No one seriously contends, of course, that the domineering wife is, sexually speaking, a new character in our world. After all, the henpecked husband with his shrewish wife is a comic figure of long standing, in literature and on the stage, as Dr. Schillinger points out. There is no evidence that these Milquetoasts became suddenly emboldened when they crossed the threshhold of the master bedroom.

Furthermore, Dr. Calderone says, a certain number of docile, retiring men always have been around. They aren't ``frigid'' and they aren't homosexual; they're just restrained in all of life. They like to be dominated. One such man once confided to Dr. Theodor Reik, New York psychiatrist, that he preferred to have his wife the sexual aggressor. Asked why, he replied primly: ``Because that's no activity for a gentleman.''

But such cases were, in the past, unusual. Society here and abroad has been built around the dominating male -- even the Bible appears to endorse the concept.

Family survival on our own Western frontier, for example, could quite literally depend on a man's strength and ability to bring home the bacon; and the dependent wife seldom questioned his judgment about anything, including the marriage bed.

This carried over into the more urbanized late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the man ruled the roost in the best bull roaring Life With Father manner.

In those days, a wife had mighty few rights in the domestic sphere and even fewer in the sexual sphere. ``Grandma wasn't expected to like it,'' Dr. Marion Hilliard, the late Toronto gynecologist, once summed up the attitude of the' 90 s. Wives of the period shamefacedly thought of themselves as ``used'' by their husbands -- and, history indicates, they often quite literally were.