Chapter 7ANATOMY AND DESTINY
We have seen two important reasons why women can, in the course of growing up, be deflected from true sexual maturity. Let us now look at a third, and equally important, reason.
I have already described the so-called clitoridal woman to you, but now I must tell you more about the implications of her problem. You will remember that in the female genitalia both the clitoris and the vagina are capable of experiencing orgasm. This fact is of decisive importance to the problem of frigidity in women.
Why? It means, in effect,that women have two distinct sexual organs, both capable of bringing her release from sexual tension. In the unconscious sense many women can “choose” one type of sexual satisfaction in preference to another. This ability to choose often spells disaster, for one of these methods of gratification represents immaturity and is allied to neurosis.
A man has only one organ: his penis. He has been given no anatomical alternative. If, as happens in relatively rare cases, upsetting early experiences cause him to block off hissexual feelings, he simply becomes impotent. He will experience this impotency as a tremendous and tragic deprivation and will be powerfully motivated to overcome it. Those who have witnessed the sufferings of a man with such a problem will know just how powerful his drive back to health is.
The mature female’s orgasm takes place within the vagina; the fact that a woman can experience this kind of orgasm generally marks her as a fully developed woman in all aspects of her personality.
The clitoral orgasm takes place on the clitoris only. It excludes the vagina from sensual participation and it is often independent of the male penis. This kind of orgasm is possible at an early stage in female development. If, in growing up, the young girl becomes for any number of reasons frightened of mature vaginal sexuality, she can block that pathway and keep it blocked permanently without consciously experiencing any strong feelings of being deprived. She can do this because she is already having, as far as she knows, an amply satisfying experience through her clitoral orgasm. Since she has never experienced true sexual awakening, she doesn’t know what she is missing, consequently she doesn’t miss it.
You can see then that the woman who is able to have only a clitoral orgasm has no very strong motive for moving on to the next stage of sexual development. Her developing sexuality is channeled off into a sensual cul-de-sac and there, unless valiant and very conscious steps are taken, it tends to remain. As the early years of development move on into adolescence and further, the direction of her sexuality will not change, for she feels no reason to change it. Indeed the channel grows deeper, the earlier method of sexual response more ingrained. In the end she can respond in no other way.
Since such a woman is not advancing sexually she tends, too, to remain static emotionally. If her psychological fears of real womanhood are not resolved, she now begins to build up defenses of her childish emotional needs and of her childish methods of sexual gratification. By the time she is ready, in terms of her age, for marriage, she may very well have a full-blown neurosis that militates gravely against the success of any close relationship.
This then, is how, biology can represent destiny, with a helping hand from psychology. In a very real sense this dual potentiality of woman’s anatomy contains the seeds of sexual and hence personal tragedy.
Remember that the woman whose orgasm is confined to the clitoris is definitely frigid. Statistics on the prevalence of this kind of sexual problem are not available, but most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts agree that it is very widespread, may even be the dominant form of frigidity in our society.
Unhappily many women who suffer from this form of frigidity have not been helped in the past several years by widely published and thoroughly erroneous views concerning sexual behavior in the human female. The Kinsey report, above all, has erred in this respect. It makes no differentiation between vaginal and clitoral orgasm. Indeed its authors passionately defend the view that all orgasm is clitoral. How trained observers could come to this conclusion, it is difficult to say. The great observers in the field of human sexuality in the past fifty years have been in the field of psychiatry. They have been and are unanimous in their observation on the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasm and its importance to personality development and to neurosis. The fact that the Kinsey report ignores this important and well-established fact about the female sex and, even worse, defends the opposite viewpoint simply invalidates, frompsychiatry’s viewpoint, many of its basic findings about orgasm.
The sad thing, however, is that the Kinsey report is often used to bolster the neurotically defensive attitude of women who are able to achieve only clitoral orgasm. They can say to themselves that their method of gratification is perfectly normal; do they not have a tremendous body of “scientific” data to support their view? And somehow or other women with this difficulty do get hold of the Kinsey “results.” I myself have had several women suffering from the kind of problem I have just described quote Kinsey to me at some length in defense of their method of gratification. And, having checked with several of my colleagues, I find that they all report many similar experiences.
This is unfortunate. Women who suffer from any other form of frigidity are frequently motivated to face up to their problem by feelings of sexual frustration. Sooner or later, driven by natural hungers, they will take steps to throw off the yoke of their difficulty.
The woman who is able to have a clitoral orgasm, however, has no such strong motivation. She can ruin her life and never be the wiser, never realize the reason why.
