Since, as far as is known, elevated levels of female sexual tension are not technically necessary to conception, the natural function of woman’s sexuality has been repressed in the service of false propriety and restricted by other unnecessary psychosocial controls for equally unsupportable reasons.
In short, the negation of female sexuality, which discourages the development of an effectively useful sexual value system, has been an exercise of the so-called double standard and its socio-cultural precursors.
Residual societal patterns of female sexual repression continue to affect many young women today. They mature acutely aware of repercussions from sexual discord between their parents and among other valued adults, so they grope for new roles of sexual functioning.
Since discomfort in the communication of sexual material still prevails between parents and their children, the young frequently are condemned, by lack of information about what is sexually meaningful, to live with decisions equally as unrewarding sexually as those made by their parents.
In other words, because of cultural restraints the members of younger generations must continue to make their own sexual mistakes, since they, like previous generations, rarely have been given benefit of the results of their parents’ past sexual experience; good, bad, or indifferent as that experience may have been.
The necessary freedom of sexual communication between parents and sons and daughters cannot be achieved until the basic component of sexuality itself is given a socially comfortable role by all active generations simultaneously.
In the face of rapidly increasing complaints of inadequacy of human sexual function, it would seem that the potpourri of cultures that influence the behavior of so many might designate some area less vital to the quality of living than sexual expression to receive and to bear the burden of the social ills of human existence.
As recently as the turn of the century, after marriage rites and advent of offspring were celebrated as evidence of perpetuation of family and race.
Woman was considered to have done her duty, fulfilled herself, or both, depending of course upon the individual frame of reference. In reality society honored her contribution as a sexual entity only in relation to her capacity for breeding, never relative to the enhancement of the marital relationship by her sexual expression.
In contradistinction to the recognition accorded her as a breeding animal, the psychological importance of her physical presence during the act of conception was considered nonexistent.
It must be acknowledged, however, that there always have been men and women in every culture who identified their need for one another as complete human entities, each denying nothing to the other including the vital component of sexual exchange.
Unfortunately, whether from sexual fear or deprivation (both usually the result of too little knowledge), those who socially could not make peace with their sexuality were the ones to dictate and record concepts of female sexual identity The code of the Puritan and similar ethics permitted only communication in the negative vein of rejection.
There was no acceptable discussion of what was sexually supportive of marital relationships.
So far the discussion has focused on an account of past influences from which female sexual function has inherited its baseline for functional inadequacy.
Because this influence still permeates the current “cultural” assignment of the female sexual role, its existence must be recognized before the psycho physiological components of dysfunction can be dealt with comprehensively.
Socio cultural influence more often than not places woman in a position in which she must adapt, sublimate, inhibit or even distort her natural capacity to function sexually in order to fulfill her genetically assigned role. Herein lies a major source of woman’s sexual dysfunction.
The adaptation of sexual function to meet socially desirable conditions represents a system operant in most successfully interactive behavior, which in turn is the essence of a mutually enhancing sexual relationship. However, to adapt sexual function to a philosophy of rejection is to risk impairment of the capacity for effective social interaction.
- To sublimate sexual function can enhance both self and that state to which the repression is committed, if the practice of sublimation lies within the coping capacity of the particular individual who adopts it.
- To inhibit sexual function beyond that realistic degree which equally serves social and sexual value systems in a positive way,
- To distort or maladapt sexual function until the capacity
- Its function is extinguished, is to diminish the quality of the individual and of any marital relation ship to which he or she is committed.
When it is realized that this psychosocial backdrop is prevalent in histories developed from marital couples with complaints of female sexual inadequacy, the psycho physiological and situational aspects of female orgasmic dysfunction can be contemplated realistically.
