The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
Ludovici painted a description of the future he envisaged if
the ‘disgruntled females’ were successful. He feared that male
dominance would be overthrown, the exercise of male sexuality
severely curtailed and eventually the numbers of men in the
population severely reduced:
congress of male and female will have begun to seem much
more guilty and disgusting even than it is today, and as the
male will still be looked upon (as he is now) as the principal
culprit in the matter, the age of consent will probably be
extended to 35 or 40, if not to the menopause. Seduction and
rape will be punished brutally, probably by means of
emasculation; and men of vigorous sexuality will be
eliminated in order to make way for a generation of lowsexed,
meek and sequatious lackeys. 26
His predictions about restrictions on male sexual behaviour
are clearly based upon the demands of feminist campaigners of
the day though much exaggerated. Women would go even
further than the above, he claimed, and take to extracorporeal
gestation and cease to cohabit with men, and at length, ‘The
superfluousness of men above a certain essential minimum (about
5 to every 1,000 women) will have become recognised officially
and unofficially as a social fact.’ 27 There would then be an
annual slaughter of males or at least vigorous males and if sex
choice were developed, only 1/2 per cent of males would be
reared yearly. Ludovici’s concern with the ‘problem’ of women’s
refusal to participate in heterosexuality stemmed from a fear of
feminism and its implications for men, particularly in the area
of control of male sexual behaviour.
In the antifeminist classic, Motherhood and its Enemies
(1927), Charlotte Haldane, favoured a more strictly biological
theory of the connection between lack of sexual activity and
dangerousness in women. She focussed her concern on virgins:
We are revising all our opinions on the value of virginity—
economic, social, political or religious. Scientific students
cannot avoid scientific conclusions such as the demonstrable
evidence that in certain animals, including man, the nonfulfilment
of the normal sex functions due to atrophy or
castration may cause the emergence in later life of the
secondary sexual characters of the opposite sex.
We do not yet have the means to investigate the
psychological effects of permanent virginity in great detail,
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