of a marriage. When she realized this she was able to control her competitive actions, and the immediate rewards she received in the form of renewed affection and companionship from her grateful husband motivated her to find out more and more about herself. At length this intelligent but dreadfully insecure person became, through understanding and insight, a real woman able to give and take in every aspect of the love relationship.

Frigidity causes a personality distortion. I wish to impress this on you deeply. It means that the person has a misunderstanding of reality, denies it, blames others for her own miseries and failures.

One woman who had been cured of a severe frigidity problem phrased it this way: “I was looking at life and people through a distorting glass. No wonder I made such poor decisions.” She was right, too. Her problem had first driven her to promiscuity, then to marriage with an alcoholic. I was very glad, when she first came for treatment, that she had not yet had any children. With her deeply seated, sexually based personality problem she might have ruined them. I am even gladder that, remarried to a fine man, she has two children now.

In a later section we shall examine in great detail these personality problems that accompany frigidity. There are, however, more immediate symptoms which I should like to go into here.

You will recall in the description of sexual intercourse leading to orgasm how thoroughly the body becomes mobilized: heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure rise precipitately, tissues become engorged with blood, glands secrete freely, muscular tension mounts to a pitch which would be unendurable if the sexual instinct were not demanding expression. Complete satisfaction brings an end to all these processes, and the energy discharged through normal channels and in a normal manner leaves the person in a condition of relaxation and with a sense of well-being.

When orgasm does not take place, when there is no release of the intensely mobilized energy, there are immediate repercussions, both physical and psychological, on the individual.

Psychologically the woman who has been brought to such a pitch experiences a feeling of acute frustration which, consciously or unconsciously, turns to anger at herself and at her partner. If the anger is unconscious, she may have physiological symptoms—headache, nausea, throat constrictions, heart palpitations, or difficulty with breathing. She may also weep uncontrollably, vomit, or have tremors throughout her body.

This unconscious anger at her frustration may also cause her to quarrel with her husband or to take out her rage on the children.

I should like to emphasize that she usually does not see any connection between these symptoms and her frustrated sexual experiences. When her anger at her frustration does become conscious, she usually blames her husband for her lack of satisfaction. As I have pointed out, he is rarely to blame.

Purely physical symptoms not connected with repressed anger may also follow upon sexual excitement which has not been released through orgasm. These are somatic and can probably be traced to undischarged neuromuscular and glandular energy. Such symptoms include low back pain, general restlessness, and very often acute insomnia. Several of my patients have complained of severe vaginal pains which have lasted several hours. Gynecologists report that abdominal cramps, probably emanating from contractions of the uterus, are frequent.

As you can see from this recital of symptoms and my preliminary descriptions of personality disorders, women may pay a very high price for their frigidity. If the condition were relatively rare, we could take some comfort from that fact at least.

But frigidity is not rare; it is one of the commonest and most serious chronic ailments that beset society today. Conservative estimates indicate that 40 per cent of all American women suffer from some degree or kind of sexual frigidity. No other public health or social problem of our time even approaches this magnitude.

I have now told you about the degrees and psychological consequences of frigidity and described one basic type. There are, however, two other types of frigidity which, because they have certain confusing elements in them, I have reserved until now to explain. Psychologically and sexually both of these types seem to run counter to the generalities I have made about frigidity so far.

The first type, though we consider her definitely frigid in the wide sense of the word, is able to have full and complete orgasm practically every time she has intercourse. This is really quite an astonishing fact, considering the usual close connection between personality and sexuality. Actually one could not distinguish in any way the sexual reaction of this type from that of the perfectly normal woman described in Chapter 3.

However, this kind of woman is totally unable to build a relationship with any man. For that reason she generally becomes, in the end, sexually promiscuous. Somehow and somewhere along the line a wedge has been driven between her sexuality and her ability to relate psychologically in a love relationship. Her sexuality has come to apparent maturity while her character has remained infantile. We call this psychic frigidity.

