_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.