April, 1947
STATISTICS COMPILED BY DR. Kinsey of the University of Indiana give the text for today’s sermon preached by a journalist and a woman psychiatrist to the women of America. Using the Gallup Poll method, Dr. Kinsey discovered that from 50 to 85 per cent of American women college graduates had never experienced an orgasm. High school graduates had a better record; less than 20 per cent reported the same deficiency. The percentage continued to decline as schooling was less intensive, and among uneducated Negro women the incidence of orgasm was nearly 100 per cent. If frigidity is to be viewed as a national scandal on a par with political corruption and inadequate housing, the remedy at least seems obvious. The mother of little girls has only to present Dr. Kinsey’s figures to the truant officer. Mr. Ferdinand Lundberg and Dr. Marynia F. Farnham, however, disclaiming such hasty inferences, arrive at the same result by a more devious route. Their book is an adjuration to American women to return to the home and leave men’s pursuits to men. Their itinerary to his conclusion follows:
(A) Modern man is unhappy, more unhappy than he has ever been before. We know this from statistics on crime, divorce, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, the falling birth rate. Other signs of his unhappiness are Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, feminism, war, and modern art.
(B) Unhappiness equals neurosis. The argument that the unhappiness apparent in such mass movements as socialism and Communism has an objective base in intolerable social conditions is readily disposed of. Material conditions have improved.
(C) Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made man feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe. He retaliated with the assertion of his penis through the conquest of nature, the invention of machines, the industrial revolution.
(D) In the course of these compensatory activities, he unwittingly destroyed the home, replacing it with the factory as the center of his life.
(E) The devaluation of the home made woman lose her function and her sense of self-importance.
(F) Woman, to recover her prestige, began to compete with man in his own domain, to work outside the home, vote, get educated, fornicate, and neglect her children. She did all this because she grudged her husband his penis, her own vagina, with the collapse of the home, having lost its cachet.
(G) But woman’s biological nature demands reproduction and nurture of her. It punished her for not having children, for undervaluing the home and the feminine activities (nursing, dishwashing, sewing, furniture-polishing, cooking, tutoring), by refusing her the orgasm.
(H) Statistics show that the educated (ego-striving, competitive) woman has fewer children than the uneducated woman, besides being more frigid.
(I) Woman can recapture the orgasm by accepting her biological destiny. She must have at least three children and renounce her ego-striving activities in higher education and career-seeking, except in very special instances, such as that of the female doctor. She must also renounce sexual freedom—for her always self-defeating; she should preferably be a virgin when she marries.
(J) If she fails to exemplify this rule, she will be neurotic and almost invariably frigid. Her one or two children will be socially undesirable problem-cases, phallo-narcissists like Byron, compulsive bachelor system-builders like Leibnitz or Newton, or passive-feminine males with gentle, affectionate dispositions.
(K) Naturally, however, childbearing cannot be recommended for all, but only for the “fit.” About two-thirds of American women are unfit. The “fit” demonstrate their fitness by producing three children. That is, childbearing is recommended for women who bear children. For the protection of these children, spinsters should be barred from our schools, teaching posts being reserved for married women with at least one child. Bachelors should be punitively taxed.
(L) Psychotherapy is recommended for the unfit. It is expensive.
Before entering into a discussion of its contents, it must be acknowledged that this book has the crude beauties of a cartoon. The mechanical view of psychology has never been so broadly rendered. Other pictures of women vanish before a vision of The Lost Sex as a broken-down sedan with Mr. Lundberg and Dr. Farnham in mechanics’ overalls peering under the hood. The frigid wife in the other twin bed will never look the same again to the husband with the psychiatric know-how. Private parts become “parts” to be sent to the psychoanalytic repair shop for reconditioning. The terminology of love and of medicine is replaced by the jargon of the factory and the garage: there is no more talk of passion or of healing, but only of functioning and adjustment. Mass production methods (statistics) yield an average woman who is tested by a bureau of standards that expects uniform “performance”—the regular production of orgasm and the regular production of children. Erraticism or failure condemns her to the junkyard of society, like an airplane grounded by the Federal Aviation Authority. The American scene takes on a new, technological desolation. This junkyard is the national eyesore, a vast dump disfiguring the suburbs of the well-regulated community, presided over by the truly feminine mother and the fully genitalized male.
