The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
The reader could be forgiven for thinking that it was Van de
Velde rather than woman’s ‘intuitive’ feelings that were telling
her to submit. Van de Velde’s main concern in all his work was
the preservation of marriage and the elimination of that
dangerous threat to marriage, ‘hostility’. The hostility seems to
have been caused by women’s refusal to submit to their husbands.
He writes that woman because of her ‘emotional temperament’:
desires either power or subjection. She desires submission
with her whole soul and being, but seeks to gain power. She,
herself, sooner or later, (usually, however, from the very first)
begins the struggle for power, and, if she wins the victory,
she loses the very thing that she most needs, the protection
and support of the man. 58
Though it may seem hard to understand how to marry these
contradictions, Van de Velde none the less found some logic in
this and went on to say that there was only one possible outcome
of the struggle. The woman can only win by losing, ‘the woman
who wins the game of the struggle for power, loses. Only if the
man carries off the prize can both the husband and wife win. If
the woman wins, then both lose.’ 59 This very strange language
which Van de Velde uses, in which words mean their opposites,
at first sight a strange language for a scientist to use, is actually
the language of sado-masochism. Men’s pornographic literature
of sado-masochism is full of women who choose to be conquered
and win by losing, women for whom only slavery is freedom
and for whom only being bound is being really ‘free’. 60 Van de
Velde was simply trying to extend the rules of the pornographic
game into everyday sexual life, and discovering a disquieting
amount of resistance in the women playmates. In sadomasochistic
pornography women consent to their submission
and are said to win by losing in order that the obvious cruelty
inflicted upon them should not look too unfair and appear to be
what the women really want.
Weith Knudsen was also greatly exercised by the problem of
women’s frigidity. He also saw woman’s subjection to be
necessary to her sexual pleasure, and was annoyed that feminism
seemed to be interfering with women’s natural inclination to
submit:
It is therefore only to be expected that a mental atmosphere
like that of present-day Feminism, which in a number of
women actually precludes the psychical submission,
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