Now that we have seen the real potential of woman, how she can flower and blossom in the climate of love, what she can be like when she embraces her true destiny, we may turn to an examination of frigidity with some perspective. This section will deal with what frigidity is, specifically, and why it can and does occur in women, blighting their capacities, stunting their personality, chilling and killing their ability to love at the heart’s deep core. When a woman gets a clear picture of such matters, and _only_ when she does, can she find her way back to the highroad of real womanhood. If we take the word “frigidity” in its most general sense it means, as I have already stated, an inability to enjoy sexual love to its fullest potentiality. This means, purely and simply, the inability to have an orgasm of the type described in Chapter 2. But the matter is more complicated than that, for there are degrees of frigidity, and I think it is very important to understand what this means. Perhaps I can make this idea clearest by first describing the symptoms of a woman who came to see me several months ago. She was an example of total sexual frigidity. In our first interview she described herself as having absolutely no sexual reactions whatsoever. She did not respond to her husband’s caresses in any way at all. Neither her clitoris, vagina, nor labia was capable of the slightest sexual response. She received no stimulation from kissing or physical closeness. Her breasts and all secondary erotic regions were, from the standpoint of sensual response, dead. Her vaginal passage never became lubricated before or during intercourse. The act of love was very painful for her. An examination by a competent gynecologist showed no physical condition which would explain her pain. Her external genitalia were all fully developed. Her reproductive organs--the vaginal tract, cervix, uterus, tubes, and ovaries--also were normally developed and showed no pathology. This woman’s sexual unresponsiveness was entirely psychological, and on a scale showing the degrees of frigidity she would represent absolute zero. (This is no longer true of her, incidentally; she has made progress in therapy in a relatively short time, considering the extent of her difficulty, and her final prognosis promises to be excellent.)