SECTION IIThe Psychology of Frigidity
Chapter 4WHAT IS FRIGIDITY?
Now that we have seen the real potential of woman, how she can flower and blossom in the climate of love, what she can be like when she embraces her true destiny, we may turn to an examination of frigidity with some perspective. This section will deal with what frigidity is, specifically, and why it can and does occur in women, blighting their capacities, stunting their personality, chilling and killing their ability to love at the heart’s deep core. When a woman gets a clear picture of such matters, andonlywhen she does, can she find her way back to the highroad of real womanhood.
If we take the word “frigidity” in its most general sense it means, as I have already stated, an inability to enjoy sexual love to its fullest potentiality. This means, purely and simply, the inability to have an orgasm of the type described in Chapter 2. But the matter is more complicated than that, for there are degrees of frigidity, and I think it is very important to understand what this means.
Perhaps I can make this idea clearest by first describing the symptoms of a woman who came to see me several months ago. She was an example of total sexual frigidity.
In our first interview she described herself as having absolutely no sexual reactions whatsoever. She did not respond to her husband’s caresses in any way at all. Neither her clitoris, vagina, nor labia was capable of the slightest sexual response. She received no stimulation from kissing or physical closeness. Her breasts and all secondary erotic regions were, from the standpoint of sensual response, dead. Her vaginal passage never became lubricated before or during intercourse. The act of love was very painful for her. An examination by a competent gynecologist showed no physical condition which would explain her pain. Her external genitalia were all fully developed. Her reproductive organs—the vaginal tract, cervix, uterus, tubes, and ovaries—also were normally developed and showed no pathology.
This woman’s sexual unresponsiveness was entirely psychological, and on a scale showing the degrees of frigidity she would represent absolute zero. (This is no longer true of her, incidentally; she has made progress in therapy in a relatively short time, considering the extent of her difficulty, and her final prognosis promises to be excellent.)
At the opposite end of this frigidity scale is the woman who trembles on the verge of sexual maturity but cannot quite step over the line. In the act of love she has all the responses which I have described as taking place in normal sexual intercourse, but she cannot come to orgasm, or at least orgasm happens quite rarely—say once in ten or twenty times—and it is generally a mild and unsatisfactory one. You will be interested to know that her sexual problem is a relatively easy one to resolve. This is the kind of frigidity that may disappear entirely after the birth of a child. I have seen it dispelled, too, by a single conversation with a wise counselor or with just time and a minimum of insightful understanding which she can obtain by taking thought or learning more about the nature of her problem and dispelling certainmisunderstandings she has had about the nature of sex, marriage, men, and love.
In between these two types there are all degrees of sexual frigidity. The severity of a woman’s problem, or the lack of it, can be calculated in terms of the degree of response she has to her husband’s caresses and the frequency with which she achieves satisfaction in intercourse. Also important in estimating the degree of the problem is the orgasm itself. This is purely a subjective matter and can of course be judged only by the individual. If the orgasm is weak and chronically leaves one with a dissatisfied feeling, a certain degree of frigidity is present.
In addition to thedegreesof frigidity there is atypeof frigidity that it is very important to understand. We call a woman suffering from this form of frigidity a “clitoridal” or “masculine” type. To make her problem clear to you I shall have to describe her typical sexual reaction.
This woman’s responses to sexual stimulation are usually quite passionate. In the foreplay preceding sexual intercourse and even in the first part of intercourse her reactions parallel the normal to a greater or lesser extent. This type of woman, however, can always be identified by the kind of orgasm she has.
This orgasm takes place on her clitoris exclusively. She does not feel the orgasm in her vagina, nor do the sexual sensations spread very strongly to the other parts of her body. The sensual experience is primarily localized at climax, and though, owing to her lack of experience with the mature form of orgasm, she may defend her orgasm as perfectly normal and adequate, it is not. Therapy has helped many women with this constricted reaction to sexual intercourse and, once they have experienced the profound pleasure of the true orgasm, they will admit quite freely their former deprivation.
The clitoridal woman seeks to obtain her typical orgasm in two ways. In intercourse she will sometimes strive to bring her clitoris into direct contact with the penis, thus obtaining the stimulation necessary for her to achieve climax. Most women, however, are not able to gratify themselves in this way. Intercourse seems to deaden their sexual feelings, even their clitoral feelings. It is as though the male penis in the vagina represented a dangerous and hostile presence. Such women are only able to come to their clitoridal climax either by masturbating themselves or having their husbands do so before or after intercourse.
The clitoridal woman—that is, the woman who experiences orgasm on her clitoris alone—is very definitely suffering from a form of frigidity. Indeed this form of frigidity is extremely widespread, and we will devote much space to it later, tracing the origin of the difficulty and the indications for treatment.
