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and withdrawn on the other.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.
I _am_ saying that a woman’s ability to have an orgasm is far more
subject to outside influences than a man’s ability. It is in many ways
more subject to the psychological experiences, the mental and moral
traumas of growing up. Compare the female orgasm to a shallowly rooted
tree which the wind may blow down more easily than its deeply rooted
brother, it is still a tree, however, and if it can be sheltered and
protected from storms that are too severe it can flower as beautifully
as any other.
The fact that frigidity is so psychological, so subject to the mind,
gives it almost a “willful” character. It is often as if a woman had
“chosen” to be frigid in a very real sense. I don’t mean consciously
chosen to be, generally speaking. It’s an unconscious choice. But
the fact that it has that element of choosing in it often makes it a
poignant condition indeed.
I know one case where the “choice” was, in part at least, conscious,
and I am going to tell it briefly to emphasize my point, the fact that
frigidity has a very high element of the mental as opposed to the
biological.
Years ago, on a vacation with my husband, I met an older woman with
whom, until her death, I had a very close and highly valued friendship.
She was a wonderful woman. She was a doctor, but this had not prevented
her from having five children of her own, two of whom have since become
quite famous.
One day, after our friendship had deepened and we had begun to exchange
confidences, she told me the following story. She had been deeply in
love with her husband but had been totally frigid. This had not seemed
strange at the time; she had been married in 1904, and the traditions
of Victorianism were still very much adhered to. However, after the
birth of her third child she began to experience some feelings of
pleasure during intercourse, and these gradually increased. At this
point she had her fourth child, and intercourse was interrupted for
two or three months. When it was resumed her feelings of pleasure had
increased enormously and on the second time she had a profound orgasm.
But she was not, like my actress, delighted with the new horizons the
experience opened up for her. She was very consciously frightened and
very consciously ashamed. All her background and training had been
against it. She consciously decided never to let the experience repeat
itself. She was entirely successful in her resolution, she told me.
Unlike my actress, she threw off the lovely pink cloak of her feminine
potentiality and never donned it again. Her husband had died after the
birth of their last child, and it was not until a few years afterward,
with the new information science had developed on the subject, that she
realized the tragedy of her decision.
It’s a poignant story, but I have not told it for that reason. I have
told it because it illustrates very clearly how subject to the mind, to
outside cultural and moral influences, feminine sexuality can be. If a
grown woman can choose to destroy her mature and flowering sexuality
at the height of its strength, just think of the fragility of this
sexuality in the bud.
_The Fear of Motherhood_
On the whole, women will face anything to achieve motherhood. Recently
a woman of thirty-five came to my office. She had called me twice to
make appointments and twice broken them at the last moment. When this
happens a psychiatrist will generally assume that the patient has
become frightened of her decision to face up to whatever problem is
troubling her and has gone into a last-minute flight. I had assumed
that about this patient and had expected, if I ever did see her, to
encounter a reticent, scared, perhaps terrified person.
Instead the person who sat opposite me was a very pretty woman of
thirty-five, well dressed, clear-eyed, and straightforward. She came
right to the point.
“I’m here because I’m terrified of having children,” she told me. “I
must find out what’s at the root of my fear.”
“Was your fear the reason you canceled the two appointments?” I asked
sympathetically.
“Oh no,” she answered quickly, “the children were ill. We’ve had flu
for a month. First one came down and then another.”
“Children?” I asked in puzzlement. “What children?”
“Mine, of course,” she said.
“How many do you have?” I asked.
“Four,” she said, “but John and I want six and I thought … ” She
paused; then, catching my smile, she looked down at the floor for a
moment and back at me, and then we both burst into laughter.
She did have a fear of childbirth, however, dating from certain
traumatic experiences in her childhood, and we were able to resolve it.
It was a marked fear, but the important point is that even with it she
had gone right on and had four children.
The maternal instinct is as deep and as ineradicable in women as the
instinct to plant the seed of his species is in man. They both subserve
the same ends, the continuation of the race, and even if a woman’s
childhood is sown with neurotic fears by unhappy parents--yes, even
neurotic fears of childbirth--her desire to have children of her own
will, in by far the majority of cases, survive relatively intact.
