SEXUALITY IN MARRIAGE: RESEARCH ON MARITAL SEX (FREUD, ELLIS AND OTHERS)
The influence of Freud’s and Ellis’s ideas interacted with other cultural phenomena, setting the stage for a new kind of research on sexuality which adopted the quantitative methods and techniques of the natural sciences.
Before the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey and others), however, only a few such studies had appeared, dealing mostly with students and patients. Of the few whose samples were normal married persons, three deserve mention: Factors in the Sex Life of 2200 Women, (Davis); A Research in Marriage (Hamilton); and One Thousand Marriages (Dickinson and Beam). The first two were based on questionnaire data, and the last relied on cases in Dickinson’s files on his gynecological patients.
It becomes clear from these early studies that ignorance and frustration among married persons was commonplace, as they tried to work out their sexual lives in an era when accurate information was not readily available and when the prevailing mores and attitudes still reflected what Brecher (1972) called the debilitating disease of Victorianism. Dickinson, for example, reported that eighteen of his one thousand patients remained virgins for an average of four years after marriage, because neither the husband nor the wife knew how to have intercourse. Characteristically, he said, the marital coitus of his patients was brief and male-oriented, the wife remaining passive and unaroused. Intercourse occurred once or twice a week, usually without foreplay. Intromission lasted about five minutes, after which the husband had an orgasm and the wife did not.
Hamilton, in his study of one hundred married persons of each sex, felt that the institution of marriage had “fared rather better than had been expected”, when 48% of his sample had been rated as reasonably satisfied with their marriage. Of the one hundred women, only thirty-six had had orgasm during the first year of their marriages, though this number had increased to fifty-four by the time of the study. Hamilton thought that his study gave evidence that in many families the children “are so affected by their parents that when adult life is reached no conceivable mode of prolonged and intimate relationship with a person of the opposite sex is likely to end otherwise than disastrously”.
During the same period, there appeared a noteworthy attempt to change this dismal picture, to give to physicians and married men the knowledge they needed to introduce satisfaction and joy into marital sex for both the man and the woman, and to dispel the tedium and misery of the sexual side of marriage which seemed to be so typical of the time. Ideal Marriage, by Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Van de Velde (1930), was an explicit manual whose intention was to dispel ignorance, to teach men how effectively and lovingly to introduce their brides to the marriage bed, and, by describing in detail many possible variations and techniques, to help couples to keep their sex lives alive and interesting through their lives. One of Van de Velde’s most important contributions was to emphasize the mutuality of sex, of the reciprocal giving and receiving of pleasure between the partners. He insisted throughout the work on the importance of the wife’s satisfaction and described the typical sex act consisting of brief or no foreplay, intromission, and ejaculation as a parody of how sex could be. Though himself a Victorian who believed that sex should be expressed only within the context of marriage, Van de Velde provided a popular and knowledgeable antidote to the prevailing climate of ignorance and inhibition about sex.
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