I strongly advise, therefore, that such women be more than usually wary about their tendency to be complacent, more than usually insistent about finding a way out of their dilemma; above all, they must recognize their life situationasa dilemma, a serious one that can far too easily be rationalized.
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 shameor 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 responseinintercourse. 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 isnotunsympathetic 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 fromthe 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.
And I should like to put the mind of all such women to rest on one particular point I cannot count the number of times that women with a clitoridal problem have asked me whether I believed that, just under the surface, they had a homosexual problem or at least strong homosexual inclinations. The answer is invariably no.
Let me give you an example of one such typical case. Not long ago a young nurse came to see me. She was extremely upset and wept copiously before she could bring herself to tell me her problem. She had been married for about a year and had found that she could not have an orgasm during intercourse. It was necessary for her husband to manipulate her clitoris for a rather extended period of time before she could come to a climax. After she told me this she remained silent for a long time. Then she burst out with it. “Doctor, I think I’m homosexual.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, I had this dream, and I was hugging the head nurse in the hospital and I felt very warm and good inside.”
“Any other damning evidence?” I asked.
Now she really blushed. She hung her head, and one could hardly keep from going over and patting her head and saying there, there. “Yes,” she said. “When I was twelve. With this other girl. We used to, used to … ” Words failed her.
“Play with each other sexually?” I asked as gently as possible.
She looked at me, wide-eyed and said, “Yes,” nodding tragically.
She had had no repetition of the experience since she had really grown up, and I was able to set her mind completelyat rest on that matter. She was not at all homosexual. That symptom is a very severe one, of course, and not always amenable to treatment. It always implies that the woman prefers women to men; she falls in love with objects of the same sex. She has no conscious interest in men sexually.
Our little nurse’s “homosexual” dream simply meant that she was having a disturbing time with her husband sexually and wanted a “mother image” to protect her from her difficulties, help her through them. She got one in me, of course, and her need for such a mother was probably why she selected a woman psychiatrist in the first place.
Her early sexual play with another little girl is perfectly normal. Not all children indulge in this kind of play, but many do, and unless it continues into adolescence it is generally harmless.
The reasons behind this delusion of homosexuality are complex. They lie in an early confusion of the clitoris with the male penis, as I will illustrate later. But you may be certain of one thing—you are not going to discover that your problem is based on homosexuality as it appears in the difficulty called “lesbianism.” To hold onto such mistaken conceptions is to frighten oneself with self-told ghost stories after the fashion of young children.
I wish here to cover just one more attribute of the woman whose sexual feelings have become fixed on her clitoris, one which, if she is forewarned, she will and should be suspicious of. It is the tendency to look for solutions for her problem in directions where no solutions lie.
I have treated women who have tried everything under the sun in their search for an easy resolution of their clitoridal problem—drugs, surgery, even yoga. One of the most widely used evasions can be found (and how often it is!) in the many popular manuals written, ostensibly, to tell one how to achieve a happy marriage. Such books, for the most partpublished in all good faith, almost invariably counsel married partners to diversify their sexual positions during intercourse. Many of these books contain illustrations to drive their lesson home.
There is nothing wrong with this advice in and of itself. Anybody with a modicum of experience knows that variety is one of the finest spices of love. The books generally, if not always, neglect to say, however, that such variety is only relevant to a sex life in which the partners have no deep-seated sexual problem to start with. By omitting that piece of information these books give the strong tacit impression that variety of sexual position will solve an already well-established sexual difficulty.
The desperate woman will seize upon these implications as upon a panacea for her ills. I must state here that all of the innumerable positions of love described in the Hindu Kamasutra (from which so many of our marriage manuals, incidentally, derive much of their information) will not undo a clitoral fixation. A woman is asking for just one more emotional defeat if she insists that a solution lies in this direction.
We have now seen the three things that make frigidity possible in women. I will repeat them briefly so that you’ll remember them later.
The first is the fact that the female orgasm is not a biological necessity in woman as it is in man. The race can and does go on if women fail to have full sexual satisfaction. This strongly suggests why the female orgasm is so susceptible to psychological influences of an adverse kind.
The second is the fact that motherhood calls for tremendous psychological and sometimes physical sacrifices; it means that a woman has to reverse the natural law of self-preservation and put her children’s welfare ahead of her own.This is deeply frightening to some women and, unless they are properly educated, can cause them to fear their feminine sexual impulses to the point where they are unable to enjoy love-making.
The third reason is that women have, in effect, two organs of gratification, the clitoris and the vagina. Clitoral orgasm is immature, evades true feminine sexuality, and is considered a form of frigidity. However, millions of women find this earlier method of gratification so satisfying that they are not motivated to move up to the mature level.