Thank heavens this is so. For the bearing and rearing of children are
the beautiful destiny toward which a woman’s whole body and personality
point from earliest childhood on. If this profound goal cannot be
achieved, the result is far too often a shriveling of the personality
of the individual.
Thank heavens this is so, too, for the good of the race. I thought one
of my colleagues expressed the whole thing very neatly in a paper given
to a private psychiatric group recently. “If the feminists had been
able to injure the maternal instinct of nineteenth-century woman to the
same degree that they injured her sexual instinct, the Western world
would by now be well on its way to being depopulated.”
No, the maternal instinct cannot be fundamentally affected by adverse
circumstances. However, the proper handling of information about the
maternal instinct by a mother is very important to the proper sexual
development of her daughter. Misunderstandings about maternity and what
it means can scare a young child badly--so badly, in fact, that fear of
it can be a direct cause of later frigidity.
Here’s why the maternal instinct can cause trouble to a young girl’s
developing sexuality. Most women know this, even if they have never
phrased it in this manner.
To gratify the maternal instinct a woman has to put her very life right
on the line. In a real sense she has to be willing to say, and to keep
on saying: “I am willing and ready to die for the sake of or the safety
of my child.”
I’m not only speaking of the now very slim chance that she might die in
childbirth, though I should like to point out that until very recently
that possibility had to be faced by every mother-to-be. And the
enormously high mortality rate in childbirth throughout history and in
every civilization shows very clearly that women _were_ willing to face
death to have their child. They have not changed.
What I mean more directly, however, is the fact that the maternal
instinct demands of the woman in every situation an ever-readiness to
put her child before herself, before her safety, before her personal
needs, before everything.
Just yesterday I read of a woman who had saved two of her children
from their burning home. The place had gone up like tinder and she had
snatched them up, one seven and one ten, and, holding them under her
arms, brought them to safety down a flaming stairway. She had thought
her twelve-year-old had gotten out by himself but then discovered that
he had not. She started back at once, without a moment’s hesitation, to
rescue him, but the building was now on the point of collapse and she
was restrained by several firemen. However, so powerful was her drive
to save her child that she broke away from their grasp and entered the
building.
She found him, too, on the kitchen floor, overcome by smoke, and
somehow got him to the front hall and out. She was badly burned, though
she will live. But the child was all right; the child was all right!
_That_ was all that mattered.
And it is all that matters to every mother, unless, of course, she is
dreadfully ill mentally--psychotic, in fact.
Just think of it; this aspect of the maternal instinct is more powerful
than the instinct for self-preservation, which is known to be one of
the basic instincts of all life. It supersedes self-preservation,
annuls it; there are no reservations about it. It will never whisper:
“You’ve done all you can; three powerful men are holding you down and
you can’t get to him anyway.” It will fight powerfully and to the very
end for the mother’s right her indomitable need, to save her child.
Of course most mothers never have to face physically dangerous
situations for their children. In most lives the way this aspect of the
mother instinct expresses itself is in everyday sacrifices. Mothers
give up (and, in the healthy woman, with pleasure, by preference) their
time, intellectual pursuits, careers, first to have the child and then
to see him safely to maturity. Everything else a woman could call her
own becomes secondary to this impulse in the maternal woman. As you saw
in the normal woman, there are checks and balances within the female
personality which prevent her from making a psychological martyr of
herself to the point where she would be a _detriment_ to her children,
but at this time I should like to make a different point.
I have said that the maternal instinct is more powerful than the
instinct for self-preservation. I ask you to imagine for a moment how
easily this characteristic of women could frighten a young girl if the
experience of pregnancy or the role of the mother is presented to her
in an improper way. She will react with acute anxiety, fear, rather
than with joyful anticipation. This anxiety will color in dark hues
though will not overwhelm her desire and determination to have babies.
It _will_ tend to take all the pleasure out of her sex life, however;
it _will_ tend strongly to make her frigid. And it will tend to make
her a less effective mother, even a very poor one indeed.
