The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

The little girl knows this; she knows it with her body and mind, for even the most prudishly reared child cannot be prevented from finding out the facts of life. If her parents have not told her she will soon find out all there is to know from her girl friends.

I have said that the new changes in her cause her apprehension. They also cause her feelings of joy, excitement, and intense curiosity. Throughout her entire puberty she will run between these two states of mind, anxiety on the one hand and feelings of pleasure on the other. At times she will look back in envy at the blissful latency period when she was not bothered by these powerful indications of her biological destiny, which lies immediately ahead. She will hate her developing breasts, her menstrual period, the hair growing under her arms and around her genitalia. At other moments she will be rapturous about these very same changes.

At this point she withdraws from her parents to a large extent. Nature, as we saw in the latency period, must not only prepare her biologically for womanhood but must ready her psychologically too. If the little girl were to maintain the total dependency on her parents that she has had up to this point in her growth, she would not be able to develop the fullness of personality, the strength and individuality necessary for successful wifehood and motherhood.

But she is not a woman yet by any means. Do not get that impression, for there are vital steps ahead which she must take first. The attempt some girls make to embrace true sexuality and feminine functioning around the age of fourteen or fifteen is generally disastrous. In normal development she will flutter between strong feelings of dependency on her parents and rebellion against them, or rather rebellion against her intense desire to be a little girl with them again. The success of this phase of her growth is marked by achieving the feeling that she has the “potentiality,” not the actuality, of freedom from her parents.

At some point during this period she will become dramatically attached to a girl friend. This fact is so unalterable in normal development that the whole period of puberty is often referred to as “the chum stage” of development. She uses this friend to buttress her feelings of separateness, of independence from the parents. The two share secrets together constantly, pool their information on all matters pertaining to sex, boys, women, childbirth. The friendship is a liberal education for both and should be encouraged for the most part. The girl friend is sometimes older by a year or two or three, and the younger one’s worship of her is clearly a substitute for her feelings toward her own mother. If the older girl is not too precocious sexually, nothing but good can come from this relationship.

Very gradually puberty merges into adolescence. This is the last stage before maturity. I call this whole period the “daydream stage.” It is a period of almost literal waking dreams on the part of the young lady. She is still held lightly by the long preparatory sleep of childhood and early youth, but she is ready to wake. Her head is filled with tremendous plans for herself. These plans usually have a highly maternal and altruistic character about them; she will become a great doctor and serve suffering humanity in darkest Africa, or she will become a lawyer and defend the poor free of charge, or she will become a nurse and, under fire that would daunt a lesser creature, she will tend the wounded among our boys at the front. She has scores of great loves with boys or men whom she considers wonderful—all in her head.

The satisfaction of her now nearly mature maternal and sexual impulses through such dreams is clear. But they serve another function which is perhaps a bit more obscure. She is not quite ready for real love yet. She has still half a foot in childhood, is still reluctant to give herself wholly to the realities of grown-uphood. She needs to hang upon the tree, so to speak, for a few more years, to ripen a bit. The great roles she plays in her daydreams are, in most cases, not achievable. They allow her, by the very impossibility of their fruition, to have her cake and eat it too.

Yes, the dream of young love is a long and lovely one, and it readies the dreamer for real love. Woman will always be a romantic dreamer, a weaver of inner reveries, of tapestries of thought that give her whole personality its richness and flavor. In love, as in life, man is a doer, an aggressive achiever. Woman is the passive one; she is the dreamer who values the man’s achievements, who creates the need for his achievement and gives color and glory to it through her appreciation of it. The dreams of adolescence ready her for this role with her man.

Adolescence is a gradual preparation for true sexuality and love. In it the young girl conquers her impulse to masturbate, though in certain rather “free” communities there may be a great deal of petting with the opposite sex. If the girl’s development is normal and she puts the normally high value on herself that is characteristic of this period, she will not have sexual intercourse until she actually falls in love seriously. Also, nature gives her an almost unerring instinct for the “right” man, one who will cherish her and their children.

It is important to know that it is the man who ultimately wakens the sleeping beauty sexually. Until she is ready for intercourse and all that it implies in the way of a relationship, she is conscious of no particularly urgent vaginal sensations of a sexual nature. The man awakens these for the first time in the act of love.