Chapter 11THE MASCULINE WOMAN
She was a strikingly handsome woman. I looked at her as she sat opposite me in my office and I remember being struck by the extreme femininity of her appearance: the glossy, clean softness of her brown hair, the peaches-and-cream texture of her complexion, the care she had given her toilette and her clothes. Everything was perfect. I recall I thought then: “Perhaps a little too perfect. It’s almost as if she is dressing for a role.”
First impressions are not always correct, but in this case mine were. My new patient, whom I shall call Toni (her real nickname was also based on a boy’s name) was suffering from the form of frigidity that is often called the “masculinity complex.” She was, in short, the “clitoridal woman,” whose general characteristics we looked at briefly before. Her case is so typical and illustrates so many aspects of this very widespread type of frigidity that I have selected it to tell here.
In my first sessions with her I could see that Toni’s clear thinking and logical mind, her emotionless, almost masculine forthrightness in expressing herself belied her softly feminine appearance. Her way of dressing was anunconscious attempt to hide from the world, and from herself, her real problem.
She was thirty years old, had been married for seven years, and had a five-year-old son. For the past two years she had had severe migraine headaches, sometimes as often as three times a week. These headaches had started at about the same time that serious marriage difficulties had developed between herself and her husband. The problem, she stated honestly, had originated with her. Rather quickly she seemed to have lost all respect for her husband. Looking at him one day, she said, she suddenly saw that he had no ambition of any kind and was “insufferably smug and complacent.” He had not the slightest desire to better his lot, she realized, but was content to putter around in his cellar workshop with “inane and useless projects” or to spend his evenings “glued to the television set” or playing poker with a few “useless men.”
This passivity on the part of her husband had inexplicably enraged her. “I realized in that moment that we could rot, socially and financially, if it were up to him,” she told me bitterly. “I can’t stand such pointlessness in a man.”
I now asked her what their social life together had been like, and she told me that it had been very active until two years before. “Most of our friends were my friends originally. His friends just seemed to fall away in the first year of our marriage. They weren’t very interesting anyhow, and I was just as glad. But after I began to lose interest in my husband, to lose my respect for him, I began to withdraw socially myself. My husband didn’t seem to care about that either. He doesn’t seem to care about anything.”
Further inquiry elicited the fact that Toni was extremely successful in the business world. She had been through a leading woman’s college and had been the president of her class and very prominent in extracurricular activities. “I wasa really Big Woman On Campus,” she said nostalgically. She had then gone to graduate school, taking her degree at Columbia University in business administration, and on graduation had entered the buying department of one of the largest merchandising corporations in America.
Within five years Toni had become the top buyer of women’s clothes for the entire corporation. In actuality this was one of the top positions of this kind in the United States, for the merchandising corporation was gigantic. Her present salary exceeded twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
I was not surprised to learn, at this point, that this was exactly three times the salary her husband made as a junior member of a law firm that specialized in corporation law.
I now asked Toni if she did not get a great deal of pleasure from her success in the business world. She told me that before she was married and for about two years afterward she had indeed felt a great deal of pride in her success. Her husband, too, had shared her pleasure in her achievements. After the baby had come, however, he had seemed gradually to lose interest in her work. And gradually, too, she had developed a growing sense of guilt about her activities in the business world. She had the constant feeling that she was neglecting her child. Sometimes she would call the nurse at home five or six times a day to find out if the baby was all right. “Two months ago,” she told me, “I went in to see my boss. I told him I wanted to leave or to cut down to a part-time job. He was terribly upset and at once offered me a large increase and gave me a big talk on how important I was and how much they needed me. One part of me was flattered enormously, but after I left him I felt depressed. I felt as though I were failing my child terribly, but I felt trapped by the amount of money I had been offered. I also felt that if I should really give it all up I would quickly become bored at just staying home.”