This type of woman is not, however, to be confused with the nymphomanic woman, who, in my experience, is generally seriously mentally disturbed and for that reason is not included in this book. The woman with psychic frigidity usually has sexual affairs with one man at a time; her neurosis is usually based on sexual seduction in early childhood.

The second type is nearly the exact opposite of the psychic type of frigidity. I call her the all-mother type. She is a distinct anomaly. In the first place, she is definitely classifiable as sexually frigid; the degree of her erotic reaction is zero. She is totally anesthetic sexually.

Psychologically speaking, however, she exhibits almost the perfect picture of normalcy. She is happily married, is a very giving and altruistic person, and is totally loyal and devoted to her husband. She is, above all, a wonderful mother, willing and able to give the very best of herself to her children. Her husband is generally happy with his marriage. We suspect, although there is not sufficient data on this to say it with certainty, that the mate of the all-mother type has a rather low-pitched sexual nature and also a rather low storehouse of normal male vanity, albeit he is a good provider and a steady type. It is probable that the woman divined his characteristics unconsciously when she first fell in love with him.

There is generally little reason why the all-mother type of woman should seek to change herself in any way. I must emphasize the fact again and again that the reason frigidity presents a problem that must be solved is that it has harmful repercussions on the woman and on those close to her. It causes acute misery to her, causes personality damage to the children, and tends to destroy her marriage. The all-mother type of frigidity does none of these things, and I see no reason, if the woman doesn’t, why she must contemplate changing herself. However, the matter can be a subtle one, for this type of woman can, without any awareness of the fact, tend to be overprotective of her children or tend to have a hard time letting them go from the nest when that period in their growth has arrived. She should be most careful, weigh this matter thoroughly, before she decides in any final sense whether her problem may or may not be having untoward effects of a concealed nature.

These, then, are some of the basic facts about the nature of frigidity. Let us now consider their implications.

Chapter 5
THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

When one contrasts the normal woman with the frigid woman, certain questions come to mind at once. Why, for example, do certain women become frigid? Have millions of women always been this way, or is it a problem of our times only? Why, if not being frigid is so pleasant, do some women hold onto this problem though they know they can get help for it?

To answer these questions in part or in whole, you will first have to know a little history. For, though every case of frigidity represents a psychological problem in the individual, we have found that, sociologically speaking, frigidity is rooted in certain destructive events that have occurred to woman in the past two hundred years. If you grasp them you will begin to get a picture of the over-all problem that has beset woman, of how she lost her direction, her sense of self, and what she must do to find them again.

The history I am going to tell you about is the history of a war, a bitter and destructive war. It is often called “The War between Men and Women.” For far too many women and men too—it is still going on.

It began toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the apparently innocent event that started it all was the invention of the steam engine by Watt—the great invention that ushered in the modern age. It seems hard to believe now that this almost outdated means of creating power could have been so important, but it was. It launched the so-called Industrial Revolution, which was to change the whole fabric of society, our ways of doing things and making things, our living quarters and our living standards, our morals, religion, art; name it and you will find that the Industrial Revolution has turned it upside down and inside out.

Most of all, and most tragically, it changed the home. It would be more accurate, if somewhat bleaker, to say that it destroyed the home, at least as home was known up to that time.

But let me tell you what home was like before the Industrial Revolution, for when you see that you will begin to discern the outlines of the great tragedy that happened to woman when the old-fashioned family home ceased to exist.

In that era our society was almost entirely rural and agricultural. In other words, most homes were farms. There were cities and some industry, of course, but where industries existed they were almost entirely home industries run by individual families.

Home, then, was, almost without exception, the center of all life, economic, social, and educational. Everything was produced at home; all food was grown; suits and dresses and underclothing were made from cloth woven on the premises. There were simply no stores in which to buy anything. The leather for shoes was taken from the hides of animals one had reared oneself, and the shoes were made at home, the leather tanned, the shoes fashioned. A man made his own tools, was his own blacksmith, carpenter, architect. He built his own house, too, and kept it in repair.

