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.