with her problem. They were both children of farm people and had been reared in the strictest of Puritan disciplines. They were both the oldest children, and each had had two brothers and a sister. Their mothers had hated and feared sexuality and had communicated quite freely to the children their feeling that it was dirty and wicked. The fathers had been punitive on the one hand and withdrawn on the other. This young man had broken away from home as early as possible and so had his wife. They had come to the city, gotten jobs in the same business, and here they had met.
I will take leave of our young husband now because the above facts illustrate the question I want you to ask yourself. However, in case some of my warmth toward him has come over to you, I can tell you that his marriage had a most happy outcome. His wife, motivated strongly, I am sure, by the sense of security his love gave her, was able to resolve her frigidity and the other neurotic problems which invariably accompany it.
But to the question: With almost identical backgrounds, why had the wife developed a rather severe frigidity problem and the husband remained perfectly normal sexually?
If you wish to extend that question you may ask yourself: Why is frigidity so widespread among women and sexual impotency so rare among men? We saw that under the adverse conditions caused by the Industrial Revolution women could, by the millions, abandon sexual gratification, convince the world and themselves that, biologically speaking, they were asexual beings. There was never the faintest suspicion that man, on the other hand, would or could abandon his sexual nature, no matter how difficult the going became. Men might develop neuroses, they might even take odd sexual directions, develop perversions, if their parents were sufficiently neurotic. But abandon sexual gratification en masse, they could not.
