Tag: sex, sexuality

Hanne Blank

For Hitschmann and Bergler, ‘frigidity’ had a single criterion: ‘absence of the vaginal orgasm.’ The standard was unqualified and absolute. A woman who did not enjoy intercourse: frigid. Women who derived sexual pleasure from acts other than intecourse were frigid too. Nothing else mattered, only whether a woman had an orgasm because a man’s penis was inside her vagina. Sexually agressive women were labeled ‘frigid’ because of the association between masculinity and aggressiveness. Womanhood that was not passive was not properly womanly. “Frigidity,” as Jane Gerhardt points out, “thus became a label and a diagnosis that defined how much sexual desire a woman must have and in what kinds of sexual behavior she must engage to be ‘healthy’.

John Stoltenberg

If you look at all the variables in nature that are saidto determine human “sex,” you can’t possibly find one that will unequivocally split the species into two. Each of the so-called criteria of sexedness is itself a continuum—including chromosomal variables, genital and gonadal variations,reproductive capacities, endocrinological proportions, and any other criterion you could think of. Any or all of these different variables may line up in any number of ways, and all of the variables may vary independently of one another.

Esther Perel

When we are children, play comes to us naturally, but our capacity for play collapses as we age. Sex often remains the last arena of play we can permit ourselves, a bridge to our childhood. Long after the mind has been filled with injunctions to be serious, the body remains a free zone, unencumbered by reason and judgment. In lovemaking, we can recapture the utterly uninhibited movement of the child, who has not yet developed self-consciousness before the judging gaze of others.