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.