The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

In my first sessions with her I could see that Toni’s clear thinking and logical mind, her emotionless, almost masculine forthrightness in expressing herself belied her softly feminine appearance. Her way of dressing was an unconscious attempt to hide from the world, and from herself, her real problem.

She was thirty years old, had been married for seven years, and had a five-year-old son. For the past two years she had had severe migraine headaches, sometimes as often as three times a week. These headaches had started at about the same time that serious marriage difficulties had developed between herself and her husband. The problem, she stated honestly, had originated with her. Rather quickly she seemed to have lost all respect for her husband. Looking at him one day, she said, she suddenly saw that he had no ambition of any kind and was “insufferably smug and complacent.” He had not the slightest desire to better his lot, she realized, but was content to putter around in his cellar workshop with “inane and useless projects” or to spend his evenings “glued to the television set” or playing poker with a few “useless men.”

This passivity on the part of her husband had inexplicably enraged her. “I realized in that moment that we could rot, socially and financially, if it were up to him,” she told me bitterly. “I can’t stand such pointlessness in a man.”

I now asked her what their social life together had been like, and she told me that it had been very active until two years before. “Most of our friends were my friends originally. His friends just seemed to fall away in the first year of our marriage. They weren’t very interesting anyhow, and I was just as glad. But after I began to lose interest in my husband, to lose my respect for him, I began to withdraw socially myself. My husband didn’t seem to care about that either. He doesn’t seem to care about anything.”

Further inquiry elicited the fact that Toni was extremely successful in the business world. She had been through a leading woman’s college and had been the president of her class and very prominent in extracurricular activities. “I was a really Big Woman On Campus,” she said nostalgically. She had then gone to graduate school, taking her degree at Columbia University in business administration, and on graduation had entered the buying department of one of the largest merchandising corporations in America.

Within five years Toni had become the top buyer of women’s clothes for the entire corporation. In actuality this was one of the top positions of this kind in the United States, for the merchandising corporation was gigantic. Her present salary exceeded twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

I was not surprised to learn, at this point, that this was exactly three times the salary her husband made as a junior member of a law firm that specialized in corporation law.

I now asked Toni if she did not get a great deal of pleasure from her success in the business world. She told me that before she was married and for about two years afterward she had indeed felt a great deal of pride in her success. Her husband, too, had shared her pleasure in her achievements. After the baby had come, however, he had seemed gradually to lose interest in her work. And gradually, too, she had developed a growing sense of guilt about her activities in the business world. She had the constant feeling that she was neglecting her child. Sometimes she would call the nurse at home five or six times a day to find out if the baby was all right. “Two months ago,” she told me, “I went in to see my boss. I told him I wanted to leave or to cut down to a part-time job. He was terribly upset and at once offered me a large increase and gave me a big talk on how important I was and how much they needed me. One part of me was flattered enormously, but after I left him I felt depressed. I felt as though I were failing my child terribly, but I felt trapped by the amount of money I had been offered. I also felt that if I should really give it all up I would quickly become bored at just staying home.”

Everything Toni had said up to this point fitted the classical picture of the clitoridal woman. Almost invariably they marry a passive and rather dependent (though often very attractive and charming) man and finally become bitterly critical of his dependency and lack of drive, thus upsetting the equilibrium of the marriage. In their mind’s eye they wish for a more aggressive male who would dominate them, but this is pure fantasy, for they would not be able to stand real male assertiveness and, indeed, take it very poorly when their passive male does assert himself. Such women, too, are often very successful in the world of masculine achievement. And if they have children they develop great guilt about neglecting them.

One further characteristic that Toni had was a tremendous anxiety about childbirth. Her pregnancy had been characterized by a very deep depression; she had suffered physically for the entire nine months and, when the time for delivery arrived, had felt “absolutely certain that I was going to die.”