Thinking about "frigidity"
I was having a conversation with BBL during the conference about whether the concept of 'frigidity' would have been invoked in the early 1920s - the context being a particularly fraught matrimonial dispute in the upper classes that she's working on, which had the media in a feeding frenzy.
So off the top of my head, I thought that the term and the concept - in particular the use of 'frigid' as a pejorative term for the woman - probably weren't much around at the time.
So, of course, I have been doing my usual run and find out thing about this, not that I have the time to more than skim the surface.
And certainly the terms 'women's coldness' and 'sexual anaesthesia' were probably more used.
Havelock Ellis did use the expression 'frigidity' in The Sexual Impulse (1902), but being the Havelock we know and love, he then goes into so many It's All More Complicated convolutions (he is certainly a strong contender for the AllTime IAMC Award, which I conceive of as a gold statue of a hedgehog in a particularly knotty yoga pose) that it's not so much on the one hand on the other as Octopus Orgy Time.
I didn't see the term at all in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, but we are talking translation choices there.
Poking around (as it were) in various other texts of the period I am inclined to conclude, at least as a preliminary position that:
It was a period at which the assumption that WYMMYNZ - NACHRALI COLD was still pretty much rife.*
While your sexologists and sex reformers were saying that women were apparently cold and uninterested in sex because:
Ignorance, shame, misinformation, culture of silence, socialisation of women;
AND male insensitivity, sexual ignorance and ineptitude.
Which are, when you think about it, quite strong reasons for women have difficulties around sex and the possibilities of sexual pleasure.
Okay, you do get the odd writer who fulminates about the societally evil influence of the 'frigide' (Walter Gallichan, to be specific) but he is also all over The Pernicious Effects of Sexual Ignorance and Shame as being mostly at the root of the problem.
Yet, by, say, the 1950s-1960s, it's seen as something that is somehow the woman's fault, and a hostile act towards men.
I am inclined to blame a concurrence between highly popularised versions of Freudianism ('she is expressing her hostility towards the male on account of her Daddy issues and lack of penis') with D H Lawrentian views on sex. Intersecting in a way that removes any responsibility for the state of affairs from the male: if the woman isn't multiply orgasmic from a more or less cold start through penetrative sex alone, she must be a frigid bitch passively-aggressively enacting her hatred of Teh Menz.
It would, of course, require a good deal more delving into the literature to see if this hypothesis can be sustained.
At the moment, I'm just leaving it on the doorstep to see if the cat drags it in (yes, I'm aware it could make an interesting article: I have a small stack of as yet unwritten articles that I'd like to get to first).
*I suspect this was in play in the case in question: that all the various judges, barristers, etc were not surprised that the wife was revolted by her husband's embraces, but probably thought that she should close her eyes and think of wifely duty rather than being quite so explicit about her revulsion.
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