Straight (24 page)

The idea that mutual orgasm was “scientifically correct” was the window-dressing that made sexual technique discussable even in such broad outline as this. Just as the spiritualization of love had made the introduction of romance to marriage acceptable, making sex scientific helped to establish sexual technique as a topic fit at least for discreet, duly married inquiry.

As expectations of mutual orgasm and of wives' willing and desirous participation in marital sex became more widespread, so did the anxiety of those who had not achieved what writers euphemistically called “true marriage” or “the completed sex act,” namely mutual orgasm. Sex advisors received hundreds of anguished letters—Marie Stopes's well-preserved correspondence includes approximately five thousand—from people with a wide array of sexual fears, faults, and complaints. Long-married women who had “never felt anything” during intercourse wanted to know what was wrong with them; men who ejaculated too quickly to provide the ten to twenty minutes of intercourse some writers recommended for proper female satisfaction wanted to know how to do better. Men about to be married wrote of their panic that they might inadvertently, as sex advisors claimed was so often the case, permanently ruin their wives through clumsy overeagerness on the wedding night. Huge numbers of women pleaded for help with contraception, saying that what really stood between them and sexual enjoyment wasn't a lack of interest but a fear of pregnancy. Forlorn husbands wondered whether it was inevitable that wives would simply never let themselves be seen in the nude.

Declaring the standard of a “good sex life,” it seemed, opened a Pandora's box of previously unutterable and seemingly ubiquitous
dissatisfaction. Some of the causes of unhappiness were things no sex advisor, no matter how well meaning, could help with, and a sizeable portion of the causes existed mostly due to concerns the sex advisors themselves had helped to create. Men, facing new vistas of performance anxiety, could not rest easily or happily in their wives' arms out of fear that they might not be doing the “job” of sex well enough.

Women, of course, were also under pressure to perform. Even before the heyday of Freud's “vaginal orgasm” (about which more presently), Havelock Ellis contended, the woman who had not learned to want and enjoy sexual intercourse had “not acquired an erotic personality, she has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is incapable of bringing her personality—having indeed no achieved personality to bring—to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around her.”[
16
]

This stood at serious odds with the doxa with which most middle-class people had been raised in regard to female sexuality. Open acknowledgement of female desire and pleasure had for centuries been deemed excessive, sinful, and destructive; synonymous with promiscuity and prostitution. It is no wonder that people felt confused, anguished, and frustrated. No matter how willing women and men were to try to achieve the new goal of an eroticized marriage, they could not necessarily change their beliefs and emotions about women's desire and pleasure overnight.

Nor could people instantly reverse deeply rooted beliefs about the morality of sexual acts other than intercourse. Sex authorities were increasingly willing to consider an array of other types of stimulation as legitimate foreplay, so long as penis-in-vagina intercourse and accompanying orgasms were the ultimate result. This approach would eventually provide men and women many welcome liberties. But to people raised with the Victorian abhorrence of masturbation, encouragement to manually stimulate a wife's clitoris might seem suspect, to say the least. Although Walter Robie's correspondence features a letter from a woman who exulted in “husband's hands—that they give a perfectly legitimate joy!,” Marie Stopes's correspondence includes letters from women who were terribly upset by achieving orgasm through such “unnatural” means.[
17
] Although there were those—like
gynecologist Alice Bunker Stockham, who advocated approaches to mutual pleasure less procreatively oriented even than this—they were considered far out on the fringes.[
18
] Early sex surveys, such as Katherine Bement Davis's 1929
Factors in the Sex Lives of 2200 Women,
hint that more people were at least considering erotic pleasure as one of the goods of marriage, independent of the potential for reproduction. But most people, and indeed most sex authorities, operated on the same age-old assumption that the Freudian “vaginal orgasm” contingent would shortly reinforce: that pleasure in sex should be derived from penis-in-vagina intercourse, if it was to be derived at all.

By the eve of the Second World War, mutual sexual satisfaction was held to be not just
a
crucial ingredient of successful marriage but probably
the
crucial ingredient. Even the conservative Central YMCA College in Chicago could state, in its 1932 handbook,
The Hygiene of Marriage,
that “reproduction is neither the sole nor the chief purpose of marriage,” but rather “the desire for sexual communion and companionship.” Although it seems fairly plain that many relatively happy and functional marriages must have coexisted with sex lives that did not live up to the high standards of the sex manuals, the intense emphasis on a sexually compelling marriage changed how people thought and behaved. Sexual desire and sexual pleasure were newly and openly on the table as marriageability issues, and in time they would be qualifications for premarital relationships as well. In ways that had never before been true, sex appeal and the promise of sexual competence became important criteria in the selection of a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or a spouse. Sex was no longer only, or even primarily, the ultimate physical manifestation of the spiritual union of true romantic love that it had been for earlier Victorians. Erotic pleasure, albeit by a particular and mannered approach, was a newly official standard for heterosexual relationships.

COPULATION ON THE COUCH

This brings us back to Freud, whose bourgeois Viennese upbringing, education, and social standing gave him the useful vantage point of being able to probe the most difficult questions of sexuality's origins, development, and influences among the very population most concerned about them. Among the many beliefs Freud shared with his
generally well-off bourgeois peers was a deep, nearly mystical belief in the importance of penis-in-vagina copulation.

Additionally, Freud accepted from Krafft-Ebing the idea that there was a human attribute called “heterosexuality.” Krafft-Ebing had used the word more or less as a synonym for an ultimately reproductive drive toward male/female penetrative sex. Freud expanded on this in novel ways. For Freud, as Jonathan Ned Katz points out, “heterosexual” is not merely a noun but frequently an adjective, describing a “drive,” a “love,” an “instinct,” and a “desire,” as well as a sexual activity and a type of person.[
19
] In Freud's thinking, “heterosexual” was a quality that encompassed not just behaviors but perceptions, emotions, even something that could almost be called a sensibility or aesthetic. This made it possible, for the first time, to speak of heterosexual
feeling,
whether or not heterosexual behavior was involved. When combined with the Freudian notion of the libido, “heterosexual” became part and parcel of a politics of healthy versus unhealthy pleasures.

In Freudian thought, the libido is more than just the sexual impulse. It is the formless, insistent, and universal part of the psyche that desires. The libido itself does not have any productive intent; it just wants what it wants and what it wants is its own satisfaction. Freud's libido, with its goal of subjective satisfaction regardless of the source, stood in stark contrast to Krafft-Ebing's sex instinct, so firmly anchored in the reproductive urge.

This presented a vexing problem: why should choosing a sexual object for the libido seem, in theory, like something that should involve so much freedom, yet in practice involve so little? The process of learning to channel the libido toward proper and healthy sexual objects, Freud claimed, was not just a central part of human socialization but something that revealed a great deal about a person's psyche and mental health, for it was the central drama of the development of personhood.

To explain it, Freud invented an elaborate theory of psychosexual development, first articulated in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
in 1905. Adult sexual preferences, Freud asserted, were what resulted after the child's unformed and malleable libido was put through a forge of primal psychological drama. For males this was relatively straightforward, aggressive, and uncomplicated. During the “phallic”
or “genital” phase, a phase lasting from approximately ages three to five, the child would experience the desire to have the mother as a mate. For boy children, Freud claimed, this included the desire to kill his rival, the father, resulting in castration anxiety and emotional ambivalence toward other men. This was the moment at which the male sexual nature coalesced.

Things were different for girls. Girls began like boys, madly in love with their mothers. But this desire to possess the mother, Freud claimed, would inevitably meet with frustration as the child realized that she did not possess the penis necessary to take her father's place. Freud explained that at this point, the female child would back down from wanting the mother and instead learn to want to
be
her. In emulating her mother, a girl would develop an appropriate feminine identification. As part of this, on a subtle, subconscious level, the girl would lose her interest in her clitoris, the genital part with which she associated her desires during that early genital phase. By the time she finished puberty, she would have somehow, in a semi-mystical process of transference, switched her erotic focus from her clitoris to her vagina, the better to take the mother and wife position with her own eventual husband.

