Thoughts on the Sexual Revolution and Frigid Woman

Whatever became of the Frigid Woman? Along with the infantile paralytic and the thalidomide baby, that female eunuch once haunted the American landscape; a walking, joyless rebuke to our unhealthy, uncaring, medically and morally primitive society.

Unlike those other two, it's not clear the Frigid Woman, defined by her inability to attain orgasm, ever really existed, or if so in what numbers, or even from what she was suffering. It could have been hysteria, penis envy, or some form of psychosomatic vaginosis; or maybe it was just the accumulated guilt and uptightness brought on by tens of thousands of years of the whole hung-up, Apollonian, unfreaky, blue-nosed, Judeo-Christian, puritanical establishment.

Then suddenly, suspiciously close to the time the sexual revolution peaked, the Frigid Woman vanished. Along with nymphomania and the virgin/whore complex, her disease no longer existed, another relic from the ungroovy dark ages. Was she cured by the no-strings, gettin' down, good-vibrating, out-front love fest of the late sixties and early seventies? Or did she cure herself through a reaction to that love fest, by fighting off the open-shirted horndog males unleashed by the sexual revolution?

My explanation is that the sexual revolution contained both new vistas of freedom and the seeds of its own undoing. For all that loosening up ultimately contained just more male insistence, a sense that the real problem with society was that women just weren't putting out enough! The journey to sexual liberation was sold as a step forward for women, but it was also a clever way to eliminate the option of saying no. And while "frigidity" was a phenomenon that had been discussed for decades, it reached crash velocity just when the promise of balling your way through to the other side seemed believable. It turned out women weren't having a problem achieving orgasm at all: They just couldn't do it with you.

What's left of that heady experience, particularly for those of us born too late to get in on the action the first time around? You could say the journey has been completed in the Housewives and the City entertainment genre of frank and sexually free women. You can find the evidence all over the bestseller lists—novels full of breathless detail about Manolo shoes, Pilates-toned figures, fiery redheads, cussing bitches with hearts of gold, lovely Korean-American gal pals, arrogant but sexy assholes, and giggly revelations over white wine.

It's hard not to think there's something missing in this age of freedom. The original sexual revolution may have ended in plenty of bad humping with stinky hippies and gold-chained Lotharios, but there was romance in the search for a new consciousness, and in the naive idea that you could get there by fucking. Is the idea totally dead? How could such a beautiful notion not live on? Maybe what these modern, catty, gossipy chicks really need is a man who can take them to the next level, make them feel the way a woman's meant to feel. Your place or mine?