#frigidity

“Women were required to enjoy sexual intercourse, not just take part in it. Sexual pleasure in intercourse was not expected to be positive or strengthening for women. The sexologists of the 1920s predicted with assurance that women could not gain pleasure in sexual intercourse unless they subjected themselves to the will of their husbands. This assumption had also underlain the work of other sexologists before the First World War, such as Ellis, Bloch, and Forel. The writers of the 1920s put much more emphasis upon the idea of the necessity of women's subjection in sexual intercourse, and expected it to fulfil a grandiose social and political function. Through the orchestration of women's sexual response, based upon submission, writers like Steel and Van de Velde believed that all the problems which most alarmed them such as feminism, manhating and female resistance to male domination in general, could be overcome. A radical new significance was given to sexual intercourse. It became both a metaphor for the subjection of women and a method of effecting that subjection. The eagerness of the sexologists to help women with their 'frigidity' becomes easier to understand as we see how closely they associated women's sexual pleasure with their submission.”

an icy fact

“An important motivation behind the writings of the sex reformers in the 1920s was the desire to shore up marriage. This was to be done by introducing a new binding ingredient in the form of woman’s sexual response to sexual intercourse, to compensate for the lost legal and economic restraints. Another likely motivation for this change in men’s sexual taste in wives is the decline in the use of prostitutes in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Contemporary sources generally agree that such a decline took place. Some attribute it to the growth of ‘amateur’ prostitution. It could also be that there was a change in public opinion regarding the use of prostitutes. The sex reformers were in fairly general agreement that the purchase of sexual pleasure was not desirable. The massive campaigning efforts of feminists against the use of women in prostitution, coupled with anxiety over venereal disease, may well have caused such a change of attitude. If men were not to use prostitutes then they would require from their wives the same response of simulated passion which they had previously been able to buy. Wives could be indifferent no longer and must fulfil the prostitute’s role.

Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare