Free The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen Page B

femininity because they had never experienced the much-touted vaginal orgasm. No doubt there were many. In one study of white middle-class couples, one-third of women claimed they had never achieved orgasm. Some of these women perhaps mistook emotional emptiness for sexual dissatisfaction. Betty Friedan grew bewildered when housewives gave her “an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all.” Could it be, she wondered, that they viewed sex as a substitute for a “forfeited self”? 33
    It was difficult to know. “Frigidity” probably had many causes, including guilt. Over 80 percent of the women Alfred Kinsey interviewed for his study of female sexuality expressed moral objections to premarital sex, but half of them nevertheless violated their own values. One divorced woman later explained the source of her sexual problems:
My experience
being with
my to-be husband succeeded in conditioning me to utter subservience to
his
satisfaction and he never thought mine could be other than automatic upon his (else I was “frigid” or wrong somehow). And he is and was a psychoanalyst! I remain as I was—unfulfilled.
    After marriage, some wives who had engaged in premarital sex wondered if their husbands still “respected” them.
I feel this gradual introduction to the sex experience has advantages over being plunged into it suddenly on the wedding night. However, it carried with it for me a high sense of guilt, which still bothers me after all these years. I am forever grateful that we did finally marry because I probably wouldn’t have felt free to marry anyone else. This feeling of guilt may be why I am unable to respond sexually as I wish I could. 34
    Ignorance of anatomy and sexuality was also widespread. One woman, who had saved herself for marriage, wondered “whether or not the lack of sexual experience before marriage marred our early days of marriage . . . but I believe a better understanding of woman’s nature on the part of [my husband] . . . could have helped considerably. After seventeen years, this understanding is still lacking.” Another woman revealed that she “didn’t know anything about orgasms”:
The first time . . . we were in his room in his dorm. It was fast—he came in and he came out. It was a sharp, poignant pleasure that had no resolution. It stayed like that, it never got any better. He would come in and then pull out and come into a handkerchief. I was always left hanging. I used to come back to my dorm and lie down on the floor and howl and pound the floor. But I didn’t really know why I was frustrated. I felt so lonely. 35
    The truth is, it was difficult to switch from virginal bride to sexy wife. As Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs have argued, women—not men—made the sexual revolution. Between the fifties and the eighties, men’s sexual behavior changed very little. They still enjoyed premarital sexual experiences in their youth, married, and afterward perhaps strayed with other women. But during the same period, as Ehrenreich has pointed out, women moved “from a pattern of virginity before marriage and monogamy thereafter to a pattern that much more resembles men’s.”
    Even before the sixties, a sexual revolution simmered, but it had not yet boiled over. Women received confusing messages from a culture in transition. Society still divided the female population into “good” and “bad” women. The spreading use of birth control—diaphragms and condoms—helped rupture the historic tie between sex and procreation, but they were for planning babies, not for pleasure. Despite the expectation of an “eroticized” marriage, many people still felt shy about discussing sexual matters in public or, for that matter, in private. Advice manuals emphasized the desirability of female orgasm but assumed the woman would remain passive and