The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
vengeful attitude, their inability to forget an insult and their
play-acting propensitites which enables them to mask the
inner motives of their emotional aloofness. There are women
who refuse to be made happy; they resent the thought that
the man has saved them, that they owe him everything. 55
The way to cure ‘dyspareunia’, according to Stekel, was to
uncover the motives for the obstinacy in the woman’s whole
personality and treat those. One of the symptoms of the obstinacy
was woman’s desire to see herself as a separate personality and
only when the woman stopped fighting to maintain her separate
personality would she, according to Stekel, be able to achieve
sexual pleasure: ‘I have emphasised repeatedly that the
dyspareunia signifies an “inner negation”…. Obstinacy cancels
the will to submission and reopens the struggle for the
maintenance of the feeling of personality.’ 56 Stekel saw women’s
frigidity as a mass phenomenon and as a weapon used by women
in the general war of the sexes. Curing individual frigidity but
on a mass scale would aid the end of women’s resistance to
men in the battle of the sexes and ensure male dominance, not
just on an individual but on a societal scale.
Van de Velde’s Sex Hostility in Marriage makes it clear that
the correct form of marriage ought to be male dominance and
female submission, and that this power relationship was to be
symbolised in sexual activity. Van de Velde refers frequently to
Stekel and was much influenced by Stekel’s ideas. His description
of the desirable form of marriage was placed in capitals to give
extra emphasis:
As a result of characteristic sexual qualities (in particular as
a result of her physiological vulnerability and plasticity) the
woman is dependent on the man for protection and support.
She demands this support—consciously or unconsciously. She
not only accepts, but desires the dependence involved by
this, because her highly developed intuitive feeling tells her
the reasons for this dependence are based on natural
(biological) causes.
Dependence is always connected with submission,
and the desire for the one involves the other. In addition to
this, numerous powerful influences making for submission
to the man are present in sexual connection, the sexual
impulse is associated in the woman with a tendency to
submit herself. 57
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