Sexual frigidity can stem from emotional mismatch rather than physical constitution
Evidence
Mrs. P.H. has been married for the past eight years to a man who is a member of an athletic club. She visits the gynecologic clinic on account of a slight inflammation of the ovaries. There she complains that her husband gives her no peace … She perceives only pain and does not know the meaning of gratification. The man is rough and violent … Finally he takes a sweetheart… [This does not trouble her in the least.] She is happy … she wants a divorce and calls on an attorney. In his office she meets a clerk who is the exact opposite of her husband. The clerk is humble, delicate, weak, but he is also loving and tender. They become closely acquainted and he begins to court her. He writes her tender letters. His petty attentions flatter and please her … They find that they have similar intellectual interests … With his first kiss her anaesthesia vanishes … This man’s relatively weak potentia has roused the keenest orgasm in the woman. After the divorce they married; now they live very happily together … He is also able to rouse this woman’s orgasm with kisses and other caresses. This was the same woman whose frigidity in the embrace of a highly potent man drove her to take a lover! — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1626
Categorization
- XREF: Directly supports Beauvoir’s core thesis that woman’s erotic experience is mediated by her situation and her relation to the man, not by biology alone — ties to the opening determinism critique. — connects to: In Freudian terms a girl’s sexual development can stall into frigidity or homosexuality.; Adult punishment of childhood sex play can trigger lasting somatic symptoms; Sexual coldness tracks vitality expended elsewhere, not constitutional frigidity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 958 (+2 more)
- QUESTION: Stekel’s case reads as evidence that female ‘frigidity’ is situational, not constitutional — worth chasing the original source and its reception among later sexology.