ANATOMY AND DESTINY
We have seen two important reasons why women can, in the course of
growing up, be deflected from true sexual maturity. Let us now look at
a third, and equally important, reason.
I have already described the so-called clitoridal woman to you, but now
I must tell you more about the implications of her problem. You will
remember that in the female genitalia both the clitoris and the vagina
are capable of experiencing orgasm. This fact is of decisive importance
to the problem of frigidity in women.
Why? It means, in effect, _that women have two distinct sexual
organs, both capable of bringing her release from sexual tension_.
In the unconscious sense many women can “choose” one type of sexual
satisfaction in preference to another. This ability to choose often
spells disaster, for one of these methods of gratification represents
immaturity and is allied to neurosis.
A man has only one organ: his penis. He has been given no anatomical
alternative. If, as happens in relatively rare cases, upsetting early
experiences cause him to block off his sexual feelings, he simply
becomes impotent. He will experience this impotency as a tremendous and
tragic deprivation and will be powerfully motivated to overcome it.
Those who have witnessed the sufferings of a man with such a problem
will know just how powerful his drive back to health is.
The mature female’s orgasm takes place within the vagina; the fact that
a woman can experience this kind of orgasm generally marks her as a
fully developed woman in all aspects of her personality.
The clitoral orgasm takes place on the clitoris only. It excludes
the vagina from sensual participation and it is often independent of
the male penis. This kind of orgasm is possible at an early stage in
female development. If, in growing up, the young girl becomes for any
number of reasons frightened of mature vaginal sexuality, she can
block that pathway and keep it blocked permanently without consciously
experiencing any strong feelings of being deprived. She can do this
because she is already having, as far as she knows, an amply satisfying
experience through her clitoral orgasm. Since she has never experienced
true sexual awakening, she doesn’t know what she is missing,
consequently she doesn’t miss it.
You can see then that the woman who is able to have only a clitoral
orgasm has no very strong motive for moving on to the next stage of
sexual development. Her developing sexuality is channeled off into a
sensual cul-de-sac and there, unless valiant and very conscious steps
are taken, it tends to remain. As the early years of development move
on into adolescence and further, the direction of her sexuality will
not change, for she feels no reason to change it. Indeed the channel
grows deeper, the earlier method of sexual response more ingrained. In
the end she can respond in no other way.
Since such a woman is not advancing sexually she tends, too, to remain
static emotionally. If her psychological fears of real womanhood are
not resolved, she now begins to build up defenses of her childish
emotional needs and of her childish methods of sexual gratification.
By the time she is ready, in terms of her age, for marriage, she may
very well have a full-blown neurosis that militates gravely against the
success of any close relationship.
This then, is how, biology can represent destiny, with a helping hand
from psychology. In a very real sense this dual potentiality of woman’s
anatomy contains the seeds of sexual and hence personal tragedy.
Remember that the woman whose orgasm is confined to the clitoris is
definitely frigid. Statistics on the prevalence of this kind of sexual
problem are not available, but most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts
agree that it is very widespread, may even be the dominant form of
frigidity in our society.
Unhappily many women who suffer from this form of frigidity have
not been helped in the past several years by widely published and
thoroughly erroneous views concerning sexual behavior in the human
female. The Kinsey report, above all, has erred in this respect. It
makes no differentiation between vaginal and clitoral orgasm. Indeed
its authors passionately defend the view that all orgasm is clitoral.
How trained observers could come to this conclusion, it is difficult to
say. The great observers in the field of human sexuality in the past
fifty years have been in the field of psychiatry. They have been and
are unanimous in their observation on the difference between clitoral
and vaginal orgasm and its importance to personality development and to
neurosis. The fact that the Kinsey report ignores this important and
well-established fact about the female sex and, even worse, defends the
opposite viewpoint simply invalidates, from psychiatry’s viewpoint,
many of its basic findings about orgasm.
The sad thing, however, is that the Kinsey report is often used to
bolster the neurotically defensive attitude of women who are able
to achieve only clitoral orgasm. They can say to themselves that
their method of gratification is perfectly normal; do they not have
a tremendous body of “scientific” data to support their view? And
somehow or other women with this difficulty do get hold of the Kinsey
“results.” I myself have had several women suffering from the kind of
problem I have just described quote Kinsey to me at some length in
defense of their method of gratification. And, having checked with
several of my colleagues, I find that they all report many similar
experiences.