Woman’s place in this early family home was indisputably at the very center, an equal partner with her husband in all the manifold duties, responsibilities, joys, hopes, and fears of the entire household. Her work was heavy and constant; she cooked the food her husband had grown, wove the cloth, fashioned and made the clothes for the entire family. She cleaned and she swept, washed, and ironed from morning till night.

Children, as soon as they were old enough, lightened her labors. She was responsible for their education (public schools had never been heard of), which was not just a matter of teaching them the three R’s but of inculcating in them all that she knew of the multitude of arts, crafts, and techniques it took to run such a home.

Her reward for all this was the fact that she was needed, loved, held in the highest esteem by her husband and her whole family. If she failed in her duties or if she died, it would be not merely a sad or inconvenient event for the family. It would be a disaster, for the activities of the distaff side, although different from those of the male, were of equal importance.

There were of course no social scientists to ask her probing questions about her sex life, and we can only know about her indirectly and by piecing odd patches of information together wherever we may find them. From what we can gather, even the concept of frigidity in marriage was unknown to her; love, home, work were a unified and profoundly satisfying experience on all levels. As a woman she was profoundly needed, and as a woman reared to respond to this need she had no single occasion to question her worth or her abilities.

And then one by one, slowly but surely, her responsibilities and her duties were removed from her; her close and equal working relationship with her husband was destroyed; her importance to her children was diminished sadly.

The new machines made possible by Watt’s harnessing of steam power began to take over, to displace all those things that had been done by hand. Transportation, via the new Iron Horse, developed, and trade between sections that were once remote from one another was made possible. A man could make more money than he had ever dreamed of if he could supply a need of some group or community.

And so industry in the sense that we know it today started with a rush. The principle of steam power was applied to the manufacture of goods with tremendous success. Factories sprang up, and they needed men to run them. Now husbands who but recently had worked at home, hand in hand and side by side with their wives, labored outside the home, developed lives that were independent to some extent of the home’s activities and concerns.

The supply of manufactured goods from the factories began to render the homemaking skills and handicrafts of women unnecessary. As time wore on and new ideas developed to meet the new conditions created by the machine, the education of the children passed from the home to a new institution, the public school.

It happened slowly, very slowly, over generations, in fact, and the full results of the Industrial Revolution were not felt until this century. At first, so gradual was the process that only a few women, scattered here and there, felt the impact of the change. But as time passed and the process extended, more and more families were drawn into the vortex of industrialization, and at length it had changed the lives of every individual in the land.

Very slowly, too, but everywhere, women woke as if from a centuries-old dream of peace and happiness to find themselves dispossessed. Gone was their central place in the family home, gone their economic importance, gone their close working partnership with their mate, their functions of teacher and moral guide to the children. The child himself was gone, to school, as the husband had gone to the mill or factory.

Yes, she was dispossessed, dispossessed of all those things that for centuries had defined her womanhood for her, that had supported her ego, given her the certain knowledge that being a woman, however hard, was a wondrous and most desirable thing. She felt her womanhood itself devalued, the things it represented unwanted.

And then she reacted. She reacted violently and with rage at this depreciation of her feminine attributes, of her skills, of her functions. Unhappily this reaction was precisely the wrong one, the one from which no solution of a happy kind for her could be attained.

Here’s what she did. Looking about, she thought she spied a villain in the piece. Who was it? None other than her partner through the centuries, man. It was he who had deserted her, who was responsible for her loss of self-respect as a woman, a mother, an equal socially and mentally and morally. He despised women. Very well, she would show him. She would simply stop being a woman. She would enter the lists and compete with him on his own level. To hell with being a woman. She would be a man.

You don’t believe it? It seems too farfetched? Woman as a sex would never have made such a decision?

