it, is any less intense than a man's. Nor am I saying that it is not necessary to her psychological well-being, to her maturity, to be able to achieve it.
I am saying that a woman's ability to have an orgasm is far more subject to outside influences than a man's ability. It is in many ways more subject to the psychological experiences, the mental and moral traumas of growing up. Compare the female orgasm to a shallowly rooted tree which the wind may blow down more easily than its deeply rooted brother, it is still a tree, however, and if it can be sheltered and protected from storms that are too severe it can flower as beautifully as any other.
The fact that frigidity is so psychological, so subject to the mind, gives it almost a "willful" character. It is often as if a woman had "chosen" to be frigid in a very real sense. I don't mean consciously chosen to be, generally speaking. It's an unconscious choice. But the fact that it has that element of choosing in it often makes it a poignant condition indeed.
I know one case where the "choice" was, in part at least, conscious, and I am going to tell it briefly to emphasize my point, the fact that frigidity has a very high element of the mental as opposed to the biological.
Years ago, on a vacation with my husband, I met an older woman with whom, until her death, I had a very close and highly valued friendship. She was a wonderful woman. She was a doctor, but this had not prevented her from having five children of her own, two of whom have since become quite famous.
One day, after our friendship had deepened and we had begun to exchange confidences, she told me the following story. She had been deeply in love with her husband but had been totally frigid. This had not seemed strange at the time; she had been married in 1904, and the traditions of Victorianism were still very much adhered to. However, after the