Everything Toni had said up to this point fitted the classical picture of the clitoridal woman. Almost invariably they marry a passive and rather dependent (though often very attractive and charming) man and finally become bitterly critical of his dependency and lack of drive, thus upsetting the equilibrium of the marriage. In their mind’s eye they wish for a more aggressive male who would dominate them, but this is pure fantasy, for they would not be able to stand real male assertiveness and, indeed, take it very poorly when their passive male does assert himself. Such women, too, are often very successful in the world of masculine achievement. And if they have children they develop great guilt about neglecting them.
One further characteristic that Toni had was a tremendous anxiety about childbirth. Her pregnancy had been characterized by a very deep depression; she had suffered physically for the entire nine months and, when the time for delivery arrived, had felt “absolutely certain that I was going to die.”
Knowing all this, a psychiatrist could almost guess the nature of Toni’s sexual life. It did not come out in our interviews for some time, and I did not press for the details. However, when the facts did emerge at length they portrayed the particular type of sexual response which characterizes the clitoridal woman and has caused endless and ill-informed speculation in various quarters. The fact that this form of frigidity is so widespread in our society has actually given rise to a group which believes that the clitoridal woman’s form of sexual gratification is perfectly normal. This group is vociferous and much-published and, in my opinion at least, can do incalculable harm if its conclusions should reach wide acceptance.
Toni was what we call “clitorally centered,” though she did have some general reactions to kissing and other formsof foreplay. For example, she enjoyed having her back rubbed and she received a rather minor pleasure if her husband manipulated her labia. But she definitely preferred that the foreplay be confined to her clitoris. If her husband stroked her labia for more than a few seconds, the sensations became rather uncomfortable and she would ask him to stop.
Orgasm was almost invariably confined to the clitoris. During such orgasm, though her vagina sometimes became lubricated, she felt no pleasurable sensations there at all. At the point of orgasm she could feel no vaginal contractions nor any desire to have her husband thrust his penis ever deeper or more rapidly inside her, as is characteristic of the normal orgasm in women.
On the contrary, she generally preferred to be masturbated manually rather than to have sexual intercourse. Often, to avoid intercourse, she would masturbate her husband. Or, when they did have sexual intercourse, her husband would generally masturbate Toni afterward.
However, she was occasionally able to have a clitoral orgasm during intercourse. This always was achieved when she took the position on top and her husband was on the bottom. She was very circumstantial in her explanation of why she could achieve orgasm in this position, pointing out to me at some length that her clitoris could come into more direct contact with his penis in this position. There may be some truth in this fact, but what was of more interest to me was the extent to which she went to make her point clear. I have often found that women with this type of problem are, in the beginning at any rate, very anxious to avoid any suggestion that they may be enjoying the position because in our society it is the traditional male position in intercourse.
Just as she took the lead in financial and social matters in the family so did Toni take the lead in sexual matters. Itwas she who almost invariably initiated every intercourse. She explained this fact to me by saying that her husband was very insensitive to her sensual moods. “He just doesn’t seem to pick up any cues that I throw out,” she said, “so I have to go after him when I feel passionate.” Please note that this, too, is a reversal of the usual pattern in sexual love between men and women in our society; the woman will sometimes initiate sex, but it is usually the man who does so.
It is interesting, too, to note that although the personal relationship between Toni and her husband had deteriorated badly in the two years before she came to me there had been no diminution in the amount of sex they had. Since Toni was the initiator of sex, the one who, so to speak, set the sexual pace of the relationship, it would indicate that she had split off her sexual feelings from other emotions. Unlike most women, she could have sex with a person toward whom, at least during this period, she felt no conscious feelings of love.
As soon as I possibly could, without upsetting her, I began to focus my discussions with Toni on the period two years before, when she began to develop feelings of anger toward her husband.
At first our discussions yielded nothing, though I had emphasized to Toni the importance of reconstructing all the details of life at that juncture as minutely as possible. At length she brought up the important factor. Two days before the sudden onset of her intensely critical feelings toward her husband she had, for the first time in her life, pleasurable vaginal sensations during intercourse.
She had felt very warmly toward her husband that night; an unaccustomed tenderness had filled her whole being before the love-making. They had had no preliminary love play of the usual manual kind, starting intercourse almost atonce. The vaginal sensations had begun halfway through the intercourse and had been maintained right up to the point of orgasm, when her clitoral sensations once more took over. She recalled that afterward she had been surprised and quite pleased but had soon “forgotten” the whole experience.
