The fact is that no woman who suffers from frigidity consciously desires to. Nor can she be, for a single second, held accountable for the fact that the problem developed. The word “blame” cannot by any stretch of the imagination be used in connection with her problem. I strongly urge you to let that point sink deeply into your heart and mind. How could it possibly be that you had any responsibility in the matter? This problem always develops in childhood or even infancy. It is partly a product of early family and historical influences over which you had not the slightest control, and it is partly a matter of the biological heritage of all women everywhere. And you certainly can’t be held responsible for that. Here is the attitude I have found most helpful to take toward this matter of sexual responsibility: You are not responsible for having developed a difficulty; you are not responsible for the existence of your frigidity any more than the stutterer is responsible for his stutter. However, once you realize it is a problem, that it is having repercussions on you and those dear to you, you are responsible for finding out everything you can about the problem and then, on the basis of this information, taking whatever action is necessary. I have already mentioned another important misconception about frigidity and should like to go into it a bit further now. I have said that it is highly unlikely that the husband of a frigid woman is responsible for her frigidity problem. I can’t emphasize that enough. Of course if he is impotent, was when his wife married him and has continued to be, she might have a case. But true sexual impotency in the male is quite rare. Even, however, if he were truly impotent, the fact remains that this particular woman did marry him--we have found that when a woman marries an inadequate man she has done so because she, all unknown to herself, was deeply afraid of true male virility. In saying the husband is rarely if ever to blame for a frigidity problem I am running counter to a vast body of information that has been published; in the 1930’s in particular, book after book appeared, each showing conclusively that a happily married sexual life depended on the male’s skill in arousing the woman. In such books the husband was instructed to manipulate or caress her for X minutes in Y number of erotic zones. By then, presumably, she would have reached such a state of excitement that true sexual satisfaction could not possibly fail her. Any failure of a woman to respond adequately in the marital bed was always supposed to be due to faulty technique on the husband’s part.