The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
plainly that dyspareunia (frigidity in women) is a social
problem; it is one of woman’s weapons in the universal
struggle of the sexes. 52
Stekel considered that a woman must submit herself to her
husband in order to experience sexual pleasure. He saw
woman’s refusal to experience pleasure as an unconscious or
conscious refusal to submit or be ‘conquered’. He believed that
‘two bipolar forces struggle for mastery over human life: The
will-to-power and the will-to-submission (or the self-subjection
urge).’ 53 It will be no surprise to discover that he expected the
subjection urge to conquer the will-to-power in women but not
in men. He argued that all lovers must yield in love but
continued in the same breath to speak only of women being
‘conquered’:
A secret (unrecognised) notion of all persons who love is that
to make another person ‘feel’ is to achieve a victory over
that person. To give one’s self to another, to permit one’s self
to be ‘roused’, means self-abandonment; it means ‘yielding’!
This act of submission is expressed symbolically even in
woman’s position during the sexual embrace. Alfred Adler
very properly lays great stress upon the symbolisms of ‘above’
and ‘below’. Indeed, certain women feel roused only if they
are ‘on top’, i.e. by clinging to the fantasy that they are
males and that they are the ones to ‘rouse’ their sexual partner,
who is thus relegated to the passive or feminine role. To be
aroused by a man means acknowledging one’s self as
conquered. 54
Stekel did not see woman’s ‘will-to-submission’ in sex as being
isolated from the rest of her experience. As a psychoanalyst he
was used to treating the whole personality and to treating the
‘dyspareunia’ as part of the woman’s whole personality. He
was indignant at the general ‘obstinacy’ of the women he treated,
their refusal to submit and the fact that they wished to be
personalities in their own right. Such a wish he associated with
the ‘will-to-power’ which he saw as the desire of a woman to
survive as a self-respecting, independent human being who still
had some conception of herself as a person not subsumed into
her husband. The following unsympathetic comment upon his
patients illustrates his attitude:
We are still disposed to underestimate the infantile obstinacy
of most women, their predisposition to ‘resentment’, their
182