There could be no doubt that Toni’s anger at her husband and her migraines started right after this sexual experience. And there could be no doubt that they were intimately related experiences. Though her personality structure and the psychological events which caused her kind of frigidity were different from Patricia’s and from Joan’s, they were alike in one regard. All three had the deepest and most abiding fear of real vaginal sensation and ultimately, of course, of vaginal orgasm.
This fear is a profound one in the clitoridal or masculine woman. Toni, rather than admit to herself how frightened she was of this vaginal experience, chose unconsciously to ruin her personal relationship with her husband, to denigrate all those characteristics which she had formerly loved in him—his charm, his ability to relax, his quiet and warm understanding, his refusal to be driven by circumstances, and his insistence on enjoying the small, warm, everyday events of life. To protect herself from knowing the real nature of her problem, she had to blame him for her difficulties. She even had to make up the difficulties, for though he was a rather passive man he was also a very attractive and loving one.
The vagina is the very center of femininity, of female love, as we have seen. If the individual fears this love, she learns unconsciously to block vaginal sensations. If, however, at any point in her life she is beguiled into feeling sensation there, she will have a severe anxiety reaction, flee from the experience in any way she can. And this brings us to the psychological structure of this kind of problem.
The clitoridal woman develops, very early, an underlying denial that she is indeed feminine or that she has any use for the things of womanhood. She learns to feel that womanhood is dangerous, a slavish and humiliating role. Only men are powerful and secure; and thus she identifies herself with the male exclusively.
If you will recall that, sexual anatomy aside, there is little to distinguish boys from girls either psychologically or glandularly in the first ten years of existence, you will get some indication that the desire to be a boy need not seem so impossible of fulfillment to a little girl. And even if we take her sexual anatomy into consideration, the idea does not seem farfetched to her. She does have a clitoris, which, in her wishful psychology, she can consider a penis, or at least the beginnings of one. Though it is small it is, in medical parlance, “the homologue of the penis.” It can become erect; it has a head; it has a prepuce. Girls who are going to pursue (albeit unconsciously) their daydreams of becoming male, eschewing femininity, pay a great deal of very minute attention to these similarities.
Such was the case with Toni. Typically for such cases, her father had rejected her. During the stage of development when a young daughter needs a sufficient quota of her father’s love and tenderness to give her an experience of the rewards of womanhood, a substrate of feminine security, he simply ignored her. He was, by all accounts, a very cold man, engrossed in his business and quite indifferent to both his wife and daughter. The concept that men rejected women, were actively hostile to them, was very much deepened in Toni by the fact that her father behaved in exactly an opposite manner to her brother, who was three years younger. This young fellow received, by all accounts, the lion’s share of her father’s small store of attention and devotion.
Reports from a patient, while they have a certainreliability, cannot always be depended on completely. In Toni’s case I was fortunate to be able to check the veracity of her story. She had maintained a close relationship with her brother after they had grown up and, on Toni’s insistence, I saw him. If anything, Toni had understated the degree of her father’s withdrawn relationship to her and her mother. Even at that, the damage to Toni’s ability to love might not have been decisive had her mother been a warm and feminine woman. But here, too, circumstances militated against the little girl. Her mother (perhaps as a reaction against her husband’s personality but more likely because she, too, was essentially a masculinized woman) refused to stay home with the children after her son had achieved the age of three. She had opened a dress shop with a friend in the business section of Toni’s home town which had been very successful, demanding all her time. It was a rare evening when Toni’s mother got home for dinner. Between the ages of seven and fourteen the girl saw her mother little more than an hour a day on weekdays and half a day on Sundays.
It is not hard to see then that Toni’s young world had little in it that supported feminine values. It was clear to her that only male activities, achievement in terms of male goals, could bring security. Even her mother seemed to subscribe to this, for hadn’t she gone back into the world of male activity as soon as she could manage it? Indeed, judging the matter by her father’s relationship to her brother, she very early reached the literal conclusion that in order to achieve love a woman really had to be a man.