Since we have a name for the clitoridal type of sexual frigidity, let us, for the sake of clarity, also give a name to the form of frigidity first described, that which is characterized by a subnormal degree of sensation in the entire genital area and weak and infrequent orgasm. This form of frigidity is called sexual anesthesia in textbooks, and I will use that phrase here when I refer to it. The word “anesthesia,” as you probably know, simply means the absence, or relative absence, of sensation.
Now that we have named names I should like to say that I wish the problem of frigidity were as uncomplicated as this description makes it sound. If it were we’d simply have the problem of a large number of women who weren’t getting all the pleasure out of life that is possible. But there is far more to it than that.
The sad fact is that frigidity usually has a profound psychological repercussion on the individual. Her inadequacy isrooted in her childhood or adolescence, in early fears and misunderstandings, in events largely forgotten now. Around these early experiences, as crystals around a string, have clustered a whole series of personality traits that make life very hard for her and, much too often, unbearable for those nearest and dearest to her—her husband and her children.
To put it most directly, frigidity is generally a product of neurosis. And, most importantly, the frigid woman’s neurotic behavior is in direct proportion to the degree of her frigidity. I have found it to be true that, the more frigid a woman is, the more neurotic her behavior becomes, the more inimical to her own good and to the good of her family.
It is these psychological repercussions that make the problem of frigidity a serious one for the individual and society. The frigid woman’s often grossly neurotic psychological traits are raising havoc with our marital institution in the form of unhappiness, divorce, and maladjustment in her children.
Women will usually face the fact that they are sexually frigid; generally they have to; the knowledge is forced upon them. But they will rarely face the fact that they have personality difficulties that are directly related to their obvious sexual difficulty.
Let me give you an illustration.
Last year a very intelligent woman came to see me. She was an associate professor of history at a leading university and, according to her, her only complaint was that she could not have an orgasm during intercourse. She was unusually frank in describing the sexual aspect of her problem in her first interview, and when she had finished the description of her reactions and lack of them she had described a woman with a rather severe sexual anesthesia. She had neither clitoral nor vaginal sensation and could claim only some vaguelypleasant sensations on her labia. She had nothing approximating an orgasm.
Actually she was a very fine woman, but she was totally confused about this area of her life. “If I could only break through this silly little block,” she told me, “our marriage would be ideal.” I could get no further real facts from her. She insisted that she and her husband had “a whole community of shared interests” and two “wonderfully normal” children. I asked to see her husband.
I got the real story from him. He was, he told me, quite worried about his wife and about their marriage and had been for a long time.
She had always, he said, been an extremely competitive woman, but since his promotion from associate professor to full professor four years before, this characteristic had become almost unendurable. “I hardly dare to open my mouth any more,” he told me, “because I know she’s going to contradict me.” Quarrels had become extremely frequent, and their oldest child was definitely showing neurotic signs. I inquired about her reactions during her pregnancies, and he told me that she had been constantly ill physically and, while she would not admit it, had clearly been deeply frightened of the whole experience. Indeed, after the birth of the second child she had become severely depressed for over two months. He told me that yes, indeed, they hadhada community of interests for the first couple of years of their marriage but that her competitiveness with him had become so pronounced that any mutuality, from his standpoint, was now almost impossible.
Any psychiatrist knowledgeable in such matters could have guessed from the woman’s description of her sexual problem pretty much what I learned about her from her husband. For, as I have pointed out, the kind and degree of frigidity a woman may confess to are also an openstatement of the kind and degree of personality distortion she is subject to.
As one might guess, this patient was not easy to treat. She had developed a powerful tendency to handle her fears by denying their existence. When she was finally able to see through this self-deceiving trait, however, she came to grips with her problem. She was able to see that she had been in a ten-year competition with her husband instead of a marriage. When she realized this she was able to control her competitive actions, and the immediate rewards she received in the form of renewed affection and companionship from her grateful husband motivated her to find out more and more about herself. At length this intelligent but dreadfully insecure person became, through understanding and insight, a real woman able to give and take in every aspect of the love relationship.
Frigidity causes a personality distortion. I wish to impress this on you deeply. It means that the person has a misunderstanding of reality, denies it, blames others for her own miseries and failures.
One woman who had been cured of a severe frigidity problem phrased it this way: “I was looking at life and people through a distorting glass. No wonder I made such poor decisions.” She was right, too. Her problem had first driven her to promiscuity, then to marriage with an alcoholic. I was very glad, when she first came for treatment, that she had not yet had any children. With her deeply seated, sexually based personality problem she might have ruined them. I am even gladder that, remarried to a fine man, she has two children now.
In a later section we shall examine in great detail these personality problems that accompany frigidity. There are, however, more immediate symptoms which I should like to go into here.
