The tune the New View is singing is clearly not music to the ears of drug companies, whose pills can do little to change religious taboos or relationship woes. Portraying a sexual problem as an individual woman’s failure to ‘function’ makes a drug solution much more appealing. A perspective that puts women’s difficulties firmly in the context of their life and loves, their cultures and societies is far less valuable to those trying to promote new medicines.
The debate about what constitutes a normal part of sexual life and what should be classified as a dysfunction is not only a fascinating contemporary fight, it has a long and rich history. Dive back into the murky waters of the nineteenth century Victorian era and you’ll find that homosexuality, masturbation and oral sex were all considered abnormal, deviant and diseased. Unbelievably, it was only in the 1970s that homosexuality was finally removed from the pages of the DSM.
By the start of the twentieth century, many Victorian-era ideas about sexual deviance and disease were under attack. Writers at that time, including Havelock Ellis, are credited with helping to usher in a more modern way of thinking about sex. Unlike influential thinkers in the nineteenth century, Ellis fought against linking everyday behaviours like masturbation to medical conditions. Seen as a champion of tolerance, Ellis was also a great enthusiast. Sex was ‘the chief and central function of life’, he wrote, ‘ever wonderful, ever lovely’.10 Importantly, he also challenged some of the views of his contemporary, Sigmund Freud.
One of Freud’s particularly troubling theories was that women who couldn’t have a ‘vaginal’ orgasm via intercourse were essentially childlike and immature, a gross misunderstanding of female sexuality that would cast a chill shadow over women’s sense of themselves as sexual beings for much of the following century. ‘The leading erotogenic zone in female children is located in the clitoris,’ Freud announced in one of his essays published in 1924. ‘But it appeared to me,’ he wrote a year later, ‘that the elimination of clitoridal sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity.’11
In contrast, Havelock Ellis argued that the clitoris was central to female sexuality, and he ridiculed Freud’s notion that adult female sexuality was exclusively vaginal. Yet it took at least half a century before these ideas about the centrality of the clitoris became more widely accepted. For many decades of the twentieth century, women were considered to suffer from the psychiatric illness called ‘frigidity’ if they were not able to experience an orgasm vaginally while having intercourse.12
An article published in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association in 1950 pronounced that frigidity was ‘one of the most common problems in gynaecology’. It suggested that up to 75 per cent of women derived little or no pleasure from the ‘sexual act’, which in most cases was because they were suffering with ‘frigidity’.13 Any condition claimed to affect up to 75 per cent of all women should raise alarm bells for us: could this really be an abnormality or malfunction if it is something that affects nearly everyone? Echoing Freud’s theories, the doctors wrote that in girl children ‘the clitoris gives sexual satisfaction, while in the normal adult woman the vagina is supposed to be the principal sexual organ’. According to these theories, if the normal transference of sexual satisfaction from clitoris to vagina didn’t take place, then the woman had ‘frigidity’, the disorder defined as ‘the incapacity of women to have a vaginal orgasm’. Though the term is rarely used today, it seems the ghosts of frigidity may still haunt much current misunderstanding of female sexuality.
By the mid-twentieth century, though, a fresh breeze was beginning to blow into popular sexual understanding, due in part to the famous work of Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues at Indiana University. Based on lengthy face-to-face interviews with more than 10 000 people, Kinsey and his team produced two major works on sexuality, the first book on men and the second on women, published in 1953.14 The findings were explosive for their time, revealing that many men and women engaged in pre-marital sex, extra-marital affairs and—God forbid—homosexuality. While the term ‘frigidity’ was still being widely used to label women, Kinsey didn’t like it at all.
The failure of a female to be aroused or to reach orgasm during coitus [intercourse] is commonly identified in the popular and technical literature as ‘sexual frigidity’. We dislike the term, for it has come to connote either an unwillingness or an incapacity to function sexually. In most circumstances neither of these implications is correct.
Rather than suffering from some supposed psychiatric disorder called frigidity, Kinsey found that most of the women he interviewed masturbated, almost all of them relied primarily on stimulation of the clitoris, and most reached orgasm that way almost all of the time. In other words, most women in his survey were both willing and able to function sexually, despite claims from within the medical profession at the time that up to 75 per cent might suffer from a sexual disorder. Their sexual dissatisfactions clearly had more to do with the way sex was happening for them, including the inadequacy of the stimulation they were receiving from their male partners, than some psychiatric condition. As to Freud’s theory, still widely accepted in the 1950s, that women could transfer the site of sexual satisfaction from the clitoris to the vagina, Kinsey dismissed it as a biological impossibility.
The work of Kinsey was attacked from all sides—not only by those unable to accept the rich variety of human sexual behaviour he uncovered, but also by those accusing him of poor statistical methods and having an unrepresentative sample. Others believed he and his team put too much focus on the physical, rather than the psychological, aspects of sex. Notwithstanding the criticisms, one of the great legacies of Kinsey’s work is his celebration of the wide variation in human sexuality, and his view that imposing uniform standards of what should be considered normal or abnormal performance is not only impractical but also unjust.15
While Kinsey’s work on women was hitting bookshops across the United States, in London in 1953 an English translation of a French work of philosophy was just being published. Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist text, The Second Sex, painted a sad, angry, despairing portrait of women still aspiring to and struggling to achieve full membership of the human race. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ de Beauvoir quoted the Greek philosopher Aristotle as saying, ‘so we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’16 There is a disquieting similarity between Aristotle’s description of women as defective and contemporary suggestions that half of all women have a sexual dysfunction.
Simone de Beauvoir’s weighty classic wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. One of the book’s latter chapters imagines a future inhabited by the ‘independent woman’. It excitedly suggests that the ‘free woman is just being born’ and that she must ‘shed her old skin and cut her own new clothes’. Well aware of the extent of women’s dissatisfaction with their sex lives, the French philosopher was hopeful that the growing feminist activism would ultimately bring genuine equality, which might also improve sex. ‘New relations of flesh and sentiment of which we have no conception will arise between the sexes,’ dreamt de Beauvoir.
The French feminist’s dream helped set the scene for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, in which women in many places felt freer to express themselves sexually, and the birth control pill allowed them to do so without fear of pregnancy. However, with genuine equality between the sexes still elusive, the newfound freedom to have sex also