To the idealized machine that is the “feminine” American woman, the husband plays a subordinate but respected part. He is converted into its servant or its tender, and to qualify him for this position, his whole life must be a character reference open to the investigation of experts. The “fully masculine male” must marry, make money, work regularly and prolifically, sustain an erection for the “normal” length of time, somewhere under half an hour. He must enjoy good health, show no feminine traits of character and have “a masterful ego-structure”; at the same time, he must not quarrel with society—radical affiliations, here as in industry, will get him dismissed as a troublemaker. Intellectual and esthetic accomplishments are not denied him, provided he is a family man, steady, with good habits, sleep-in. The author’s own description of the candidate for distinction follows:
“The libidinal life of authentic genius, working with a strong, completely integrated and masterful ego-structure, is fully realized in every way. ... The more prolific the work output of a given man, the more uniform it is in excellence and originality, the more ease there is in producing it and the higher it stands in the estimation of top workers in the field, the more likely it is to be the work of a physically healthy man. Such a man is more likely than not to be leading a sober life, married and with several children. His material establishment is apt to be better than moderately satisfactory. He never has lived in a garret. He has never had serious money difficulties, but has always been able to meet the world successfully on its own terms.”
The only successful entrants mentioned by the authors are J. S. Bach and two mathematicians. Failures to qualify include Bacon, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hume, Hegel, Descartes, Marx, Diderot, Napoleon, Hitler, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Pascal, “much of whose work must be considered socially demoralizing.” This list might be fortified by the names of Plato, Beethoven, Da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Dante, Kant, and of virtually any other great men that occur to the reader’s mind. Its comparative length suggests that the problem is really one for the medieval schoolmen: that is, if by the abortion of a single Spinoza, Bacon, Descartes, et cetera, every housewife in Iowa could have an orgasm, should it be done? Fortunately, the question is indeed a scholastic one. In the practical sphere, the authors have as yet no means of enforcing the new puritanism, the puritanism of the orgasm; bachelors may, in the authors’ phrase, be “suspicious” characters, and the authors may call for state-subsidized psychotherapy, but, legislators being backward, the new psychoanalytic police force has yet to be put in uniform. In the intellectual sphere, the Lundberg-Farnham argument remains purely contentious. No jot of evidence is brought forward to support the crucial proposition, that the large family and the orgasm are interdependent. College women as a group may have fewer children and be more frigid than the population as a whole, but is the college woman with three children less frigid than her classmate with none? Certainly, in the middle class, children are often the wife’s excuse for terminating amour with her husband: don’t, dear, you’ll wake the baby. And the unsexed career woman may be frigid with men and amorous with women—is the Lesbian orgasm not certified by these authorities? Frigidity is a more peculiar and puzzling phenomenon than these authors admit. According to another study made by Dr. Kinsey, which has been cited to me in conversation, the female animals do not have orgasm; it is the exclusive property of the human female, who is presumed to have learned it from men. If this is so, then the biological argument is absurd, and frigidity becomes, not a hidden scandal to be exploited by sensational journalists, but a condition into which the human female rather easily, perhaps, relapses. If psychoanalysis has a cure for it, as these authors intimate, this must be the best-kept medical secret of modern times; Mr. Lundberg and Dr. Farnham, at least, are discreet enough not to introduce any evidence into the sanctuary of the assertion.
Here, as in other connections, the phrase, “clinical experience shows,” relieves the authors of the necessity of proof. This phrase serves the same purpose as the photograph of the bearded doctor in the white gown extensively used in advertisements of beauty creams, reducing nostrums, and toothpaste before the passage of the Food and Drug Act. “Clinical experience,” moreover, has an infinite elasticity. It shows, for example, that every child masturbates; for the patient who tells a different story, amnesia is “understood” and his failure to remember masturbating constitutes proof that he did. In the same way, clinical experience can show that a man who has intercourse several times a day is “orgastically” impotent.
For the disingenuousness of this kind of reasoning that uses its own hypothesis as proof, that appeals always to the authority of “facts” and allows itself at the same time an anarchy of interpretation, Modern Woman, The Lost Sex offers an unforgettable illustration. This disingenuousness, mastering contradictions, has become indifferent to them—these authors will say anything. Their hardened character is well exemplified by a comparison between the book jacket and pages 220 and 221 of the text. Inside, the authors are exposing the “suggestive” innuendo of contemporary advertising and pointing particularly to the use made of “illustrations of ecstatic young models half-swooning in the moonlight.” Outside, on the dust-cover, is a drawing of a young model naked in the moonlight. She does not appear to be swooning but blushing. She is hiding her eyes.
A review of Modern Woman, The Lost Sex, by Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham.