SECTION I. _the Normal Woman_

The Normal Woman

Chapter 2

THE NORMAL ORGASM

The first thing I am going to do on this, so to speak, journey with you is to give you a view of your destination. I am going to describe an orgasm to you. I am going to describe it in detail.

We occasionally do this in psychiatry when dealing with a frigidity problem, and sometimes it has astonishing results. I have seen women who, after hearing for the first time a complete description from an authoritative and objective person of what to expect of themselves in the act of love, almost immediately win through to the sensual goal they had been deprived of.

On one occasion a patient of mine, who over a period of months had worked through a rather severe frigidity problem, detailed to her younger sister the wonderful sexual experience she was now able to have. The younger sister had been married only two months and had not once reached sexual climax. She had seriously contemplated consulting a psychiatrist about her “problem.” The very night her older sister described true orgasm to her she was able to achieve her own first complete satisfaction with her husband.

However, my chief motive in approaching the subject of frigidity by describing the normal orgasm is not to try to bring about a sudden or miraculous cure. In cases where such a sudden release of mature sexuality is achieved and thaw comes like a sudden spring, the frigidity problem is generally, even though it may appear to be deep-seated, a superficial one, lightly rooted in the personality.

The real reason I start with the orgasm is that a picture of the normal is an absolute necessity if you are to understand deviations from it with any real clarity. It is a truism that in order to understand illness in the body it is first necessary to understand health. Every doctor knows this and so do his teachers, for in medical school he first learns, through classes in anatomy and physiology, the structure and functions of the healthy body.

I think you will understand frigidity more thoroughly if we pursue the same technique here, first describing the genital anatomy of woman and from there proceeding to a description of the normal orgasm, what it is, where it is located, its function in the healthy man and woman, and other pertinent material.

Despite the wide dissemination of sexual information in our time, many women often show an astonishing ignorance of their own genital region and of the character and meaning of sexual response, including orgasm. I have had patients who did not know that they possessed a clitoris, others who made no distinction between their urethra and their vagina; some have not known of the existence of the uterus as a separate organ, and some, in confusion about their uniquely feminine secretions, have believed that women can have a seminal ejaculation as men do. Perhaps most of the readers of this book will have no such misinformation, but nevertheless I feel it is wise to review the simple facts pertaining to the feminine genitalia.

Before making a detailed description of woman’s sexual apparatus, I should like to make a preliminary observation which can help you to understand the sexual nature of woman. It is this: that while women are capable of having true sexual gratification in the same sense and with the same intensity as men, they have one important difference in their responses. The man, when he is aroused, feels the sexual desire directly in his genitals. A woman’s first sexual sensations are not usually genital but are felt over her entire body, on her skin surfaces, everywhere; this is followed by sexual excitation in her genitals, and this is an important fact for both men and women to understand. Ignorance of this fact has given rise to many misunderstandings between the sexes, for of course it makes the woman somewhat slower in reaching the moment when she is ready for intercourse than the man is. It must be taken into consideration by both parties to an act of love.

A woman’s genital apparatus is both internal and external. The external genitalia are called the vulva when they are referred to all together. The most obvious part of the vulva is the part we called the major (or sometimes outer) lips, which enfold the rest of the genitalia. If these lips are parted we see two smaller lips; these are called the minor lips and have a very high degree of sexual responsiveness. Even in books for laymen the Latin words are often used for these two organs: labia majoris and labia minoris, which mean, simply enough, the major lips and the minor lips.

The labia majoris also contain within their folds the rest of the external genital structure of woman. Here we find the clitoris, the vestibule, and the urethra, or opening to the bladder.

The clitoris is by far the most important and most widely misunderstood part of the external genitalia. It lies immediately above the top fold of the labia minoris and is a little piece of tissue slightly less thick than a pencil. This organ is enormously important to the whole psychological and sexual development of the individual woman. It is often called the “homologue of the male penis,” and this simply means that in the embryo the cells which form the penis in the male are the same cells which form the clitoris in the female. Thus the two organs have the same cellular derivation.

The clitoris, like the male penis, is made up of erectile tissue, and when a woman is sexually excited it becomes erect in the same manner that the penis does. It also has a head and a foreskin covering it, and the head of the clitoris, at least in children and adolescents, is generally extremely sensitive to stimulation. In the fully mature female this sensitivity often diminishes, giving way to the vagina as the primary source of the greatest sexual pleasure. However, many women who become fully mature sexually maintain much of the original sexual responsiveness of the clitoris.

The remainder of the external genitalia is contained within the vestibule. This is the entrance proper to the vagina and is very susceptible to sexual excitation. The vestibule lies between the minor lips and is directly beneath the clitoris. It contains the hymen, the urethral opening, and the openings of the glands of Bartholin.

The hymen is generally referred to as the maidenhead. It is a thin membrane which partly covers the entrance to the vagina. There is no direct sexual sensation on the hymen, and sometimes pain is experienced when it is perforated, usually during the first intercourse, although the hymen can be broken by an accident in childhood, through the insertion of surgical instruments, etc. Because of the pain associated with its perforation and the stories that a young girl often hears about this pain, it can be a source of much anxiety to her and condition her attitude toward sex in general.

The glands of Bartholin are of great importance to the act of love. These glands discharge a thin colorless mucus in sexual excitation, and this lubricates the vaginal opening and canal during intercourse. The amount of secretion varies greatly with each individual. Sexual frigidity often affects these glands adversely, causing the secretions to be inadequate or nonexistent. However, the amount of secretion will also vary rather dramatically at times in the individual who has no basic sexual blocking, and therefore the glands of Bartholin cannot be taken as a final criterion of sexual adequacy or inadequacy.

And now we come to the most important part of a woman’s anatomical sexual equipment: the vagina. This is a passageway of some three to three and a half inches which extends from the vestibule on the outside of the cervix, which is the bottom end of the uterus. The vagina is, of course, the canal which accepts the penis, and it may interest you to know that in Latin the word literally means “a sheath for a sword.” The sexual act in its purest form expresses the essential passivity associated with women and the aggressiveness of the male, the actor and the acted upon. The Romans understood this basic difference at least linguistically.

It may have surprised you to learn of the relatively short length of the vagina. The tissue of its walls are extremely elastic, however, and not only can it contain a penis of virtually any thickness or length, but it can stretch enough to allow the newborn infant to pass through it. The penis presses against the cervical end of the uterus, which may be forced upward until the penis gains full entrance. Contact with the soft tissue of the cervix is a source of great pleasure for the male, and the pressure can be an equal pleasure for the woman.

The vaginal walls are lined with a soft skin, not unlike mucous membrane, but it does not secrete as mucous tissue will. A secretion is, however, released from the cervix, and this also helps to lubricate the vaginal canal during intercourse.

I have said that the vagina is the most important part of a woman’s sexual equipment. This is so because it is within the vagina that the orgasm of the truly mature woman takes place. Upon it and within it she receives the greatest sensual pleasure that it is possible for a woman to experience.

And this brings us to the subject of orgasm. I think you will understand it more fully if I describe it in the context of the sexual experience as a whole.

The sexual instinct in both men and women is marvelously complex. When it is unencumbered by neurosis it gives color, shape, brightness, charm, vividness, and direction to the entire personality, and the mechanisms by which it operates encompass both body and mind.

Desire can be set off in a woman either in response to a touch or by some act, sight, or thought which she has been exposed to. One of the chief things to which a woman responds is a cumulative tenderness expressed in words or in acts.

Whatever the stimulus, however, the brain receives the signal and, through the nervous system, sends out preparatory reactions throughout the body. The response of men to stimuli perceived by the brain as sexual is amazingly fast; some men arrive at full sexual preparedness for intercourse within three seconds--that is, their penis becomes fully erect and ready to enter the vagina within that time. Women react, on the whole, somewhat more slowly, though full preparation for intercourse, under the best of conditions, is often only a matter of a few more seconds than the man’s.

As the sexual excitement increases, tremendous changes go on throughout the body, changes that might frighten you if they occurred under other circumstances.

The pulse rate goes up astonishingly. There are records of its reaching 150 and more as the individual approaches and then reaches the sexual climax. Such pulse rates generally occur, in health, only in athletes who are performing prodigious tasks of speed or endurance.

The blood pressure, too, goes up precipitately. In a matter of a few seconds it can rise well over 100 points. Breathing also becomes much deeper and swifter. With the approach of orgasm the breathing becomes interrupted; inspiration comes in forced gasps and expiration occurs with a heavy collapse of the lungs. It is as though the sexually excited person had been in a race.

