The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

Now that we have seen the real potential of woman, how she can flower and blossom in the climate of love, what she can be like when she embraces her true destiny, we may turn to an examination of frigidity with some perspective. This section will deal with what frigidity is, specifically, and why it can and does occur in women, blighting their capacities, stunting their personality, chilling and killing their ability to love at the heart’s deep core. When a woman gets a clear picture of such matters, and only when she does, can she find her way back to the highroad of real womanhood.

If we take the word “frigidity” in its most general sense it means, as I have already stated, an inability to enjoy sexual love to its fullest potentiality. This means, purely and simply, the inability to have an orgasm of the type described in Chapter 2. But the matter is more complicated than that, for there are degrees of frigidity, and I think it is very important to understand what this means.

Perhaps I can make this idea clearest by first describing the symptoms of a woman who came to see me several months ago. She was an example of total sexual frigidity.

In our first interview she described herself as having absolutely no sexual reactions whatsoever. She did not respond to her husband’s caresses in any way at all. Neither her clitoris, vagina, nor labia was capable of the slightest sexual response. She received no stimulation from kissing or physical closeness. Her breasts and all secondary erotic regions were, from the standpoint of sensual response, dead. Her vaginal passage never became lubricated before or during intercourse. The act of love was very painful for her. An examination by a competent gynecologist showed no physical condition which would explain her pain. Her external genitalia were all fully developed. Her reproductive organs—the vaginal tract, cervix, uterus, tubes, and ovaries—also were normally developed and showed no pathology.

This woman’s sexual unresponsiveness was entirely psychological, and on a scale showing the degrees of frigidity she would represent absolute zero. (This is no longer true of her, incidentally; she has made progress in therapy in a relatively short time, considering the extent of her difficulty, and her final prognosis promises to be excellent.)

At the opposite end of this frigidity scale is the woman who trembles on the verge of sexual maturity but cannot quite step over the line. In the act of love she has all the responses which I have described as taking place in normal sexual intercourse, but she cannot come to orgasm, or at least orgasm happens quite rarely—say once in ten or twenty times—and it is generally a mild and unsatisfactory one. You will be interested to know that her sexual problem is a relatively easy one to resolve. This is the kind of frigidity that may disappear entirely after the birth of a child. I have seen it dispelled, too, by a single conversation with a wise counselor or with just time and a minimum of insightful understanding which she can obtain by taking thought or learning more about the nature of her problem and dispelling certain misunderstandings she has had about the nature of sex, marriage, men, and love.

In between these two types there are all degrees of sexual frigidity. The severity of a woman’s problem, or the lack of it, can be calculated in terms of the degree of response she has to her husband’s caresses and the frequency with which she achieves satisfaction in intercourse. Also important in estimating the degree of the problem is the orgasm itself. This is purely a subjective matter and can of course be judged only by the individual. If the orgasm is weak and chronically leaves one with a dissatisfied feeling, a certain degree of frigidity is present.

In addition to the degrees of frigidity there is a type of frigidity that it is very important to understand. We call a woman suffering from this form of frigidity a “clitoridal” or “masculine” type. To make her problem clear to you I shall have to describe her typical sexual reaction.

This woman’s responses to sexual stimulation are usually quite passionate. In the foreplay preceding sexual intercourse and even in the first part of intercourse her reactions parallel the normal to a greater or lesser extent. This type of woman, however, can always be identified by the kind of orgasm she has.

This orgasm takes place on her clitoris exclusively. She does not feel the orgasm in her vagina, nor do the sexual sensations spread very strongly to the other parts of her body. The sensual experience is primarily localized at climax, and though, owing to her lack of experience with the mature form of orgasm, she may defend her orgasm as perfectly normal and adequate, it is not. Therapy has helped many women with this constricted reaction to sexual intercourse and, once they have experienced the profound pleasure of the true orgasm, they will admit quite freely their former deprivation.