The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

I have designed it, too, to be read by the husband of the woman who suffers from frigidity. It goes without saying that the success of his marriage is dependent on the resolution of her problem. He can help greatly to ensure this resolution by fully informing himself of the nature of the problem and by discovering the most helpful role he can play during her recovery.

But the problem of frigidity does not concern only the married. Thus I have also aimed this book at those young people who are about to enter their first love experience. We have found that this first experience can be of vast importance for the further emotional growth of the individual and of the relationship upon which she has embarked. Young women who find they have problems in the sexual sphere may be spared years of misery if they are given a real understanding of the matter in the beginning. Many of my patients, had they been given an insight into the nature of their difficulties at the start, might have avoided the inevitable and innumerable poor choices and often disastrous decisions which are so characteristic of the woman suffering from a sexual problem.

Since I have designed this book to answer the needs of a specific audience I should like to ask you to read it through and not skip around trying to find the material that seems to apply directly to you or to someone close to you. For, if you follow me as I go, you will see that frigidity is not a single, simple, local symptom. It is a complicated and profound problem involving many factors and having profound consequences. One can grasp the nature of this problem, understand it, and cure it. To do so, however, you must have very specific and complete knowledge of it in all its complexity. It may take all your powers to master this complexity. To do so, however, will be more than merely worth while. It can be the first great step toward real love, upon whose threshold you have tarried already far too long.

Before we advance into the subject itself, I should like to dispose of a few widely held and thoroughly incorrect notions about frigidity. I do this to clear away some of the underbrush which can impede those of you who are seriously seeking a resolution of the problem.

In the first place, let us look at this problem of a woman’s sexual “responsibility,” as it has been recently called. Much has been written about it and much of what I have read is pure nonsense, based on a sort of mechanical conception of what love is and of what the act of love means. I fear that such books encourage women who have deeply rooted sexual difficulties to approach the problem from the wrong direction and before they properly understand the real nature of their difficulties. Such an approach leads them to attempt abortive “solutions” which can only further discourage and disillusion them. The basic error here is in trying to make the individual woman “responsible” without giving her any real information about her condition.

The fact is that no woman who suffers from frigidity consciously desires to. Nor can she be, for a single second, held accountable for the fact that the problem developed. The word “blame” cannot by any stretch of the imagination be used in connection with her problem. I strongly urge you to let that point sink deeply into your heart and mind.

How could it possibly be that you had any responsibility in the matter? This problem always develops in childhood or even infancy. It is partly a product of early family and historical influences over which you had not the slightest control, and it is partly a matter of the biological heritage of all women everywhere. And you certainly can’t be held responsible for that.

Here is the attitude I have found most helpful to take toward this matter of sexual responsibility: You are not responsible for having developed a difficulty; you are not responsible for the existence of your frigidity any more than the stutterer is responsible for his stutter. However, once you realize it is a problem, that it is having repercussions on you and those dear to you, you are responsible for finding out everything you can about the problem and then, on the basis of this information, taking whatever action is necessary.

I have already mentioned another important misconception about frigidity and should like to go into it a bit further now. I have said that it is highly unlikely that the husband of a frigid woman is responsible for her frigidity problem. I can’t emphasize that enough. Of course if he is impotent, was when his wife married him and has continued to be, she might have a case. But true sexual impotency in the male is quite rare. Even, however, if he were truly impotent, the fact remains that this particular woman did marry him—we have found that when a woman marries an inadequate man she has done so because she, all unknown to herself, was deeply afraid of true male virility.

In saying the husband is rarely if ever to blame for a frigidity problem I am running counter to a vast body of information that has been published; in the 1930’s in particular, book after book appeared, each showing conclusively that a happily married sexual life depended on the male’s skill in arousing the woman. In such books the husband was instructed to manipulate or caress her for X minutes in Y number of erotic zones. By then, presumably, she would have reached such a state of excitement that true sexual satisfaction could not possibly fail her. Any failure of a woman to respond adequately in the marital bed was always supposed to be due to faulty technique on the husband’s part.