As the sexual act continues there is a general shortage of oxygen throughout the body, which accounts for the unusual breathing. This gives rise to a tortured expression on the face, as if the person were undergoing severe pain. This fact has been observed by Kinsey in his famous study of female sexuality, and I quote here an interesting paragraph on the phenomenon:

“ … Prostitutes who attempt to deceive (jive) their patrons, or unresponsive wives who similarly attempt to make their husbands believe that they are enjoying coitus, fall into an error because they assume that an erotically aroused person should look happy and pleased and should smile and become increasingly alert as he or she approaches the culmination of the act. On the contrary, an individual who is really responding is as incapable of looking happy as the individual who is being tortured.”

Within seconds after sexual arousal the blood supply in the veins and arteries lying close to the skin increases, causing the body to become flushed and the temperature to rise slightly. Certain areas of the body are engorged with this blood, become swollen and erect, notably the penis of the man, which swells, often to twice its size. In women, this also happens to the clitoris, which becomes firm, and to the nipples of both sexes. The firmness of these organs increases as the sexual climax approaches.

Muscles throughout the body begin to tense at the onset of sexual excitement, and this tension increases as the excitement grows. Certain glands and tissues also increase their secretions as the sexual act commences and moves closer to completion. The salivary glands and the nasal mucosa flow freely, and it is this latter fact which causes, in conjunction with the engorgement of the surface blood vessels, the characteristic nasal stuffiness so many people notice after intercourse. In some women the secretions of the glands of Bartholin and the mucus from the cervix of the uterus become amazingly copious as sexual excitement rises, and particularly during orgasm itself. This profuse flow may have given rise to the widely held and entirely mistaken idea I have mentioned--that in orgasm women have an ejaculation similar to the male’s. There is no such ejaculation--nor indeed any female organ that could make one possible.

One of the most amazing aspects of sexual intercourse is the fact that all five senses become extremely dulled as the act increases in intensity. The ability to feel hot and cold, to feel pain, or to hear sounds becomes almost nonexistent. The eyes take on a characteristic trance-like stare, and vision becomes constricted. The entire mind and body are concentrated fully on the mounting sexual feeling and exclude all else. In orgasm itself the anesthesia of the senses is almost total. Indeed many people experience a temporary loss of consciousness for a matter of seconds. Some, according to Kinsey’s findings, remain unconscious for two or more minutes.

This last fact brings us to our examination of the experience of orgasm itself. If you are to understand frigidity in women it is of tremendous importance to grasp the nature of orgasm and what it means physically and psychologically. The importance of such understanding is due, of course, to the fact that orgasm, of the type described here, is the very thing the frigid woman is unable to have. In fact, its absence from her experience is the usual definition of frigidity. Certain kinds of frigid women may experience one, two, or all of the physical and psychological reactions described above, which normally would terminate with orgasm. But the final experience eludes them; at the vital juncture the body, despite an agonizing need to come to a climax, refuses to respond; it draws back, goes dead.

Orgasm is the physiological response which brings sexual intercourse to its natural and beautiful termination. It is preceded by a very dramatic increase in all of the phenomena noted above. In the moment just preceding orgasm, muscular tension suddenly rises to the point where, if the sexual instinct were not in operation, it would become physically unendurable. The pelvic motions of the man and the movement of the penis back and forth within the vagina increase in speed and in intensity of thrust. The woman’s pelvic movements also increase, and her whole body attempts with every move to heighten the exquisite sensations she is experiencing within her vagina. According to many women with whom I have discussed this experience, the greatest pleasure is caused by the sensation of fullness within the vagina and the pressure and friction upon its posterior surface.

At the moment of greatest muscular tension all sensations seem to take one further rise upward. The woman tenses beyond the point where, it seems, it would be possible to maintain such tension for a moment longer. And indeed it is not possible, and now her whole body suddenly plunges into a series of muscular spasms. These spasms take place within the vagina itself, shaking the body with waves of pleasure. They are felt simultaneously throughout the body: in the torso, face, arms, and legs--down to the very soles of the feet.

These spasms, which shake the entire body and converge upon the vagina, represent and define true orgasm. At this moment the woman’s head is thrown back and her pelvis tips upward in an attempt to obtain as much penetration from the penis as is possible. The spasms continue for several seconds in most women, though the time varies with every individual, and in some women they may continue though with decreasing intensity, for a minute or even more.

