The steps for achieving insight into one’s negative emotions which I recommend here are the most difficult steps one has to take on the road to maturity. If you can take them, the hardest part will be over. The remaining part of the process of recovery occurs rather naturally, is a matter of acquiring more information, allowing new feelings to grow and expand inside oneself, accepting guidance past a few possible pitfalls. You will see what I mean as we continue in the following chapters. _Chapter 15_ THE MALE SEX: A NEW HORIZON The self-exploration described in the last chapter results in the surfacing of hidden feelings, attitudes, and fantasies. Getting them up and out, exposing them to the bright light of reason and judgment, clears the psychological atmosphere almost miraculously. The next most helpful step to take, I have found, is a re-evaluation of the male sex. The woman who suffers from frigidity has, by definition, very little knowledge of what men are really like. Since her attitudes toward men were formed in her distant past and have altered little through the years, she has a child’s-eye view of men. To her, as parents to a child, men are powers, not people. Projecting her own childhood fears and hopes and needs upon them, she has been calling that reality and acting accordingly. This next step, the conscious revaluation of men, can be achieved by learning what the male sex is really like--how it differs from the female sex, what makes men think, act, and feel the way they do in everyday life--and by contrasting this knowledge with the negative attitudes and feelings she has now brought to the surface of her mind. In this way she will soon learn to understand her husband _as he is_, and thus achieve the ability to love him in all of his uniqueness and individuality. The central characteristic of the male, and the one that most clearly differentiates him from the female, is his aggressiveness. In the sexual sphere this shows itself most clearly in the fact that the man takes, for the most part, the initiative in wooing. He it is who is the pursuer, the girl the pursued; he it is who proposes and he it is who initiates sex. An analogy to this fundamentally aggressive activity of the male in relationship to the female is seen, in a primordial biological form, by the function of his sperm. As you may know, the individual spermatozoon is an individual cell which is propelled by a microscopic tail. After the deposit of spermatozoa in the vagina, the individual sperm _actively_ seeks out and joins the ova, which has been _passively_ waiting for it. This physiological metaphor, according to certain leading theoreticians, well expresses the fundamentally aggressive nature of man in relationship to woman, psychologically as well as sexually.