This is unfortunate. Women who suffer from any other form of frigidity
are frequently motivated to face up to their problem by feelings of
sexual frustration. Sooner or later, driven by natural hungers, they
will take steps to throw off the yoke of their difficulty.
The woman who is able to have a clitoral orgasm, however, has no such
strong motivation. She can ruin her life and never be the wiser, never
realize the reason why.
I strongly advise, therefore, that such women be more than usually wary
about their tendency to be complacent, more than usually insistent
about finding a way out of their dilemma; above all, they must
recognize their life situation _as_ a dilemma, a serious one that can
far too easily be rationalized.
At this point, then, I wish to emphasize once more the role of woman’s
responsibility in this matter of sexual response. There is often a
stronger-than-usual underlying irrational fear in clitoridal women
which makes them hesitate, even when they have admitted their problem,
to face up to it in any effective way. I wish therefore to reiterate
the point that nobody who suffers from this problem should feel shame
or blame for it. You did not choose in any conscious sense to remain
on this earlier and less “dangerous” plane of sexual development. Your
body made the choice, if you will, but you had nothing to say about
that. The strange dual sexuality of woman is at the base of the matter.
It all happened because you misunderstood or misinterpreted certain
early experiences. Or a grown-up responsible for your very early
training was ignorant or misinformed.
But now it will be the better part of wisdom and valor for you to face
up to the fact that your method of gratification is an expression of
immaturity, even if that immaturity was forced upon you when you were
too young to know the difference. Don’t subside into feelings of guilt
and inferiority about the problem. Remember that you are not alone.
There are probably millions of women who have the same problem. You can
be one who achieves the joys that lie just beyond this. They are real
and solid joys, and they contain none of the terrors you had thought
they contained. Not one.
One of the things I have found helpful in motivating a woman with a
clitoridal problem is to face her with its effect on her husband. Women
with this fixation have a curious inability to see these effects or to
face up to them realistically. I have found that even when such women
know that their form of gratification is infantile and expressive of
neurosis they insist that their husbands not only do not mind the
manual manipulation necessary to bring them to climax but actually
prefer this method of sexual contact to intercourse.
Such has never been the case in my years of clinical experience.
Husbands mind very much indeed.
Here, very recently, is what one husband, whose wife has been able to
move on from her clitoral fixation, told me: “I feel like a man again.
No matter what anybody says, your wife’s response is the most important
thing, and it’s got to be a response _in_ intercourse. If she doesn’t
respond that way, you gradually lose faith in yourself and then you
lose interest in making love.”
Another man, whose wife has just come to me and who has never been
able to have an orgasm except clitorally, recently said: “I may sound
unsympathetic and petty, but if I felt there was no end in sight to
this kid stuff, I mean this form of having to stroke endlessly, I think
I’d give up on the sex part. It’s lost all its fun.”
He’ll get his fun back, for his wife, knowing a lot more than she did
when she started, is very intent on helping herself. And the husband is
_not_ unsympathetic or petty in his complaints. He is simply human, and
there’s a limit to human endurance.
The wife’s denial that the husband is bothered by a clitoridal problem,
I have found, is based on a deeper fear--the fear that the marriage is
being endangered by her problem. Both of the women mentioned above (and
many others I have treated) finally admitted that they had come for
help because of their fear that their marriage was headed for trouble,
that their husbands were close to leaving them. The fact is, though,
that many men seem to have a very high tolerance for this problem in
their wives. I have yet to find any man who has broken up his marriage
for that reason. Indeed both the men I have quoted above had reassured
me that they could and would go on taking their frustrations. They just
strongly preferred not to.
No, the danger is not from the husband. Real men rarely leave women
for that reason. The danger is from the woman herself. She it is who,
because of her immaturity, will do the rejecting rather than face her
problem. The real danger is that she will force the man away from her
without even realizing that she has done so.
You begin to see, then, that the chief characteristic of women with
this type of problem is evasiveness, hiding from the facts. It is as
if they feared what they would find out if they faced up to things. I
can only tell them that they are not going to find out a thing that is
really frightening, not a thing that they cannot handle.
And I should like to put the mind of all such women to rest on one
particular point I cannot count the number of times that women with
a clitoridal problem have asked me whether I believed that, just
under the surface, they had a homosexual problem or at least strong
homosexual inclinations. The answer is invariably no.