Many women can repeat this performance two or more times before their partner has his orgasm. The pathway, neurologically and psychologically, has been set for orgasm and, if her partner continues she can respond. I have had women report that the last orgasm is sometimes more intense and satisfying than the first.

If the woman is satisfied by her orgasmic experience she will discharge the neurological and muscular tension developed in the sexual build-up. When satisfaction has been achieved, her strenuous movements cease and within a short period blood pressure, pulse, glandular secretion, muscular tension, and all the other gross physical changes which characterize sexual excitement return to normal, or even to subnormal, limits.

There have been detailed studies made of the physical reactions of both men and women during intercourse. I think it is important to realize that in almost every detail, including orgasm, these reactions and the subjective experience of pleasure parallel each other in the sexes. The major differences are that the woman is slightly slower to respond at the outset than the man, and the orgasm of the man is characterized by the ejaculation of sperm into the vagina.

Full sexual satisfaction is followed by a state of utter calm. The body feels absolutely quiescent. Psychologically the person feels completely satisfied, at peace with the world and all things in it. The woman in particular feels extremely loving toward the partner who has given her so much joy, such a transport of ecstasy. Often she wishes to hold him close for a while, to linger tenderly in the now subdued glow of their passion.

As you can see from this description, orgasm is a tremendous experience. There is no physiological or psychological experience that parallels its sweeping intensity or its excruciating pleasure. It is unique.

There are many who take a mystical view of this ecstatic coupling of man and woman in love. They think of it as a symbol of a lost unity between the sexes that strives to reassert itself in the act of love. Others see in it a foretaste of heaven, the carnal representation of endless spiritual delights for mankind. Many who are able to experience orgasm in intercourse find it difficult not to ascribe some purposive intent on the part of the Creator; the experience is that profound.

The individual perceives orgasm as a reward equal to none. It puts the sacrifices and compromises necessary to an enduring marriage into their proper perspectives, makes the constant giving done by the woman seem not only worth while but highly desirable. It is the strongest link in the unbreakable bond between two who love.

Do you recall Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire? In one of its most famous passages the frigid (and promiscuous) older woman attempts to break up the marriage of her younger sister, appealing to a spurious pride of class, pointing out that the younger woman has married beneath her, married a beer-drinking, poker-playing common day laborer. The younger woman is almost convinced that she should act on the false values of her sister. After all, these values had been inculcated in both women by the same parents and they went deep. The young girl’s husband saves her, however; he simply reminds her of the pinwheels she sees, of the high music of the bells she hears when they embrace in love. It is enough. She returns to him without a word. The bond of their wonderful sexual life is unbreakable, far stronger than the powerful and subtle assault the envious and destructive sister can make upon the marriage.

The ability to have a full orgasm is, in most cases, the hallmark of the psychologically mature woman. It is the sign that she has successfully weathered the storms of childhood and youth and come, unscathed, into full womanhood, with all that it implies.

Chapter 3

THE NOT IMPOSSIBLE SHE

What is the mature woman? Who is she? What are her characteristics? Her personality? Her role in life?

It is of vital importance to an understanding of the frigid woman to answer these questions, for again, only by understanding what health is, can we truly grasp the meaning of any departure from it.

There have been great arguments about what the word “normal” means. Millions of words have been written about it. I fear that most of them have only clouded the issue. Odd definitions of normalcy have led millions of women down very odd and unhappy paths. You will recall, for example, that Victorianism elevated frigidity to the position of the norm for all womankind--with disastrous results.

At the start of my practice I encountered another strange and tragic view of the normal that has had a powerful influence on American women. This view, which we will encounter in more detail when the feminist movement is discussed later, still has wide repercussions and is intimately bound with the subject of frigidity and divorce.

In my introduction to it a lovely woman of forty came to consult me. She was deeply disturbed and could hardly speak, she wept so. Somehow I felt at once that there was a deep rage behind those tears. I recognized her name when she was able to get it out; she was a successful lawyer whose name many would still recognize in all probability.

In her thirty-ninth year she had fallen in love for the first time with a fine man, another successful lawyer. Her dormant sexuality and true femininity had been awakened completely in her since their marriage a year before, and they both now wanted children badly. However, a physical examination had indicated (as unhappily it so often seems to do for women who postpone their first pregnancy for too long), that she would have to have a hysterectomy, for she had developed a tumor in the wall of her uterus.