Well, let’s look a little more closely at some of the facts.

Earlier I mentioned the feminist movement. Now it is time to look at it in more detail. It was launched by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, less than thirty years after the invention of the steam engine that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, and it’s power and influence were and still are enormous. It has been the self-appointed spokesman for womankind for over one hundred fifty years, and its program of reforms has been almost entirely realized in every detail.

What did this movement want to achieve? Let me quote to you what two profound students of feminism, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, had to say about it in their book Modern Women, The Lost Sex: “Far from being a movement,” they wrote, “for the greater self-realization of women, as it professed to be, feminism was the very negation of femaleness. Although hostile to men and hostile to children, it was at bottom most hostile to women. It bade women commit suicide as women and attempt to live as men … Psychologically, feminism had a single objective: the achievement of maleness by the female, or the nearest possible approach to it. In so far as it was attained, it spelled only vast individual suffering for men as well as women, and much public disorder.”

What was the program of the feminists? Actually Mary Wollstonecraft had enunciated it in its entirety in her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and the movement never deviated from her original demands. She had stated that men and women were, in all fundamental characteristics, identical, and that therefore women should receive the same education as men, be governed by the same moral standards, do the same work, and have identical political rights and duties. Women were to be treated exactly as men in every detail of living, and the same demands were to be made on them.

The appeal of this program was enormous. Nineteenth-century woman felt: “Ah, if we could only achieve this, then we would be happy once again.” The fact—and it’s a dreadfully simple one—is that now, indeed, the entire program has been realized and modern woman, having reaped the benefits of it in full, is more confused, perhaps even unhappier, than ever.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that woman’s lot was not difficult, often impossible, in the nineteenth century. Nor am I saying that all of the goals set by the feminists were neurotic and wrong-headed. The movement indeed helped to overcome some of the gravest dislocations in social and economic life caused by the upheavals that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

I am saying this: that in so far as the feminist movement pitted itself against the male, and at the same time advised woman to masculinize herself or divest herself of her feminine nature, it was dreadfully neurotic, and we have been reaping the whirlwind this movement started ever since.

The rage of the feminist was directed against herself.

We know, for example, that to fulfill herself biologically—that is, to give birth to children—a woman must have security, the protection of the male, a permanent abode. Marriage has been society’s answer to this feminine need from time immemorial. But the feminists pitted themselves against the institution of marriage. Woman, they held, had the right, even as men did, to be promiscuous sexually, to live with whom she pleased, for as long or as short a time as she pleased. If she wished to get married she should be able to do so, but she should also have the privilege of terminating this marriage when she wished to, when she tired of it.

We know, too, that maternal love for children, particularly love of her own children, is one of the major traits of womankind, as typical of her as her female anatomy. We know that only the very sickest women, mentally, will desert or neglect their children. Maternality is so deeply rooted in the biology of the female sex that its fierce protectiveness can be observed in many animals.

Maternality is a trap, said the feminists in effect, a bill of goods sold to women by men in order to keep them enslaved. Children should not be allowed in any way to interfere with the new freedom of women. Work, advised the feminists, right up to the last day of pregnancy. Then, mothers, get back to work as soon as possible. Put your child in the hands of some trained child handler or handlers. Public nurseries were advocated, pre-kindergarten groups were advocated; anything that “freed” the mother was advocated.

Freed the mother for what? you may well ask. To work in offices and factories as the men did, of course. To substitute boss for husband, to share the “privilege” of being hired or fired; to be, in short, men.

If space allowed I could continue with a long and circumstantial list of masculine goals which the feminists advocated. And I could give an equally long list of goals which ignored or denied the existence of feminine characteristics in womankind. Very few of the early feminists actually lived in the manner they prescribed. But it was as clear as crystal that they ardently desired to.

