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 The fathers had been punitive on the one hand and withdrawn on the other.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.