The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

You see, women want to find themselves, desperately want to. And in this portrait they get a hint, often the first they have ever had, of what to aim for, of the real potential inside themselves.

I call this subject of my sketch “idealized,” and she is. But I want to emphasize that she is not a personal idle daydream of my own, based on airy nothingness; very much the contrary. Her characteristics are based on exact and thoroughly checked psychological and biological facts, facts upon which the leading scientists in this field are in general agreement. And she is a composite based on observations of women I have known, and not always clinically. If you stop to think as you read about her, you may realize that you have known such women too.

What, then, is she like? First of all to give us a frame for our portrait so that we can see what we do know more clearly, let me state what we cannot know about her; what, in fact, is irrelevant.

We don’t know what she looks like. She may be tall or short, red-haired, blond, or brunette. She may have large breasts and round hips and sloping shoulders, or she may be small-breasted (or even flat-chested), have wide shoulders and narrow hips. She may have a career or not have a career, be more intelligent and better educated than her husband or less intelligent and less well educated. She may have children or be unable to have children. She may be rich or poor, come from the “400” or from the slums. She may be a bit shy or quite at ease socially. She may be athletic or totally unathletic. These things we don’t know about her and, for our purposes, they do not matter.

Here are some of the things we do know.

In the first place, she is very much “at home” in the world. Deep inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can’t imagine what it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her husband makes the world safe for her.

This feeling may seem unrealistic, in view of the very clear insecurities in the world today. As you will discover, however, it is based on a far deeper understanding of reality, on a far deeper reality than the one reflected in the alarums published in the daily newspaper.

This sense of reality almost invariably leads her to select a husband who is good for her, often near perfect, in fact. He might not be perfect for another woman, nor perfect in any ultimate sense, but he is near perfect for her. He loves her and intends to go on loving her. He may be a carpenter or an architect, a lawyer, a dock hand, or a poet, but he, with her, is passionate and loyal, a good companion and a good father for her children. She has an infallible sense about this matter, and though she may have had an adolescent or college crush on a no-gooder, she simply never will marry him.

Of course marrying a good husband adds to her sense of “at-homeness” in the world. Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.”

As you will see, it too has its roots in woman’s biology, is, on its deepest level, a need in her that must have expression. The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it.