But here is the important thing to remember: The feminist credo thoroughly discredited truly feminine needs and characteristics and substituted male goals for female goals. There weren’t so many feminists in actual numbers, but those there were, were incredibly vocal, and in the end their ideals and beliefs became the ideals and beliefs of millions of women.

But the feminist front was not the only front in this war between men and women; it was only the loudest and most militant. Unnoted, hidden, unknown even to the women themselves, the war against feminine sexuality, against the flowering of true womanhood, was being waged in every home in the land. The chaste and prim-lipped heroine of this front was Victorian woman, whom we already have had a look at. Let’s take another quick one.

Her reaction to the loss of her position in the highly creative family home which had preceded the Industrial Revolution was just as violent as that of the feminist. But it was thoroughly unconscious. She had been rejected, her place taken from her, her sexual and maternal functions devalued. Very well. She had a perfectly good technique for dealing with the situation.

She simply denied the very existence of female sexuality. Sex, according to her, was exclusively a male characteristic; woman had none of it in her nature. Although this was a form of psychological revenge on the “rejecting” male, she was amazingly successful in convincing men in general, even the scientists of the day, that frigidity was indeed a basic attribute of the female.

Victorian woman was, of course, unconscious of her motives in affirming that she was biologically frigid. She entirely believed it herself, and there is much evidence to indicate that the individual woman was generally deeply shocked if she discovered she was not as unresponsive as she had been taught she was or wished to be. She kept any such reactions a very dark secret indeed.

Frigidity as an article of female faith died with the Victorian woman—a happy and mercifully early death during World War I. But the influence of Victorianism is still very much with us in our unconscious attitude toward sex and love.

This, then, is the heritage of woman today: On the one hand, from Victorian woman, a profound belief that she is and should be non-sexual, frigid, by natural law. On the other hand, from the feminists, that man is woman’s natural enemy, that she should drop her femininity altogether, oppose man, supersede him, become him.

Please stop for a moment now to think what effect either of these two attitudes must have had on the marital life of a woman who held one of them. Her hostility to her husband and all the misery such hatred implies, we take for granted. But it was the effect on the children that was decisive.

I have treated, as I have told you, several women who had been raised by Victorian or feminist mothers. The attitudes inculcated into these patients in their childhood would make one’s hair stand on end. Or it should. This is what they learned at their mother’s knee: Shame about their bodies; shame about menstruation, and disgust with it, hatred of it, for it is a hallmark of womanhood; fear of pregnancy and childbirth; punishment for early and natural sexual feelings and experimentation; destruction and depreciation of the father as an ideal image for the child to love or to emulate. In general, women learned early and well to loathe their womanhood in all of its important manifestations.

Can you begin to see why most psychiatrists passionately agree with Dr. Marynia Farnham when she writes: “The most precise expression of unhappiness is neurosis. The bases for most of this unhappiness … are laid in the childhood home. The principal instrument of their creation are women”.

You may perhaps have noticed that I have coupled our feminist with our Victorian woman, and you may object that they really shouldn’t be spoken of in the same breath. The feminists were, after all, for more and more sexual freedom; Victorian woman was anti-sexual. I feel that that is only superficially true. They were both, in their unconscious lives, against feminine sexuality. It is not possible for woman to be masculine sexually; to advocate that for her is exactly equal to demanding that she be frigid.

Of course feminism, as a conscious attitude toward sexuality, ultimately triumphed over Victorianism. Sexual freedom and all the other equal rights with men demanded for women by the feminists after World War I became the order of the day.

The flapper of the 1920’s represented the unintended flower of the feminist philosophy of life, its definition of what constituted womanhood. As we know, the flapper was a caricature of woman, a cheap and shoddy imitation of the opposite sex, a second-class man. Happily, she did not survive as a conscious national ideal, but the philosophy that created her did survive. The depreciation of the goals of femininity, biological and psychological, became part and parcel of the education of millions of American girls. Homemaking, childbearing and rearing, cooking, the virtues of patience, lovingness, givingness in marriage have been systematically devalued. The life of male achievement has been substituted for the life of female achievement.

