The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol Tavris

Author:Carol Tavris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

6

Bedtime Stories

Three fables of female sexuality

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, psychologists, doctors, and advice columnists used to dispense prescriptions for the treatment of sexually “frigid” women. The goal was to warm these women up a little, but not so much that they were in danger of liking sex too much. (Women were supposed to travel a narrow pathway between “frigidity” and “nymphomania.”) Professional treatises on the problem of female frigidity typically sounded like this:

Certain women have the capacity to identify completely with their men and are happy in their role as encouraging and contributing companions. . . . They may be the most intelligent and lovely women, but they are unaggressive and not competitive. . . . These women are not frigid, but only after long courting do they allow any intimacies.

In contrast to the woman described, from whom emanates the extraordinary beauty of femin[in]ity, we find the woman with the masculinity complex, characterized by aggressive tendencies and envy of the male. This attitude frequently originates from frustrating experiences in her role as a woman. Even after marriage and the birth of several children, she must find satisfaction in a job or profession to overcome her unconscious feelings of inferiority towards the male sex. . . . Because of their rebellion towards what they interpret as superiority of the male, [such women] unconsciously and, in some instances, consciously resist a response to the lovemaking of the male. They are either frigid or they respond rarely. 1

When do you suppose this passage was written—1895? 1925? These comments appear in Frigidity: Dynamics and treatment, written in 1969 by a psychiatrist named Fritz Kant. Poor old Dr. Kant’s analysis would never be acceptable today to sexologists or to the psychiatrists who compiled the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. His language is far too laden with subjectivity and bias, starting right off the bat with the fraught word frigidity. It is clearly a pejorative description; the appropriate diagnosis nowadays is Female Sexual Arousal Disorder. (No more pejorative descriptions for men, either. Impotence is out, with its connotations of a power failure, replaced by Male Erectile Disorder.) And of course Kant’s clear dislike of women who want jobs and families is a dead giveaway of his prejudice that a sexually healthy woman is happiest in her role as wife and mother. Modern readers may also be tickled by his description of proper feminine women, who yield “intimacies” only after long courtship and who then magically and unfrigidly release their sexual passions with the one right man.

Frigidity: Dynamics and treatment almost immediately became an anachronism in the modern era of sex research. William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Response had been published three years before, in 1966, and their book on therapy for sexual problems, Human Sexual Inadequacy, followed a year later in 1970. These books were widely hailed as a major scientific effort to chart the physiological changes of human sexual response, and to treat sexual problems in a practical and efficient manner.

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