Let me give you an example of one such typical case. Not long ago a
young nurse came to see me. She was extremely upset and wept copiously
before she could bring herself to tell me her problem. She had been
married for about a year and had found that she could not have an
orgasm during intercourse. It was necessary for her husband to
manipulate her clitoris for a rather extended period of time before
she could come to a climax. After she told me this she remained silent
for a long time. Then she burst out with it. “Doctor, I think I’m
homosexual.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, I had this dream, and I was hugging the head nurse in the
hospital and I felt very warm and good inside.”
“Any other damning evidence?” I asked.
Now she really blushed. She hung her head, and one could hardly keep
from going over and patting her head and saying there, there. “Yes,”
she said. “When I was twelve. With this other girl. We used to, used
to … ” Words failed her.
“Play with each other sexually?” I asked as gently as possible.
She looked at me, wide-eyed and said, “Yes,” nodding tragically.
She had had no repetition of the experience since she had really grown
up, and I was able to set her mind completely at rest on that matter.
She was not at all homosexual. That symptom is a very severe one, of
course, and not always amenable to treatment. It always implies that
the woman prefers women to men; she falls in love with objects of the
same sex. She has no conscious interest in men sexually.
Our little nurse’s “homosexual” dream simply meant that she was having
a disturbing time with her husband sexually and wanted a “mother image”
to protect her from her difficulties, help her through them. She got
one in me, of course, and her need for such a mother was probably why
she selected a woman psychiatrist in the first place.
Her early sexual play with another little girl is perfectly normal. Not
all children indulge in this kind of play, but many do, and unless it
continues into adolescence it is generally harmless.
The reasons behind this delusion of homosexuality are complex. They
lie in an early confusion of the clitoris with the male penis, as I
will illustrate later. But you may be certain of one thing--you are
not going to discover that your problem is based on homosexuality as
it appears in the difficulty called “lesbianism.” To hold onto such
mistaken conceptions is to frighten oneself with self-told ghost
stories after the fashion of young children.
I wish here to cover just one more attribute of the woman whose sexual
feelings have become fixed on her clitoris, one which, if she is
forewarned, she will and should be suspicious of. It is the tendency to
look for solutions for her problem in directions where no solutions lie.
I have treated women who have tried everything under the sun in their
search for an easy resolution of their clitoridal problem--drugs,
surgery, even yoga. One of the most widely used evasions can be found
(and how often it is!) in the many popular manuals written, ostensibly,
to tell one how to achieve a happy marriage. Such books, for the most
part published in all good faith, almost invariably counsel married
partners to diversify their sexual positions during intercourse. Many
of these books contain illustrations to drive their lesson home.
There is nothing wrong with this advice in and of itself. Anybody
with a modicum of experience knows that variety is one of the finest
spices of love. The books generally, if not always, neglect to say,
however, that such variety is only relevant to a sex life in which the
partners have no deep-seated sexual problem to start with. By omitting
that piece of information these books give the strong tacit impression
that variety of sexual position will solve an already well-established
sexual difficulty.
The desperate woman will seize upon these implications as upon a
panacea for her ills. I must state here that all of the innumerable
positions of love described in the Hindu Kamasutra (from which so
many of our marriage manuals, incidentally, derive much of their
information) will not undo a clitoral fixation. A woman is asking for
just one more emotional defeat if she insists that a solution lies in
this direction.
* * * * *
We have now seen the three things that make frigidity possible in
women. I will repeat them briefly so that you’ll remember them later.
The first is the fact that the female orgasm is not a biological
necessity in woman as it is in man. The race can and does go on if
women fail to have full sexual satisfaction. This strongly suggests why
the female orgasm is so susceptible to psychological influences of an
adverse kind.
The second is the fact that motherhood calls for tremendous
psychological and sometimes physical sacrifices; it means that a
woman has to reverse the natural law of self-preservation and put her
children’s welfare ahead of her own. This is deeply frightening to
some women and, unless they are properly educated, can cause them to
fear their feminine sexual impulses to the point where they are unable
to enjoy love-making.
The third reason is that women have, in effect, two organs of
gratification, the clitoris and the vagina. Clitoral orgasm is
immature, evades true feminine sexuality, and is considered a form
of frigidity. However, millions of women find this earlier method of
gratification so satisfying that they are not motivated to move up to
the mature level.