The biological role of woman is motherhood. If a woman cannot dare to
accept this aspect of her destiny, she will be deeply defeated in her
life. From any standpoint one wishes to look at the maternal role, it
is a great and beautiful one, embodying in it and giving expression to
qualities that are universally admired and cultivated: nobility, the
sacrifice of self, fortitude, love that passeth understanding.
The depreciation of motherhood in any sense whatsoever in the mind
of a young girl is a crime against her if one is in a position to
be influential with her. To fill her with fears, misunderstandings,
resentments of and reservations about her historic role is to cut
her off from full flowering as a woman. The ability of woman to have
an orgasm, her deepest form of relatedness to man, is planted rather
lightly in biological soil, as we saw in the first section of this
chapter. This ability is tightly interwoven with her psychological
experiences at every stage of her development, and the quickest and
most effective way to force her into frigidity is to teach her to be
frightened of the maternal aspects of her personality.
We saw how well womankind functioned before the Industrial Revolution
as an equal partner with her husband in the family home. Her
experiences were fully satisfying to her body and mind because her role
was recognized at its true value; she was needed, rewarded, depended
upon, universally admired. When she lost her role and, in agony,
mistakenly turned to feminism to find a new definition of self, or to
Victorianism, she found only ashes, a depreciation of all those things
that made her a woman; she found, and adopted, values that turned her
against her feminine self, her maternal self, her passionate self.
Scorn for true femininity was what she found and, tragically, she took
this attitude for her own.
If woman is to find true happiness once again, she must return to her
real and joyful self. She must relearn that surrender to her biological
destiny is not a trap, not a condition of slavery to her uterus, of
exploitation by man and nature, but rather a wonderful and privileged
condition.
I should like to give the contents of a letter that came into my hands
recently. I consider it a beautiful letter. It describes in a very
simple way the reactions of a woman who had been caught in a maze of
misunderstanding and fear but who had found her way out, had learned
the power and joy she could receive by surrendering to her true destiny.
This letter was written by a young woman who had just become pregnant.
Six months before, sick with anguish at her joyless marriage, unable
to enjoy any aspect of her sexual relationship because of a constant
and acute fear of becoming pregnant, she had consulted the pastor of
her church, having heard that her church had psychiatric services. The
pastor had gained her admission to a group-therapy project run by a
psychologist. The group was made up of women who had encountered some
difficulty in their lives with their husbands and children.
The patient had attended the group for four months and then had had
to leave, for her husband’s job had been transferred to another part
of the state. The letter, sent to members of the group, arrived three
months after her departure. I have received special permission from
this ex-patient to reproduce this letter on the understanding that the
names originally mentioned in it be changed.
_Dear, dear Friends_:
I will leave out all the details of our move here except to say that
we are all settled down and in our wonderful new home. Anyway, I can’t
wait to tell you that I am going to have a baby. It is a constant
astonishment to me, for it is so different from my expectations. It
all happened so easily. I don’t quite know how, but my fears and
worries have left completely. I didn’t know life could be like this. I
must be a new person. If the doctor hadn’t told me to stay relatively
quiet I would be dancing in the streets. Sam says I sound like a
honeymooner, but he’s really delighted. To think what I have deprived
both of us of because of a lot of nonsense!
The strangest thing is that I can’t remember the things I used to talk
about in the group. I wonder if this happens to everybody. I keep
asking myself: What was so painful? What was it that made me always
angry with Sam? And I’ve found a new deep love for my mother. I am not
angry with her, only sorry that she had to miss so much. You probably
won’t remember, but when I asked my mother how she had felt when she
was pregnant she had said quite sharply to me: “Put such thoughts out
of your mind. You’re young, so enjoy yourself. You’ll know all about
it soon enough, too soon.” The reply seemed so ominous and foreboding
to me. Plus the fact that she was constantly complaining about all
things female. I guess I had picked up her attitude in toto without
realizing it, until I aired the effects on me for the first time with
all of you.
I tell you this so that you will know the fears _do_ go when you are
able to get them out and see them for what they are. I love you all,
and I am deeply grateful to you, and I shall never, never forget the
help my talk with all of you has given me.
_With love and deep gratitude_,
MARGARET