The feminist-Victorian antagonism toward men has survived too. It has been handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line for so many years now that, to millions of women, hostility toward the opposite sex seems almost a natural law. Though many a modern woman may pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact, to supplant him, to exchange roles with him. She learned this attitude at her mother’s knee or imbibed it with her formula. Little that she learns elsewhere counteracts it with any great effectiveness.

Clearly, then, if this is the historical direction women have taken, the individual woman who wishes to become a real woman must change this direction. This she can do only by taking thought, long thought. For among the women around her she will not necessarily find too much support for her wish to be entirely feminine.

For one hundred fifty years now women have blamed their problems on the outside world. They have used the very real difficulties created by revolutionary social changes to avoid the task of looking within for the real problem and the real solution. They have indulged in an orgy of finger-pointing and self-pity.

If the results had been different; if this attitude had brought them happiness and fulfillment, if feminism and Victorianism had made them good mothers and joyful wives, or even pleased them with their new place in industry, the game might have been worth the candle. But it hasn’t been. The game has brought frigidity and restlessness and a soaring divorce rate, neurosis, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency—all that results when the woman in any society deserts her true function.

Last year a woman came to see me at the request of a lawyer she had consulted. She was on the verge of divorce, she told me. And then, her face distorted with rage, she said of her husband: “He will have to come crawling to me on his hands and knees before I will even think of forgiving him.”

I questioned her and soon elicited the fact that she had been totally frigid from the first time she had had intercourse with her husband. Yet consciously she felt blameless in the difficulties that had arisen, self-righteous, indignant that her husband should find her anything but eminently desirable after five years of joyless love-making. With such an attitude, of course, she could never have made the slightest headway against her underlying problem, so, as I sometimes do, I told her in detail the history I have told you in this chapter. She listened, at first with hostility and then with the growing shock of self-recognition. Just by listening she developed a genuine concern for the very first time about her whole attitude. She left that session with an avowed intent to look more deeply and more thoroughly into the whole matter and to reshape her values. There was no more talk of divorce from her; just hard work on her real problem, and success, finally, in dislodging the cause of it.

Seeing one’s own responsibility in a situation is often difficult. However, in this problem of frigidity, not to take the blame is even more difficult. It means—and has meant for millions—that one almost literally commits sexual suicide, embraces emotional isolationism as the proper condition for womankind.

Chapter 6
WHY WOMEN CAN BECOME FRIGID

Some time ago a young husband sat in my office. His wife had come to me for help for a frigidity problem, and after the first session he had asked her if he might see me. I take that to be a good omen for a relationship, generally, and I was not disappointed when I met him. He told me very quickly that he did not care how long it might take for his wife to get over her difficulty. “I’d stay with her even if she didn’t,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t love her problem, but I love her and I want you to know that I didn’t marry her for better only but for worse as well.”

No matter how much a psychiatrist hears about love, its difficulties and its triumphs, a statement like that always moves one, makes one feel that tasks and difficulties have been somehow lightened. In short, I liked him, and this moved me to ask him about himself. “That’s what I came to tell you about,” he said. “There’s something I thought just may be of some help.”

What he wanted to tell me was the amazing similarity between his background and his wife’s, and as he talked on I could see some of the reasons for his broad sympathy with her problem. They were both children of farm people and had been reared in the strictest of Puritan disciplines. They were both the oldest children, and each had had two brothers and a sister. Their mothers had hated and feared sexuality and had communicated quite freely to the children their feeling that it was dirty and wicked. The fathers had been punitive on the one hand and withdrawn on the other. This young man had broken away from home as early as possible and so had his wife. They had come to the city, gotten jobs in the same business, and here they had met.