She felt cruelly deprived, and I saw her for several sessions. During these periods she told me of her background. Her father had died when she was an infant and her mother had been a militant leader of the movement for women’s “rights.” The whole emphasis in her early upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (à la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is.

Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man. For years she sedulously avoided men entirely. Gradually, through her grown-up experiences, she learned of other values, but by the time the right man came along it was too late to have children.

I was right that her tears had been tears of rage. They were directed at her mother’s authoritarian but totally mistaken view of the feminine role in life and were, to my mind, justified. When she had sufficiently vented her righteous anger, but not until then, we were able to move on to more practical matters. Her marriage was a happy one, and finally she adopted two children. With some of her values revised she made a wonderful mother for them. I visited this family only recently, and it seems to be one of the happiest and healthiest, psychologically speaking, I have ever seen.

Most women who have been reared with such ideas of what is normal are not so fortunate, however. They cling to their defensive and self-destructive values to the end, which is often bitter.

And there are, still, passionately convinced and often eloquent purveyors of these ideas. After reading the brilliant best seller, The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, the French authoress, I was saddened to see such clarity and brilliance in the service of such a mistaken cause. Her tacit conclusions seem to be that woman’s historic role of wife and mother are degrading to our sex, have kept woman from her true destiny. As she describes what that true destiny is, however, her clarity departs, and the role and function of this woman of the future become more than merely vague. Their foggy contours remind me of the glamorous-sounding but totally evanescent and mist-enshrouded goals that many of the frigid and lonely women I treat have when they first come for help.

There is no vagueness about the goals, functions, and needs of the normal woman. Science in recent years has thrown a bright light on her, and that is why we can be certain of many fundamental details about her. She is a mature, fully functioning woman, a woman who has realized the better part of her potentialities, who knows how to achieve and handle love and happiness, who has won through to a fully satisfying mental and sexual life.

I very frequently draw a word portrait of such a woman for patients who come to consult me about their sexual problem. It often makes them angry, and they deeply resent some of the characteristics of this idealized woman. They call her all sorts of names: “a victim of the male,” “an impossible ideal.” One eloquent younger woman called her “a faceless tramp,” and I have heard older women, brought up under a more inhibited code than exists now, call her “a shameless hussy.”

And yet despite the hostility that my portrait is often greeted with there is soon other evidence in my troubled listeners that they have been touched deeply by the idea that such a picture of womanhood might conceivably be a possibility for them. “Do you really think I could ever get to be anything like that?” The yearning question, phrased in any number of wistful ways, will inevitably come, despite the obvious hostility, the bristling defenses, the fact that the speaker is scared blue of sex and motherhood and all they mean.

You see, women want to find themselves, desperately want to. And in this portrait they get a hint, often the first they have ever had, of what to aim for, of the real potential inside themselves.

I call this subject of my sketch “idealized,” and she is. But I want to emphasize that she is not a personal idle daydream of my own, based on airy nothingness; very much the contrary. Her characteristics are based on exact and thoroughly checked psychological and biological facts, facts upon which the leading scientists in this field are in general agreement. And she is a composite based on observations of women I have known, and not always clinically. If you stop to think as you read about her, you may realize that you have known such women too.

What, then, is she like? First of all to give us a frame for our portrait so that we can see what we do know more clearly, let me state what we cannot know about her; what, in fact, is irrelevant.

We don’t know what she looks like. She may be tall or short, red-haired, blond, or brunette. She may have large breasts and round hips and sloping shoulders, or she may be small-breasted (or even flat-chested), have wide shoulders and narrow hips. She may have a career or not have a career, be more intelligent and better educated than her husband or less intelligent and less well educated. She may have children or be unable to have children. She may be rich or poor, come from the “400” or from the slums. She may be a bit shy or quite at ease socially. She may be athletic or totally unathletic. These things we don’t know about her and, for our purposes, they do not matter.

Here are some of the things we do know.

In the first place, she is very much “at home” in the world. Deep inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can’t imagine what it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her husband makes the world safe for her.

This feeling may seem unrealistic, in view of the very clear insecurities in the world today. As you will discover, however, it is based on a far deeper understanding of reality, on a far deeper reality than the one reflected in the alarums published in the daily newspaper.

