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.