Freud never adequately explained why this should happen in exactly this way, but he was sure it did. On this basis, he claimed that women who continued to derive sexual pleasure from the clitoris as adults were immature, their sexual development halted somewhere in early childhood. They were also neurotic, possibly hysterical, likely to be hostile toward men, overly masculine, and aggressive. Stuck as they were at the stage of the little mother-desiring girl, they might well be sexually attracted to other women.

For a woman to derive pleasure from the vagina, on the other hand, was mature, appropriate, and fully heterosexual. Freud by no means invented the idea that women's sexual desires and pleasures should focus on being penetrated vaginally with a penis. But he did invent a radical—and, to many, convincing—new explanation of why this should be so. These ideas seemed a tailor-made rallying point for social conservatives appalled at the seeming gender anarchy of feminists, suffragists, New Women, and flappers. By the 1930s, thanks to Freud's students and followers who carried on his work both before
and after Freud's death in 1939, the idea that “vaginal orgasm” was the only valid heterosexual orgasm for women had gathered an extraordinary amount of steam.

Some proponents of the vaginal orgasm, like Helene Deutsch, one of Freud's favorite students, were optimists who took what could be called a “pro-vagina” stance. In her
Psychology of Women
(1944), Deutsch theorized that healthy women's sex drive was literally rooted in the vagina. In fine Victorian style, the “silent” vagina was to be awoken by a skilled, patient penis. Deutsch compared the process to the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, echoing Havelock Ellis's similar statements, a few decades prior, about male responsibility to awaken female sexuality, including his assertion that a girl “must be kissed into a woman.” A woman might experience a first penetration as a violent invasion, Deutsch allowed, but the pleasure she would experience from having her vagina penetrated would transform those perceptions. Intercourse would become a mystical merger of sensual, reproductive, and gender-role fulfillment. Deutsch claimed that during intercourse a woman would experience herself as a helpless child, in relation to her adult and in-control partner, and simultaneously imagine herself as the child that she fantasized about conceiving as a result of the intercourse. The vagina, therefore, was not just a reproductive organ; it was also, if you will, the organ by which the true heterosexual woman gave birth to herself.

Other Freudians didn't love the vagina so much as they detested the clitoris. Eduard Hitschmann and Edmund Bergler claimed that the clitoris was destructive, masculinizing, even subversive. Women's failure to transfer erotic focus from the clitoris to the vagina was what made women refuse their role as “normal” wives and mothers, they argued. It could turn them into feminists. Most of all, it made them “frigid.”

For Hitschmann and Bergler, “frigidity” had a single criterion: “absence of the vaginal orgasm.” The standard was unqualified and absolute. A woman who did not enjoy intercourse: frigid. Women who derived sexual pleasure from acts other than intercourse were frigid too. Nothing else mattered, only whether a woman had an orgasm because a man's penis was inside her vagina. Sexually aggressive women were labeled “frigid” because of the association between masculinity
and aggressiveness. Womanhood that was not passive was not properly womanly. “Frigidity,” as Jane Gerhardt points out, “thus became a label and a diagnosis that defined how much sexual desire a woman must have and in what kinds of sexual behavior she must engage to be ‘healthy.'”[
20
]

“Healthy” and “normal” female heterosexual performance and pleasure began to seem so exacting that it was a wonder anyone qualified. Freudian-leaning sex educators, like the best-selling Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, in their
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(1947), wanted readers to believe that “well-adjusted” women were an endangered species. Farnham and Lundberg correctly calculated that, in a United States that was desperately trying to get back to business as usual following the upheavals of global war, many men and women would find the authoritatively “sciency”-sounding prescriptions of Freudian sex reassuringly conservative and strict. Their book, and others like it, taught the mainstream that women's sexual pleasure had only one proper source, the vagina, and that women would only be able to take pleasure from the vagina if they had correctly “adjusted” to their proper, heterosexual gender roles. As for women who could not manage to have vaginal orgasms? Perhaps they could find a way to overcome their neuroses, given enough time on the Freudian couch.