This sense of reality almost invariably leads her to select a husband who is good for her, often near perfect, in fact. He might not be perfect for another woman, nor perfect in any ultimate sense, but he is near perfect for her. He loves her and intends to go on loving her. He may be a carpenter or an architect, a lawyer, a dock hand, or a poet, but he, with her, is passionate and loyal, a good companion and a good father for her children. She has an infallible sense about this matter, and though she may have had an adolescent or college crush on a no-gooder, she simply never will marry him.

Of course marrying a good husband adds to her sense of “at-homeness” in the world. Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.”

As you will see, it too has its roots in woman’s biology, is, on its deepest level, a need in her that must have expression. The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it.

It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her equilibrium, to hold onto her joie de vivre despite whatever may befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life is going to make on her--and they will be considerable. When a woman does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life’s continuous small misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself with self-pity.

Another fact about her which you may be surprised to learn is that she is deeply religious--though not officially or even consciously. In fact, if her husband’s background has been antagonistic to formal religion and he is still reflecting his background, she may pay lip service to his agnosticism or even atheism. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Just beneath the surface is an absolutely firm belief in the existence of a Creator and in some form of heaven. She’s not so clear about hell.

She also believes firmly in the fact that marriage is a sacrament, binding forever. Given the slightest encouragement or support, she will formalize these beliefs, join a church or develop a kind of personal pantheism. Why? Biologically speaking, she is the carrier of immortality, of the generations of man. This gives her a close affinity to and appreciation of the awesome and creative mysteries of the universe: moonrise, tidal flow, the growth, death, and rebirth of things.

Sexually she almost always reaches a climax during the act of love. Sometimes she reaches two or, if she and her husband are feeling particularly lusty, even three. But the number of times is unimportant, despite the Kinsey report.

What is important is the kind of orgasm she has. It is of the kind described in the previous chapter, of course; the kind that starts deep within her vagina and extends to all parts of her body. She doesn’t talk about it very often, but when she does it is always poetically. I have heard one woman refer to it as “a sensation of such beauty and intensity that I can hardly think of it without weeping”; of it another said, “It’s like a mounting symphony, rising in tremendous and irresistible rhythms till your whole being feels as though it has been swept away.” One woman, less lyrical but still exact, said, “It’s like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” Nobody can ever quite evoke the exact sensations in words, but, as one woman told me, “Nobody who has ever had it will doubt whether her experience is the real thing.”

What else characterizes her sexually? Well, she’s not very modest, I’m afraid. In fact, she’s quite a show-off and likes sexual compliments from her husband, dressed or undressed, verbal or otherwise. Her nineteenth-century sister would have been vastly shocked by her whole attitude in the bedroom.

She’s not sexually shy at all. She wouldn’t demur a moment at initiating love with her husband, though she will immediately change her amorous direction if she finds he is too tired or is preoccupied, without feeling the least bit rejected. Don’t forget that, for one thing, just under the surface (and sometimes on it) she considers her marriage a heaven-made arrangement that is going to last forever, and she need not look upon any one experience as too important in itself.

However, there is another very important point. I have indicated that sexually she takes her cue from her husband. What does she know, do you suppose--know deeply and instinctively--that makes her do this, while other women refuse to?

She knows this: that it is the man who, from the purely physical viewpoint, has to be ready before sexual intercourse can take place. No matter how many books have been written that ignore the fact, it is nevertheless true that, if the man does not have an erection, love-making cannot take place.

Just think about it for a moment. A woman can make love at any time; a man only when he is ready. There may be psychologically preferential circumstances for a woman, but there is no physical prerequisite.

That is why (by virtue of that deeper sense of reality we spoke of) when her husband is ready to make love our lady is nearly always willing, barring sickness or certain difficulties that may come up during pregnancy. And that is why she is always willing to forgo love-making if he is not ready. Her deep altruism makes her extremely sensitive to his moods, and she will not find it in herself to treat him as if he were a robot, become angry or feel rejected when, if the button is pushed, he doesn’t respond.

On this same point: she knows how much store men put on their potency, how vulnerable they can become if they are made to feel inadequate to the needs of a wife. She would die a thousand deaths rather than have her husband gain any such inference from her actions. It’s her altruism again.