You will recall in the description of sexual intercourse leading to orgasm how thoroughly the body becomes mobilized: heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure rise precipitately, tissues become engorged with blood, glands secrete freely, muscular tension mounts to a pitch which would be unendurable if the sexual instinct were not demanding expression. Complete satisfaction brings an end to all these processes, and the energy discharged through normal channels and in a normal manner leaves the person in a condition of relaxation and with a sense of well-being.
When orgasm doesnottake place, when there is no release of the intensely mobilized energy, there are immediate repercussions, both physical and psychological, on the individual.
Psychologically the woman who has been brought to such a pitch experiences a feeling of acute frustration which, consciously or unconsciously, turns to anger at herself and at her partner. If the anger is unconscious, she may have physiological symptoms—headache, nausea, throat constrictions, heart palpitations, or difficulty with breathing. She may also weep uncontrollably, vomit, or have tremors throughout her body.
This unconscious anger at her frustration may also cause her to quarrel with her husband or to take out her rage on the children.
I should like to emphasize that she usually does not see any connection between these symptoms and her frustrated sexual experiences. When her anger at her frustration does become conscious, she usually blames her husband for her lack of satisfaction. As I have pointed out, he is rarely to blame.
Purely physical symptoms not connected with repressed anger may also follow upon sexual excitement which has not been released through orgasm. These are somatic and can probably be traced to undischarged neuromuscular andglandular energy. Such symptoms include low back pain, general restlessness, and very often acute insomnia. Several of my patients have complained of severe vaginal pains which have lasted several hours. Gynecologists report that abdominal cramps, probably emanating from contractions of the uterus, are frequent.
As you can see from this recital of symptoms and my preliminary descriptions of personality disorders, women may pay a very high price for their frigidity. If the condition were relatively rare, we could take some comfort fromthatfact at least.
But frigidity is not rare; it is one of the commonest and most serious chronic ailments that beset society today. Conservative estimates indicate that 40 per cent of all American women suffer from some degree or kind of sexual frigidity. No other public health or social problem of our time even approaches this magnitude.
I have now told you about the degrees and psychological consequences of frigidity and described one basic type. There are, however, two other types of frigidity which, because they have certain confusing elements in them, I have reserved until now to explain. Psychologically and sexually both of these types seem to run counter to the generalities I have made about frigidity so far.
The first type, though we consider her definitely frigid in the wide sense of the word, is able to have full and complete orgasm practically every time she has intercourse. This is really quite an astonishing fact, considering the usual close connection between personality and sexuality. Actually one could not distinguish in any way the sexual reaction of this type from that of the perfectly normal woman described in Chapter 3.
However, this kind of woman is totally unable to builda relationship with any man. For that reason she generally becomes, in the end, sexually promiscuous. Somehow and somewhere along the line a wedge has been driven between her sexuality and her ability to relate psychologically in a love relationship. Her sexuality has come to apparent maturity while her character has remained infantile. We call this psychic frigidity.
This type of woman is not, however, to be confused with the nymphomanic woman, who, in my experience, is generally seriously mentally disturbed and for that reason is not included in this book. The woman with psychic frigidity usually has sexual affairs with one man at a time; her neurosis is usually based on sexual seduction in early childhood.
The second type is nearly the exact opposite of the psychic type of frigidity. I call her the all-mother type. She is a distinct anomaly. In the first place, she is definitely classifiable as sexually frigid; the degree of her erotic reaction is zero. She is totally anesthetic sexually.
Psychologically speaking, however, she exhibits almost the perfect picture of normalcy. She is happily married, is a very giving and altruistic person, and is totally loyal and devoted to her husband. She is, above all, a wonderful mother, willing and able to give the very best of herself to her children. Her husband is generally happy with his marriage. We suspect, although there is not sufficient data on this to say it with certainty, that the mate of the all-mother type has a rather low-pitched sexual nature and also a rather low storehouse of normal male vanity, albeit he is a good provider and a steady type. It is probable that the woman divined his characteristics unconsciously when she first fell in love with him.
There is generally little reason why the all-mother type of woman should seek to change herself in any way. I must emphasize the fact again and again that the reason frigidity presents a problem that must be solved is that it has harmfulrepercussions on the woman and on those close to her. It causes acute misery to her, causes personality damage to the children, and tends to destroy her marriage. The all-mother type of frigidity does none of these things, and I see no reason, if the woman doesn’t, why she must contemplate changing herself. However, the matter can be a subtle one, for this type of woman can, without any awareness of the fact, tend to be overprotective of her children or tend to have a hard time letting them go from the nest when that period in their growth has arrived. She should be most careful, weigh this matter thoroughly, before she decides in any final sense whether her problem may or may not be having untoward effects of a concealed nature.
These, then, are some of the basic facts about the nature of frigidity. Let us now consider their implications.