If we were to examine the purely sexual side of Toni’s unconscious identification with the male sex, we would only have to examine the dreams she brought to our sessions. At the beginning she would frequently have dreams in which she was dressed as a man or in which she was excelling in male sports. I have recorded one incredible dream, reallyquite a funny one in a sense were it not so basically pathetic, in which she played quarterback for Harvard in the annual Yale-Harvard football game. In my notes taken at the time I wrote that she made four touchdowns!
In her conscious mind Toni could not recall whether in her childhood she actually believed she might turn into a boy. More disturbed women than she often do remember such conscious fantasies in girlhood. However, on a deeper level there is little doubt that Toni treasured the possibility of such a metamorphosis. As time wore on, of course, reality and her own good intelligence modified and disguised her wish. She repressed the desire to be a boy in a physically external way, by growing a literal penis. And she substituted for this concrete idea fantasies of achievement in, to her, the male sense. In high school and college she threw herself into a world of intellectual and extracurricular activity and made an astonishing, almost legendary, record for herself. In the college she attended she became not only the president of her class but the editor of the school newspaper and president of the college’s century-old literary society.
Sexually Toni did not abandon clitoral masturbation in adolescence as, under normal circumstances, a girl would, or at least would attempt to. She clung to this early form of sexual release with almost grim determination, masturbating daily at least once. This continuation of clitoral masturbation long after the time when it is normally given up was, of course, the sexual sequel to her early rejection of all that was feminine.
At this point one might be willing to grant that Toni had sufficient reason to embrace masculine values but wonder just why she should develop such a strong rejection of her feminine side, such a fear of it. The question becomes more urgent when we learn that Toni’s sex instruction was handled in an apparently intelligent manner by her mother.Sex, menstruation, pregnancy, and other related matters were explained to her calmly and clearly and at just the right times to satisfy her normal curiosity.
She had no shocking experience, nobody seduced her; nothing whatsoever that was visibly untoward had happened to her.
Many girls can be turned against sexuality by experiences that are directly traumatic. Such experiences, however, are not an absolute prerequisite for later difficulties. If you will recall our earlier discussion, you will remember that to embrace the feminine role a woman must be willing in the deepest biological and psychological sense to suspend the natural law of self-preservation. She must be willing to sacrifice her time, her being, her other goals—her very life—to give birth to her children and to see them safely to maturity.
If in her formative years the young girl is not properly prepared for this role, if womanhood is not treated as desirable, honorable, and lovable, she will automatically turn against it. The game, to the young mind, will seem far too risky for the candle. As the years pass, nothing disproves this contention and the original childlike fears, unmodified by reality, remain intact or even increase.
In other words, to the improperly prepared child, facing the reality of being a woman is in itself traumatic. Such was the case with Toni. She was convinced that real love, full of giving and willing sacrifice, represented death. It is no wonder then that two years before she saw me, when she had come to the verge of experiencing something like true sexual pleasure with her husband, she turned against it in a panic, barred it from her consciousness, attempted to render unlovable the man who had dared to rouse such dangerous feelings in her.
In telling of Toni’s story I have selected a rather pure type of clitoridal woman, but I should like to make clear thatnot all cases show such an obvious masculinization. Nor am I making the point that the woman who succeeds in the market place is necessarily dominated by masculine motives. A woman can be a stay-at-home, apparently performing all her duties as a wife and mother, and still be suffering from the same kind of basic problem that confronted Toni. Perhaps we can put it this way: many women of this kind have never learned to imitate men as successfully as Toni did.
Helene Deutsch has said, “ … the masculinity complex is characterized by the predominance of active and aggressive tendencies that lead to conflict with the woman’s environment and above all with the remaining feminine inner world … in its most primitive manifestation, masculinity appears as the direct enemy of feminine tendencies, disturbing their function.”
Toni certainly fitted this description. However, she like many other women with this kind of problem, was finally able to overcome her fear and envy of the male and to embrace her feminine nature without fear or shame.