The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

There could be no doubt that Toni’s anger at her husband and her migraines started right after this sexual experience. And there could be no doubt that they were intimately related experiences. Though her personality structure and the psychological events which caused her kind of frigidity were different from Patricia’s and from Joan’s, they were alike in one regard. All three had the deepest and most abiding fear of real vaginal sensation and ultimately, of course, of vaginal orgasm.

This fear is a profound one in the clitoridal or masculine woman. Toni, rather than admit to herself how frightened she was of this vaginal experience, chose unconsciously to ruin her personal relationship with her husband, to denigrate all those characteristics which she had formerly loved in him—his charm, his ability to relax, his quiet and warm understanding, his refusal to be driven by circumstances, and his insistence on enjoying the small, warm, everyday events of life. To protect herself from knowing the real nature of her problem, she had to blame him for her difficulties. She even had to make up the difficulties, for though he was a rather passive man he was also a very attractive and loving one.

The vagina is the very center of femininity, of female love, as we have seen. If the individual fears this love, she learns unconsciously to block vaginal sensations. If, however, at any point in her life she is beguiled into feeling sensation there, she will have a severe anxiety reaction, flee from the experience in any way she can. And this brings us to the psychological structure of this kind of problem.

The clitoridal woman develops, very early, an underlying denial that she is indeed feminine or that she has any use for the things of womanhood. She learns to feel that womanhood is dangerous, a slavish and humiliating role. Only men are powerful and secure; and thus she identifies herself with the male exclusively.

If you will recall that, sexual anatomy aside, there is little to distinguish boys from girls either psychologically or glandularly in the first ten years of existence, you will get some indication that the desire to be a boy need not seem so impossible of fulfillment to a little girl. And even if we take her sexual anatomy into consideration, the idea does not seem farfetched to her. She does have a clitoris, which, in her wishful psychology, she can consider a penis, or at least the beginnings of one. Though it is small it is, in medical parlance, “the homologue of the penis.” It can become erect; it has a head; it has a prepuce. Girls who are going to pursue (albeit unconsciously) their daydreams of becoming male, eschewing femininity, pay a great deal of very minute attention to these similarities.

Such was the case with Toni. Typically for such cases, her father had rejected her. During the stage of development when a young daughter needs a sufficient quota of her father’s love and tenderness to give her an experience of the rewards of womanhood, a substrate of feminine security, he simply ignored her. He was, by all accounts, a very cold man, engrossed in his business and quite indifferent to both his wife and daughter. The concept that men rejected women, were actively hostile to them, was very much deepened in Toni by the fact that her father behaved in exactly an opposite manner to her brother, who was three years younger. This young fellow received, by all accounts, the lion’s share of her father’s small store of attention and devotion.

Reports from a patient, while they have a certain reliability, cannot always be depended on completely. In Toni’s case I was fortunate to be able to check the veracity of her story. She had maintained a close relationship with her brother after they had grown up and, on Toni’s insistence, I saw him. If anything, Toni had understated the degree of her father’s withdrawn relationship to her and her mother. Even at that, the damage to Toni’s ability to love might not have been decisive had her mother been a warm and feminine woman. But here, too, circumstances militated against the little girl. Her mother (perhaps as a reaction against her husband’s personality but more likely because she, too, was essentially a masculinized woman) refused to stay home with the children after her son had achieved the age of three. She had opened a dress shop with a friend in the business section of Toni’s home town which had been very successful, demanding all her time. It was a rare evening when Toni’s mother got home for dinner. Between the ages of seven and fourteen the girl saw her mother little more than an hour a day on weekdays and half a day on Sundays.

It is not hard to see then that Toni’s young world had little in it that supported feminine values. It was clear to her that only male activities, achievement in terms of male goals, could bring security. Even her mother seemed to subscribe to this, for hadn’t she gone back into the world of male activity as soon as she could manage it? Indeed, judging the matter by her father’s relationship to her brother, she very early reached the literal conclusion that in order to achieve love a woman really had to be a man.

If we were to examine the purely sexual side of Toni’s unconscious identification with the male sex, we would only have to examine the dreams she brought to our sessions. At the beginning she would frequently have dreams in which she was dressed as a man or in which she was excelling in male sports. I have recorded one incredible dream, really quite a funny one in a sense were it not so basically pathetic, in which she played quarterback for Harvard in the annual Yale-Harvard football game. In my notes taken at the time I wrote that she made four touchdowns!

In her conscious mind Toni could not recall whether in her childhood she actually believed she might turn into a boy. More disturbed women than she often do remember such conscious fantasies in girlhood. However, on a deeper level there is little doubt that Toni treasured the possibility of such a metamorphosis. As time wore on, of course, reality and her own good intelligence modified and disguised her wish. She repressed the desire to be a boy in a physically external way, by growing a literal penis. And she substituted for this concrete idea fantasies of achievement in, to her, the male sense. In high school and college she threw herself into a world of intellectual and extracurricular activity and made an astonishing, almost legendary, record for herself. In the college she attended she became not only the president of her class but the editor of the school newspaper and president of the college’s century-old literary society.