This is almost always a marital game, since it is hardly conceivable that an informal liaison would present the required opportunities and privileges over a sufficient length of time, or that such a liaison would be maintained in the face of it.

The husband makes advances to his wife and is repulsed. After repeated attempts, he is told that all men are beasts, he doesn’t really love her, or doesn’t love her for herself, that all he is intersted in is sex. He desists for a time, then tries again with the same result. Eventually he resigns himself and makes no further advances. As the weeks or months pass, the wife becomes increasingly informal and sometimes forgetful. She walks through the bedroom half dressed or forgets her clean towel when she takes a bath so that he has to bring it to her. If she plays a hard game or drinks heavily, she may become flirtatious with other men at parties. At length he responds to those provocations and tries again. Once more he is repulsed, and a game of ‘Uproar’ ensues involving their recent behaviour, other couples, their in-laws, their finances and their failures, terminated by a slamming door.

This time the husband makes up his mind that he is really through, that they will find a sexless modus vivendi. Months pass. He declines the negligee parade and the forgotten towel manoeuvre. The wife becomes more provocatively informal and more provocatively forgetful, but he still resists. Then one evening she actually approaches him and kisses him. At first he doesn’t respond, remembering his resolution, but soon nature begins to take its course after the long famine, and now he thinks he surely has it made. His first tentative advances are not repulsed. He becomes bolder and bolder. Just at the critical point, the wife steps back and cries: ‘See, what did I tell you! All men are beasts, all I wanted was affection, but all you are interested in is sex!’ The ensuing game of ‘Uproar’ at this point may skip the preliminary phases of their recent behaviour and their in-laws, and go right to the financial problem.

It should be noted that in spite of his protestations, the husband is usually just as afraid of sexual intimacy as his wife is, and had carefully chosen his mate to minimize the danger of overtaxing his disturbed potency, which he can now blame on her.In its everyday form this game is played by unmarried ladies of various ages, which soon earns them a common slang epithet. With them it often merges into the game of indignation, or ‘Rapo’.

Relatives

The converse game, ‘Frigid Man’, is less common, but it takes much the same general course with some variations in detail. The final outcome depends upon the scripts of the parties involved.

The crucial point of ‘Frigid Woman’ is the terminal phase of ‘Uproar’. Once this has run its course, sexual intimacy is out of the question, since both parties derive a perverse satisfaction from ‘Uproar’ and have no need of further sexual excitement from each other. Hence the most important item in anti- ‘Frigid Woman’ is to decline ‘Uproar’. This leaves the wife in a state of sexual disatisfaction which may be so acute that she will become more compliant. The use made of ‘Uproar’ distinguishes ‘Frigid Woman’ from ‘Beat Me Daddy’, where ‘Uproar’ is part of the foreplay; in ‘Frigid Woman’, ‘Uproar’ substitutes for the sex act itself. Thus in ‘Beat Me Daddy’, ‘Uproar’ is a condition of the sexual act, a kind of fetish which increases the excitement, while in ‘Frigid Woman’, once ‘Uproar’ has taken place, the episode is finished.

An early analogue of ‘Frigid Woman’ is played by that type of prissy little girl described by Dickens in Great Expectations. She comes out in her starched dress and asks the little boy to make her a mud pie. Then she sneers at his dirty hands and clothing and tells him how clean she is.