A LEAF FROM A SEX BOOK
I HESITATE to approach the subject of male unresponsiveness. Frigidity in men is a theme sociologists have avoided. Frigidity in women, on the other hand, forms a vast chapter in the sex research of today; the part it plays in marital discord is known to students of sociology as well as to the lay reader, although probably less well. It has occupied the attention of many noted writers, and has taken the lives of such men as Zaner and Tithridge, who carried some of their experiments too far. (Tithridge especially.)
Any discussion of frigidity in men calls for an unusual degree of frankness on the part of the writer, since it entails such factors as the “recessive knee,” “Fuller’s retort,” and the “declination of the kiss.” Sex is less than fifty years old, yet it has upset the whole western world. The sublimation of sex, called Love, is of course much older—although many purists will question the existence of Love prior to about 1885 on the grounds that there can be no sublimation of a non-existent feeling. And that brings us to our real theme, namely, frigidity in men.
THE first symptom of frigidity in men is what I call the “recessive knee.” Simply stated, the phenomenon is this: occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with. The juxtaposing of the knee is brought about by any of a thousand causes. Often the topic of conversation has something to do with it: the young people, talking along pleasantly, will suddenly experience a sensation of compatibility, or of friendliness, or of pity, or of community-of-interests. One of them will make a remark singularly agreeable to the other person—a chance word or phrase that seems to establish a bond between them. Such a remark can cause the knee of the girl to be placed against the knee of the young man. Or, if the two people are in a cab, the turning of a sharp corner will do it. In canoes, the wash from a larger vessel will bring it about. In restaurants and dining-rooms it often takes place under the table, as though by accident. On divans, sofas, settees, couches, davenports, and the like, the slight twist of the young lady’s body incident to receiving a light for her cigarette will cause it. I could go on indefinitely, but there is no need. It is not a hard push, you understand—rather the merest touch of knee to knee, light as the brush of a falling blossom against one’s cheek, and just as lovely.
Now, a normal male in whom there are no traces of frigidity will allow his knee to retain its original position, sometimes even exerting a very slight counter-pressure. A frigid male, however, will move his knee away at the first suggestion of contact, denying himself the electric stimulus of love’s first stirring. Why? That is what my research was conducted to discover. I found that in ninety-three per cent of all cases, the male was suspicious; in four per cent he was ignorant; and in three per cent he was tired. I have presented these figures to the American Medical Association and am awaiting a reply.
It is the female’s subtlety in her laying-on of the knee that annoys the male, I found. His recession is for the purpose of reassuring himself of his own integrity and perspicacity. If the female were to juxtapose in a forthright manner, if she were to preface her gesture with the remark: “I am thinking of letting my knee touch yours for the fun of it, Mortimer,” she might gain an entirely different response from the male.
It was a young Paterson, New Jersey, girl by the name of Lillian Fuller who let drop the remark that has epitomized, for the sociological and anthropological world, the phenomenon of the recessive knee. “Fuller’s retort” is now a common phrase in the realm of psychotherapy.
Miss Fuller was an unusually beautiful woman—young, accurate, sensitive. She was greatly attached to a man several years her senior in the buffing department; wanted to marry him. To this end she had laid her knee against his innumerable times without a single return of pressure. His frigidity, she realized, was gradually becoming prejudicial to his mental health, and so one evening after experiencing for the hundredth time the withdrawal of his knee, she simply turned to him with a quiet smile playing on her face and said: “Say, what is the matter with you, anyway?”
Her retort somehow summed up the whole question of frigidity in men.
THE second great symptom of frigidity is the “declination of the kiss.”1 Many men have told me that they would not object to sex were it not for its contactual aspect. That is, they said they would be perfectly willing to express their eroticism if it could be done at a reasonable distance—say fifty paces. These men (the frigid-plus type) found kissing intolerable. When they had an opportunity to kiss a young lady, they declined. They made it plain that they would be willing to blow a kiss across the room from their hand, but not execute it with their lips.
I analyzed scores of these cases, questioning both the women and the men. (The women were mad as hornets.) I found that a small number of the kiss-declining men were suffering from a pathology of the eyes—either astigmatism or farsightedness—so that when they got close enough to kiss a girl, she blurred on them.2 The vast majority of cases, however, were quite different. Their unwillingness I traced to a much subtler feeling than eyestrain. Your true anti-contactual, or kiss-decliner, is a very subtle individual indeed.
In effect, he is a throwback to another period in history, specifically to the Middle Ages. He is a biological sport. (Note: this is very confusing, calling him a “sport,” because the ordinary “sport” is not a kiss-decliner at all, anything but. If there are any of you who think you are going to find the use of the word “sport” in this connection so confusing as to make the rest of the chapter unintelligible, I wish you would drop out.)
No one can quite comprehend the motives and the successes of a kiss-decliner who does not recall his counterpart in medieval history. In the Middle Ages, when men were lusty and full of red meat, their women expected as much. A baronial fellow, finishing his meal, made no ado about kissing a Middle Age woman. He just got up from the table and kissed her. Bango, and she was kissed. Love had a simple directness which was not disturbed until the arrival, in the land, of the Minnesingers. It got so no baronial hall of the Middle Ages was free from the Minnesingers. They kept getting in. They would bring their harps with them, and after dinner they would twang a couple of notes and then sing a frail, delicate song to the effect that women should be worshipped from afar, rather than possessed. To a baron who had just drunk a goblet of red wine, this new concept of womanhood was very, very funny. While he was chuckling away to himself and cutting himself another side of beef, his wife, who had listened attentively to the song, would slip out into the alley behind the castle and there the Minnesinger would join her.
“Sing that one again,” she would say.
“Which one?”
“That one about worshipping me from a little distance. I want to hear that one again.”
The Minnesinger would oblige. Then he would illustrate the theme by not kissing the woman but dancing off lightly down the hill, throwing his harp up into the air and catching it again as he went.
“What a nice young man,” the baron’s wife would think, as she slowly turned and went in to bed.
The kiss-decliner of today is a modern Minnesinger. He is a sport in that he has varied suddenly from the normal type—which is still baronial. By the mere gesture of declining a kiss, a man can still make quite a lot of ground, even in these depleted days. The woman thinks: “He would not dream of embracing my body; now that’s pretty white of him!” Of course, it would be wrong to ascribe motives of sheer deliberateness to the frigid male. Often he is not a bad sort—merely is a fellow who prefers an imagined kiss to the real kind. An imagined kiss is more easily controlled, more thoroughly enjoyed, and less cluttery than an actual kiss. To kiss in dream is wholly pleasant. First, the woman is the one of your selection, not just anyone who happens to be in your arms at the moment. Second, the deed is garnished with a little sprig of glamour which the mind, in exquisite taste, contributes. Third, the lips, imaginatively, are placed just so, the right hand is placed just so, the concurrent thoughts arrive, just so. Except for the fact that the whole episode is a little bit stuffy, it is a superior experience all round. When a kiss becomes actual, anything is likely to happen. The lips, failing of the mark, may strike lightly against the end of the lady’s nose, causing the whole adventure to crack up; or the right hand may come in contact with the hard jagged part of the shoulder blade; or, worst of all, the man’s thoughts may not clothe the moment with the proper splendor: he may be worrying about something.
So you see, frigidity in men has many aspects, many angles. To me it is vastly more engrossing than frigidity in women, which is such a simple phenomenon you wonder anybody bothers about it at all.
1929