Her eternal acquiescence, her ever-readiness, never lets her in for a painful sexual experience, however. She knows that ninety-nine times out of one hundred even negative sexual feelings in herself will soon turn to eagerness, and eagerness to desire. And even if that once in a hundred times occurs, she will still get a profound satisfaction from the pleasure she is able to give her husband, the very obvious pleasure. Once more that deep altruism.

But she not only takes the lead from him about whether they are going to make love--the kind of love they are going to make is also usually his decision and, in pure delight, she follows him completely. If he feels purely lusty, soon she does too; does he feel gentle and tender, then she picks up that mood. Experimental? Let’s, by all means, experiment. Passive? She’ll be active. It takes her little time to find out that a geisha has the tremendous disadvantage of believing that techniques are more important than love and the love of following one’s partner.

Despite her very pronounced wantonness with her husband, however, she has no promiscuous urges whatsoever. She is realistic about other men and finds them attractive or unattractive, as the case may be. But she neither desires them nor has any fantasies of a sexual nature about them. One woman put it this way to me: “I like other men if they’re attractive,” she said. “Their attractiveness does honor to the sex my husband belongs to.”

Nor is she ever tempted to indulge in self-masturbation, at least not after one or two tasteless and pointless experiments she may make during her first absence from her husband. To her, sexuality is devoid of any meaning whatsoever if there is not mutuality, if it is not shared.

Lest you think that our paragon’s altruism could end up by making her a martyr, a person without any real regard for herself, I must hasten to nip that idea in the bud. In her quiet way she is quite self-centered. In the first place, she’s contented with all aspects of her body, all the details of a female anatomy that gives her so much pleasure. If in her cultural background there were influences which tended to inculcate disgust with certain natural functions, she finds herself rejecting them. For example, I have had several patients who, during the course of their therapy and as they found a new maturity developing in them, find themselves ruminating on the word “curse” as it is used to describe the menstrual flow. Reflection almost always makes them drop the word from their vocabulary entirely. In the end they are far more likely to call it a blessing.

This self-love, her pride in and love of her body, is reflected in her outward appearance. She likes to be as clean as a cat and as neat as a pin. She enjoys dressing well. She is very aware of the things that bring out her special attractiveness. She also knows how to make herself up to the very best advantage. But she does not spend hours daily on her toilet in front of the mirror. She is far too confident of herself, has too much self-love, to feel that such a production is necessary.

Here’s the way I’d put it. She accepts and is pleased with the way she is and the way, as time passes, she is going to be. This is true of her mental capacities as well as of her physical attributes, but we can see it most clearly in her attitude toward her physical self. As I said at the beginning, we don’t know whether she has small breasts or large breasts, rounded hips or narrow hips. We only know that, whatever she’s got, she enjoys.

You see, she knows perfectly well that it is passion and response which spin the plot of love and not, ever, fetish or fashion. She really feels sorry for women who worry about what they haven’t got or the effect of growing older. If she were small-breasted she would never disguise that fact, and you can be certain that her husband, at least after the relationship had got under way and he’d had a chance to experience her pleasures, would soon drop any adolescent predilections he had imagined he possessed.

The husband of one such woman said to me: “When I was in college I had a conviction that really beautiful women had to be redheads. I can’t imagine now what made me believe such a thing.” I know his wife well; she’s a brunette, and you and I might not be the least bit impressed by her looks. But he knows better; he knows her real beauty. And, I happen to know, so does she.

The confidence and pleasure our fair lady has in her person and in her other attributes (her self-love) have one very odd quality. And it is an all-important one. This self-love is detachable.

With a flick of her psyche she can project practically all of it onto her children, take as much joy from their beauty, achievements, and pleasures as she ever got from her own. She detaches it, too, on behalf of her husband, often will exaggerate his good qualities and minimize any weakness he might have, as long as the weakness is not a danger to family and home.

Her detachable self-love and her need to give unrestrainedly are two chief components of the maternal instinct. To put it mildly, as perhaps you have noticed, she is pervaded with this instinct. To her the fulfillment of it is the most central and all-important function of her life. It colors and deepens and enriches her sexual life with her husband. Her unconscious fantasy with every intercourse is that he might make her with child, and her psychological and biological gratitude to him for this richest of all potential gifts is boundless. Her fantasies about becoming pregnant may excite her directly.

I have paid particular attention to this connection between the sexual instinct and the maternal instinct in many patients of mine who have come to therapy because they were afraid of childbirth. When they have been able to rid themselves of such fears they are almost always struck by the new dimension that is added to their sexual life. The things they say about it are often poetic or even mystical.

One woman, who because of childhood experiences had been scared to death of bearing a child and whose fear was causing a partial frigidity, said to me of her new sexual experience: “I was living in one room of a whole mansion, and now I have the whole mansion for my own.” Another woman, who had believed her love life complete despite her deep fear of pregnancy, said of the change in her feelings during love-making: “Oh, it was fun before, but now the idea that I might become pregnant makes me feel at one with the whole universe. It’s strange. There are almost no words to express it.”

Our ideal woman carries this characteristic feeling of a deep identification with nature, with all things that grow and bud and blossom, through her pregnancy and long thereafter. Childbirth had no real terrors for her; she sails through it proudly, like a clipper made especially for such weather.

And she usually wants to nurse her child at her breast. She does, too, unless a breast abscess or some other unforeseen difficulty arises. And, though I have no statistics to prove it, I would bet that her milk is both plentiful and good.

I know that today there is a tremendous emphasis on the importance of careers for women, but I am afraid that our mature woman cannot get terribly excited about the subject. I don’t mean that she’s antagonistic to this whole modern movement. She may be a career woman herself, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, a fashion designer, whatever. But now, happily married and with children in the offing or already here, she can’t feel that its of central importance. If it’s necessary for the family welfare she will keep her job, but any drive she had after high school or college to go far in it is sacrificed, if necessary, to her love-making and homemaking instincts.

She is not the least bit jealous of her husband’s work. As I pointed out earlier, she may be smarter than her husband or may basically have a much higher intelligence quotient, or she may be far more thoroughly educated than he is. Or she may be highly talented in some art form--writing, music, painting, sculpture. You will never, however, hear her complain that she gave up a career for her family, or angrily envy the daily adventures of her man in the market place. Her joy and satisfaction in the fulfillment of her own biological destiny make all other personal achievements pale for her, any other considerable use for her energies almost a waste.

As she grows older and her family grows up and the children learn to stand on their own feet and use their own wings, she may return to work. However, even then, interest in her now-grown children and their children will be far greater than any she can summon up for her job.

As you might expect, our paragon ages very gracefully. Those sure instincts which led her to successful love in marriage and to success in rearing her children stand her in good stead now. She still loves to give, and she perceives the right time to give her children up, to let them stand on their own, learn the difficult uses of freedom. Admittedly this is a great sacrifice for a mother, but she is deeply pleased to make it. And in doing so without fuss or feathers, she wins her children’s regard and love forever.

I am very pleased to say that the menopause brings no diminution in her ability to enjoy her husband sexually. Contrary to what many people still think, her orgasm does not decrease in intensity or in kind. Increasing age and the absence of children in the home now bring her and her husband closer together again and, great companions, they develop a whole series of shared pleasures consistent with their years.

As she goes down into the other side of her middle years, she is not troubled with regrets for things left undone. She has a deep sense of fulfillment, of life lived rightly. And, whether she has become consciously religious or not, she is still, basically, a believer in immortality, for she has served it with her whole being. She looks on death totally unafraid, wondering perhaps what the Creator who has made her life such a marvel is like on an even closer view.

* * * * *

This, then, is the idealized picture of the truly feminine woman. While granting that the plane of maturity she has achieved is rather too exalted for most women to attain, I have given her to you for some very concrete reasons.

With merely this ideal to follow, I have seen many women reap immediate rewards some time before they were able to come to grips with their frigidity per se. The characteristics and neurotic goals that accompany frigidity often cause obvious domestic frictions that can be greatly reduced when the woman begins to see new horizons for herself--that she need not be blaming others. Her grateful husband will reward her at once for her change, with renewed affection and tenderness, a new solicitude, a new caring.

Our idealized portrait can help you, too, to grasp more thoroughly the rest of this book. We have found, in psychiatry, that when a goal has been clearly defined half the battle has been won. As we come now to the chapters on frigidity, its history, its whys and wherefores, kinds and causes and cures, you will have before you a picture of what the potentialities of women are, a landmark to show you how far our sex can stray from real femininity, a guide to keep you from confusion, from ever subscribing again to false and destructive ideas of what it is that constitutes real womanhood.