Peter Cryle and Alison Moore Frigidity: An intellectual history

Reviewed by: Jacinthe Flore, La Trobe University, Australia

Published as part of Palgrave Macmillan's ‘Genders and Sexualities in History’ series, Peter Cryle and Alison Moore's Frigidity: An Intellectual History presents a critical historiography of frigidity beginning in the mid-thirteenth century. The authors produce a highly informative journey into forgotten spaces of human intimacy, with the ambition to ‘bury frigidity, not to praise it’ (p. 9), and throughout the book they demonstrate that frigidity, like other putative medical conditions, does not follow a linear trajectory. Frigidity is a vexed term with multiple meanings and the authors exhort readers not to treat it as a static object of knowledge. Their approach maps the circulation of discourses, rather than identifying specific culprits in the dissemination of frigidity as pathology, and draws on a range of voices, from medical practitioners to popular fiction writers, in order to historically explore frigidity with a geographical focus on France; Frigidity ‘is not so much a history of frigidity in France as a history of frigidity in which France serves as the locus of change’ (p. 21).

Frigidity is organised in eight genealogical chapters from thirteenth-century mediaeval Italy to early twentieth-century France. In the opening chapter, through a reading of selected canonical literature, the authors demonstrate an emerging anxiety in medieval times around sexual potency and impotency in women that would ultimately surface in medicine. In the second and third chapters, turning to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the authors draw on key medical texts to highlight that ‘sexual coldness’ was conceived as an ailment affecting both men and women. Frigidity, while manifesting through multiple models, was approached from the beginning as a moral and physical abnormality. Cryle and Moore, however, emphasise that ‘moral’ should be approached with caution and not completely equated to ‘psychology’. Similarly, the physical was not completely dismissed from medicine, as they demonstrate in the third chapter, which explores vaginismus.

In Chapter 5, ‘The Wedding Night’, the authors harness both medical texts and narrative fiction of the nineteenth century. They note that resistance from the bride was expected and the onus was on the husband to find the balance between brutality and gentle coaxing in order to awaken desire and initiate the bride to sexuality; ‘in almost every case, sexuality was read as destiny’ (p. 159). Frigidity encourages us to reckon with both history and current materialisations of old models. Particularly, in light of the recent publication of the fifth tome of the DSM (2013) and the modifications of disorders of sexual desire, ¹ Frigidity is a timely reminder that the models through which we comprehend reductions and absences in sexual desire have a long and contentious history.

Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the treatment of frigidity, a malady now overwhelmingly understood as the rightful property of the female kind. The authors position the condition as significant to the development of knowledge on intimate practices and as demanding a reconsideration of what counts as central to the history of sexuality. Frigidity became a ‘perversion’ important to the elaboration of sexual aberrations: ‘every departure from the norm was a perversion, every perversion a lack, and every lack part of the same general pathology’ (p. 171). Hence, all desires not aiming towards coitus were conflated with frigidity.

The treatment of frigidity was among the major locations where physical and moral aspects of ‘sexual coldness’ were debated. The splitting between moral and physical was occasioned by the search for a viable cure: ‘if (moral) anaphrodisia could be held apart from (physical) impotence, each could be treated with a method suited to its aetiology’ (p. 179). The discussion of treatments of frigidity covers the works of physicians such as Krafft-Ebing, Schrenck-Notzing, Stekel and Ellis. The authors discuss Krafft-Ebing's assertion that posited that in neurasthenics, nymphomania, with its ceaseless yet unmet demands for satisfaction, could be closely connected to anaphrodisia (p. 198). This is an intriguing connection that I would have liked to see further expanded. Doctors like Krafft-Ebing and Schrenck-Notzing suggested that sexual excesses could eventually lead to anaphrodisia. An examination of the relationship between sexual profligacy (such as nymphomania and onanism) and sexual coldness would demonstrate that excess and lack are slippery, interconnected concepts.

Tied to debates on frigidity in the medical field was an anxiety about the place of women in society and some saw frigidity as resulting from women's desire to ‘play men's roles’ (p. 221), making the condition important to debates about the burgeoning feminist movement. It may appear peculiar that the authors discuss the work of psychoanalytic thinker Marie Bonaparte in their penultimate chapter instead of that of Freud and other psychoanalysts. However, Cryle and Moore succinctly navigate Bonaparte's ideas and her writings, challenging and edifying, provide exceptional insights into how a woman approached her own ‘pathology’. What is also significant about this chapter is how Cryle and Moore's genealogical approach enables them to focus on the knowledge paradigms that Bonaparte's work is part of, rather than evaluating her contribution as feminist/anti-feminist disputes.

The closing pages present a brief overview of current disorders relating to declines in sexual desire as they appear in North American psychiatry. This short review cannot do justice to the wealth of material, which can at times be overwhelming, presented in Frigidity. For scholars who, like me, are interested in the history of the medicalisation of sexual appetites, this is an invaluable resource. As such, Frigidity: An Intellectual History is likely to become a key text for scholars and students interested in history, gender, and sexuality. It examines the historical development of a condition whose time one might think is long past but as Peter Cryle and Alison Moore demonstrate, frigidity or ‘sexual coldness’, still influences conceptualisations of sexual lack and the body.