I will take leave of our young husband now because the above facts illustrate the question I want you to ask yourself. However, in case some of my warmth toward him has come over to you, I can tell you that his marriage had a most happy outcome. His wife, motivated strongly, I am sure, by the sense of security his love gave her, was able to resolve her frigidity and the other neurotic problems which invariably accompany it.

But to the question: With almost identical backgrounds, why had the wife developed a rather severe frigidity problem and the husband remained perfectly normal sexually?

If you wish to extend that question you may ask yourself: Why is frigidity so widespread among women and sexual impotency so rare among men? We saw that under the adverse conditions caused by the Industrial Revolution women could, by the millions, abandon sexual gratification, convince the world and themselves that, biologically speaking, they were asexual beings. There was never the faintest suspicion that man, on the other hand, would or could abandon his sexual nature, no matter how difficult the going became. Men might develop neuroses, they might even take odd sexual directions, develop perversions, if their parents were sufficiently neurotic. But abandon sexual gratification en masse, they could not.

I think we now understand the answer to this problem, and I think it will be helpful for you to learn what we know about it. You will be able to see why the problem of frigidity is so basically psychological in nature, for one thing, and therefore why, when a woman’s chief complaint is frigidity, we feel that if she really means business she can get over it.

There are three major reasons why frigidity can develop in women. I am going to treat two of them here and reserve one of them for the next chapter.

The Sexual Drive in Women

A lovely actress I was treating for a rather severe frigidity problem came for her regular hour one day and paused on the threshold of my office. She appeared different—her face was softer, her motions slower—she was elated, and I felt at once that she had experienced the first reward for the hard work she had put upon her problem.

I was right and shall never forget her method of telling it. She had on a lovely pink cape; its flowing lines and delicate color seemed to express the very essence of the feminine. As she stood smiling at me she unbuttoned the cape and with a beautiful gesture threw it on the floor between us. “Thus we can cast it away,” she said. Then, stooping, she picked it up. “And thus,” she said, “we can put it on again,” and with a flourish she put it back on her shoulders. That hour was a celebration of her new-found capacity.

Her histrionic gesture, expressive of so much happiness in her, was not only graceful but was deeply symbolic of woman’s sexual nature. To see why this is so, let us first turn our attention to the biological meaning of the sexual drive.

You perhaps know that every animal is motivated by a profound instinctual need to preserve his species. His nature has developed those characteristics that ensure the ongoingness of his kind, lemmings excepted, perhaps. We know that characteristics that do ensure the species are, so to speak, more deeply rooted in the biology of a given animal than characteristics that are not absolutely necessary to the preservation of a species.

Now, in the human animal and in many other species, sexual intercourse is the basic method by which the species is continued. In this elemental instinctual activity the male deposits his sperm in the receptive female, who then, within her body, nurtures and protects it until it is ready for birth.

But here’s the important point: In order to deposit his sperm, the male must have an orgasm. If he did not, the sperm could not be deposited inside the female. Thus the male orgasm is absolutely necessary to the continuation of the species. If the male had ever lost his ability to have an orgasm the species would have disappeared from the face of the earth.

However, it is not a biological necessity for woman to have an orgasm to fulfill her sexual role. It is only necessary for her to receive the sperm. The mere reception of it, no matter how unresponsive she may be to the ardors of the male, fully discharges her duty to the species of mankind. Maternity, not orgasm, is her biological duty. She can be as frigid as the polar cap and it will not necessarily affect her ability to have children in the slightest degree.

Can you see the implications? One of my colleagues summed up the difference in this way: “To express it in a purely biological sense, the male orgasm is a necessity. The female orgasm is a luxury.” This “necessary” aspect of the male orgasm explains why men, no matter how deeply disturbing their childhood experiences may be, rarely lose their ability to have an orgasm and why women so frequently do.

Please do not misunderstand me, however. I am not saying that the orgasm a woman has, when she is able to achieve it, is any less intense than a man’s. Nor am I saying that it is not necessary to her psychological well-being, to her maturity, to be able to achieve it.