The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

The clitoral orgasm takes place on the clitoris only. It excludes the vagina from sensual participation and it is often independent of the male penis. This kind of orgasm is possible at an early stage in female development. If, in growing up, the young girl becomes for any number of reasons frightened of mature vaginal sexuality, she can block that pathway and keep it blocked permanently without consciously experiencing any strong feelings of being deprived. She can do this because she is already having, as far as she knows, an amply satisfying experience through her clitoral orgasm. Since she has never experienced true sexual awakening, she doesn’t know what she is missing, consequently she doesn’t miss it.

You can see then that the woman who is able to have only a clitoral orgasm has no very strong motive for moving on to the next stage of sexual development. Her developing sexuality is channeled off into a sensual cul-de-sac and there, unless valiant and very conscious steps are taken, it tends to remain. As the early years of development move on into adolescence and further, the direction of her sexuality will not change, for she feels no reason to change it. Indeed the channel grows deeper, the earlier method of sexual response more ingrained. In the end she can respond in no other way.

Since such a woman is not advancing sexually she tends, too, to remain static emotionally. If her psychological fears of real womanhood are not resolved, she now begins to build up defenses of her childish emotional needs and of her childish methods of sexual gratification. By the time she is ready, in terms of her age, for marriage, she may very well have a full-blown neurosis that militates gravely against the success of any close relationship.

This then, is how, biology can represent destiny, with a helping hand from psychology. In a very real sense this dual potentiality of woman’s anatomy contains the seeds of sexual and hence personal tragedy.

Remember that the woman whose orgasm is confined to the clitoris is definitely frigid. Statistics on the prevalence of this kind of sexual problem are not available, but most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts agree that it is very widespread, may even be the dominant form of frigidity in our society.

Unhappily many women who suffer from this form of frigidity have not been helped in the past several years by widely published and thoroughly erroneous views concerning sexual behavior in the human female. The Kinsey report, above all, has erred in this respect. It makes no differentiation between vaginal and clitoral orgasm. Indeed its authors passionately defend the view that all orgasm is clitoral. How trained observers could come to this conclusion, it is difficult to say. The great observers in the field of human sexuality in the past fifty years have been in the field of psychiatry. They have been and are unanimous in their observation on the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasm and its importance to personality development and to neurosis. The fact that the Kinsey report ignores this important and well-established fact about the female sex and, even worse, defends the opposite viewpoint simply invalidates, from psychiatry’s viewpoint, many of its basic findings about orgasm.

The sad thing, however, is that the Kinsey report is often used to bolster the neurotically defensive attitude of women who are able to achieve only clitoral orgasm. They can say to themselves that their method of gratification is perfectly normal; do they not have a tremendous body of “scientific” data to support their view? And somehow or other women with this difficulty do get hold of the Kinsey “results.” I myself have had several women suffering from the kind of problem I have just described quote Kinsey to me at some length in defense of their method of gratification. And, having checked with several of my colleagues, I find that they all report many similar experiences.

This is unfortunate. Women who suffer from any other form of frigidity are frequently motivated to face up to their problem by feelings of sexual frustration. Sooner or later, driven by natural hungers, they will take steps to throw off the yoke of their difficulty.

The woman who is able to have a clitoral orgasm, however, has no such strong motivation. She can ruin her life and never be the wiser, never realize the reason why.

I strongly advise, therefore, that such women be more than usually wary about their tendency to be complacent, more than usually insistent about finding a way out of their dilemma; above all, they must recognize their life situation as a dilemma, a serious one that can far too easily be rationalized.