The Feminine Mystique (42 page)

With such people, the sexual orgasm is not always a “mystical experience”; it may also be taken rather lightly, bringing “fun, merriment, elation, feeling of well-being, gaiety. . . . It is cheerful, humorous, and playful—and not primarily a striving, it is basically an enjoyment and a delight.” He also found, in contradiction both to the conventional view and to esoteric theorists of sex, that in self-actualizing people the quality of both love and sexual satisfaction improves with the age of the relationship. (“It is a very common report from these individuals that sex is better than it used to be and seems to be improving all the time.”) For, as such a person, with the years, becomes more and more himself, and truer to himself, he seems also to have deeper and more profound relations with others, to be capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification with others, more transcendence of the boundaries of the self, without ever giving up his own individuality.

What we see is a fusion of great ability to love and at the same time great respect for the other and great respect for oneself. . . . Throughout the most intense and ecstatic love affairs, these people remain themselves and remain ultimately masters of themselves as well, living by their own standards, even though enjoying each other intensely.
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In our society, love has customarily been defined, at least for women, as a complete merging of egos and a loss of separateness—“togetherness,” a giving up of individuality rather than a strengthening of it. But in the love of self-actualizing people, Maslow found that the individuality is strengthened, that “the ego is in one sense merged with another, but yet in another sense remains separate and strong as always. The two tendencies, to transcend individuality and to sharpen and strengthen it, must be seen as partners and not as contradictory.”

He also found in the love of self-actualizing people the tendency to more and more complete spontaneity, the dropping of defenses, growing intimacy, honesty, and self-expression. These people found it possible to be themselves, to feel natural; they could be psychologically (as well as physically) naked and still feel loved and wanted and secure; they could let their faults, weaknesses, physical and psychological shortcomings be freely seen. They did not always have to put their best foot forward, to hide false teeth, gray hairs, signs of age; they did not have to “work” continually at their relationships; there was much less mystery and glamour, much less reserve and concealment and secrecy. In such people, there did not seem to be hostility between the sexes. In fact, he found that such people “made no really sharp differentiation between the roles and personalities of the two sexes.”

That is, they did not assume that the female was passive and the male active, whether in sex or love or anything else. These people were all so certain of their maleness or femaleness that they did not mind taking on some of the cultural aspects of the opposite sex role. It was especially noteworthy that they could be both active and passive lovers, and this was the clearest in the sexual act and in physical lovemaking. Kissing and being kissed, being above or below in the sexual act, taking the initiative, being quiet and receiving love, teasing and being teased—these were all found in both sexes.
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And thus, while in the conventional and even in the sophisticated view, masculine and feminine love, active and passive, seem to be at opposite poles, in self-actualizing people “the dichotomies are resolved and the individual becomes both active and passive, both selfish and unselfish, both masculine and feminine, both self-interested and self-effacing.”

Love for self-actualizing people differed from the conventional definition of love in yet another way; it was not motivated by need, to make up a deficiency in the self; it was more purely “gift” love, a kind of “spontaneous admiration.”
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Such disinterested admiration and love used to be considered a superhuman ability, not a natural human one. But as Maslow says, “human beings at their best, fully grown, show many characteristics one thought, in an earlier era, to be supernatural prerogatives.”

And there, in the words “fully grown,” is the clue to the mystery of the problem that has no name. The transcendence of self, in sexual orgasm, as in creative experience, can only be attained by one who is himself, or herself, complete, by one who has realized his or her own identity. The theorists know this is true for man, though they have never thought through the implications for women. The suburban doctors, gynecologists, obstetricians, child-guidance clinicians, pediatricians, marriage counselors, and ministers who treat women's problems have all seen it, without putting a name to it, or even reporting it as a phenomenon. What they have seen confirms that for woman, as for man, the need for self-fulfillment—autonomy, self-realization, independence, individuality, self-actualization—is as important as the sexual need, with as serious consequences when it is thwarted. Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.

Psychoanalysts have long suspected that woman's intelligence does not fully flower when she denies her sexual nature; but by the same token can her sexual nature fully flower when she must deny her intelligence, her highest human potential? All the words that have been written criticizing American women for castrating their husbands and sons, for dominating their children, for their material greediness, for their sexual frigidity or denial of femininity may simply mask this one underlying fact: that woman, no more than man, can live by sex alone; that her struggle for identity, autonomy—that “personally productive orientation based on the human need for active participation in a creative task”—is inextricably linked with her sexual fulfillment, as a condition of her maturity. In the attempt to live by sex alone, in the image of the feminine mystique, ultimately she must “castrate” the husband and sons who can never give her enough satisfaction to make up for lack of a self, and pass on to her daughters her own unspoken disappointment, self-denigration, and discontent.

Professor Maslow told me that he thought self-actualization is only possible for women today in America if one person can grow through another—that is, if the woman can realize her own potential through her husband and children. “We do not know if this is possible or not,” he said.

The new theorists of the self, who are men, have usually evaded the question of self-realization for a woman. Bemused themselves by the feminine mystique, they assume that there must be some strange “difference” which permits a woman to find self-realization by living through her husband and children, while men must grow to theirs. It is still very difficult, even for the most advanced psychological theorist, to see woman as a separate self, a human being who, in that respect, is no different in her need to grow than is a man. Most of the conventional theories about women, as well as the feminine mystique, are based on this “difference.” But the actual basis for this “difference” is the fact that the possibility for true self-realization has not existed for women until now.

Many psychologists, including Freud, have made the mistake of assuming from observations of women who did not have the education and the freedom to play their full part in the world, that it was woman's essential nature to be passive, conformist, dependent, fearful, childlike—just as Aristotle, basing his picture of human nature on his own culture and particular period of time, made the mistake of assuming that just because a man was a slave, this was his essential nature and therefore “it was good for him to be a slave.”

Now that education, freedom, the right to work on the great human frontiers—all the roads by which men have realized themselves—are open to women, only the shadow of the past enshrined in the mystique of feminine fulfillment keeps women from finding their road. The mystique promises women sexual fulfillment through abdication of self. But there is massive statistical evidence that the very opening to American women of those roads to their own identity in society brought a real and dramatic increase in woman's capacity for sexual fulfillment: the orgasm. In the years between the “emancipation” of women won by the feminists and the sexual counterrevolution of the feminine mystique, American women enjoyed a decade-by-decade increase in sexual orgasm. And the women who enjoyed this the most fully were, above all, the women who went furthest on the road to self-realization, women who were educated for active participation in the world outside the home.

This evidence is found in two famous studies, generally not cited for this purpose. The first of these, the Kinsey report, was based on interviews with 5,940 women who grew up in the various decades of the twentieth century during which the emancipation of women was won, and before the era of the feminine mystique. Even according to Kinsey's measure of sexual fulfillment, the orgasm (which many psychologists, sociologists, and analysts have criticized for its narrow, mechanistic, over-physiological emphasis, and its disregard of basic psychological nuances), his study shows a dramatic increase in sexual fulfillment during these decades. The increase began with the generation born between 1900 and 1909, who were maturing and marrying in the 1920's—the era of feminism, the winning of the vote and the great emphasis on women's rights, independence, careers, and equality with men, including the right to sexual fulfillment. The increase in wives reaching orgasm and the decrease in frigid women continued in each succeeding generation down to the youngest generation in the Kinsey sample which was marrying in the 1940's.
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And the most “emancipated” women, women educated beyond college for professional careers, showed a far greater capacity for complete sexual enjoyment, full orgasm, than the rest. Contrary to the feminine mystique, the Kinsey figures showed that the more educated the woman, the more likely she was to enjoy full sexual orgasm more often, and the less likely to be frigid. The greater sexual enjoyment of women who had completed college, compared to those who had not gone beyond grade school or high school, and the even greater sexual enjoyment of women who had gone beyond college into higher professional training showed up from the first year of marriage, and continued to show up in the fifth, tenth, and fifteenth years of marriage. While Kinsey found only one American woman in ten who had never experienced sexual orgasm, the majority of women he interviewed did not experience it completely, all or almost all of the time—except for those women who were educated beyond college. The Kinsey figures also showed that women who married before twenty were least likely to experience sexual orgasm, and were likely to enjoy it less frequently in or out of marriage, though they started sexual intercourse five or six years earlier than women who finished college or graduate school.

While the Kinsey data showed that over the years “a distinctly higher proportion of the better educated females, in contrast to the grade school and high school females, had actually reached orgasm in a higher percentage of their marital coitus,” the increased enjoyment of sex did not, for the most part, mean an increased incidence of it, in the woman's life. On the whole, there was a slight trend in the opposite direction. And that increase in extramarital sex was less marked with professionally trained women.
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Perhaps something about the supposedly “unfeminine” strength, or self-realization achieved by women educated for professional careers enabled them to enjoy greater sexual fulfillment in their marriages than other women—as measured by the orgasm—and thus less likely to seek it outside of marriage. Or perhaps they simply had less need to seek status, achievement, or identity in sex. The relationship between woman's sexual fulfillment and self-realization indicated by Kinsey's findings is underlined by the fact that, as many critics have pointed out, Kinsey's sample was over-representative of professional women, college graduates, women with unusually high “dominance” or strength of self. Kinsey's sample underrepresented the “typical” American housewife who devotes her life to husband, home and children; it underrepresented women with little education; because of its use of volunteers, it underrepresented the kind of passive, submissive, conformist women whom Maslow found to be incapable of sexual enjoyment.
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The increase in sexual fulfillment and decrease in frigidity which Kinsey found during the decades after women's emancipation may not have been felt by the “average” American housewife as much as by this minority of women who directly experienced emancipation through education and participation in the professions. Nevertheless, the decrease in frigidity was so dramatic in that large, if unrepresentative, sample of nearly 6,000 women, that even Kinsey's critics found it significant.

It was hardly an accident that this increase in woman's sexual fulfillment accompanied her progress to equal participation in the rights, education, work, and decisions of American society. The coincidental sexual emancipation of American men—the lifting of the veil of contempt and degradation from sexual intercourse—was surely related to the American male's new regard for the American woman as an equal, a person like himself, and not just a sexual object. Evidently, the further women progressed from that state, the more sex became an act of human intercourse rather than a dirty joke to men; and the more women were able to love men, rather than submit, in passive distaste, to their sexual desire. In fact, the feminine mystique itself—with its acknowledgement of woman as subject and not just object of the sexual act, and its assumption that her active, willing participation was essential to man's pleasure—could not have come without the emancipation of women to human equality. As the early feminists foresaw, women's rights did indeed promote greater sexual fulfillment, for men and women.