The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

You can see then what a complete trap Patricia was in. Actually, unless she had been strongly motivated to seek help, she would never have found an exit from her difficulties. Her periodic “breakdowns” were a simple and direct expression of the hopelessness of her situation. It was as if she were saying: “I am truly a helpless child; I can do nothing grown-up. I must be taken care of as a child is.”

She did recover her lost sexuality and her lost capacity for happiness, and in a later chapter we shall see how the Patricia Agnews of this life can achieve such an outcome. But before we leave her I should like to make one further observation of a general kind: Consider how totally beyond any help she would have been if her irrational opposition to her husband, to sex, and to real love between the sexes had been bolstered up, made to seem quite justifiable by a philosophy of life based on the feminist school of thought. From such a standpoint every one of her difficulties would have been considered perfectly normal!

Patricia, of course, represents frigidity in its most extreme form, the type in which there is almost a total lack of sexual feeling. To clarify this subject, recall our frigidity scale. On this scale total frigidity would needle around zero. A woman at the opposite end of this scale would experience a great deal of sexual excitement before and during intercourse but would be unable to have orgasm, or her orgasm would be so weak and unsatisfying that it would leave her very consciously unsatisfied. (Normalcy, of course, is a more or less absolute state and could not be described in terms of degrees.) We rate her near or at 100 on the frigidity scale, meaning she is close to normalcy. In between these two extremes there is every possible degree of sexual blocking.

Women who suffer from some degree of frigidity (rather than from a type of frigidity, such as our “masculine type”) have personality problems similar to Patricia’s. These problems become milder as they go up the scale toward normalcy. The underlying structure of their problem is also similar to Patricia’s—it is based on a too strong and too early attachment to their fathers. This early attachment has survived into adulthood and, depending largely on its original strength, causes a greater or lesser degree of sexual and interpersonal problems in marriage.

But as we go up the scale toward greater sexual responsiveness the difference in degree seems almost to become a difference in kind. From roughly the middle of the scale upward, the essential sexual problem has little to do with withdrawnness or unbridled or unrelenting hostility toward one’s mate, or a feeling of being exploited sexually. It is far more closely connected with direct sexual frustration, with a kind of Tantalus-like feeling that one is terribly close to one’s goal but cannot quite achieve it.

Here is an example of what I mean. I shall call this patient Joan. She was twenty-eight years old when she came to me, a pretty woman with an upturned nose, a generally insouciant manner, and a pleased-with-life smile. She had been married two years, she told me, and came directly to her problem. During intercourse she would become tremendously excited most of the time. It took little to stimulate her, and as the intercourse continued she would maintain her high level of excitement. But on most occasions, no matter how long the love-making continued, she would reach no climax at all. She was left with a frustrated, almost frantic feeling.

There were, however, occasional exceptions to this rule. In about one out of ten times Joan would achieve a climax of sorts during love-making. But it was weak and inconclusive and not by any means deeply satisfying to her, as it should have been and as she felt it could be. Here, however, is the most important point. Whenever she did experience this climax she almost invariably woke the next morning with severe back pains which lasted for two or three days and were clearly psychosomatic. And she would feel irritable and anxious. It was only on such days that she experienced personal difficulties with her husband. She would find herself arguing with him about trifles, being generally cross-grained and countersuggestible.

“I should think,” she said to me in puzzlement, “that it would be just the other way around; that I would be difficult with him when I didn’t come to any climax and pleased and hopeful when I did, even if it wasn’t the perfect orgasm.”

But Joan was being merely logical in this assumption. The mind is not necessarily run by such rational considerations. When she was able to comprehend the reasons behind the apparent anomaly of her backaches and her anxiety reactions, she was close to being cured.

Joan’s problem was a truly mild one. Her relationship with her husband was basically as sound as a dollar; she thought him attractive physically and respected him. She enjoyed their social life together and never felt exploited or put upon when he had to entertain his business associates. Indeed, she had a great deal of fun playing the role of hostess to them. There was no area where one could find real difficulty between Joan and her husband except in their sexual life.