The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

Molly’s mature sexual life had started at the age of thirteen! She had had an affair with a high school senior in her home town—she described it as a “back-seat” affair—and it had lasted for a year. From the beginning and even under the unfavorable circumstances that love-making in an automobile must certainly create, Molly had had a total sexual response.

Since that time she had had upward of forty sexual affairs. None of them had lasted for more than a year and some only one or two weeks. All of them had been with men who were ineligible for marriage either because they were already married or because they were not emotionally capable of marrying.

Molly, though she had certain superficial pretensions to being an intellectual, was not one by any means. But she was an intelligent girl. She had a position as a researcher on a weekly trade paper, and her work had put her in line to become head of the research department. Her job represented the “respectable” side of her life. However, despite some uneasiness of brief duration in college, she had never seriously questioned the “rightness” of her sexual conduct. Each time she had had an affair she believed that she was in love and she never had more than one affair at a time. When the current love was over she always experienced feelings of relief.

If Molly had come from an environment where a free attitude toward sexuality had prevailed, her actions might not have seemed so inexplicable. But her home environment could not have been more conventional. She had come from a small New England city near Boston. Her father was the president of the leading bank in that city and had been active in church and civic affairs. Her mother, too, had been a church leader and a member of the school board. Her parents’ marriage had obviously been a good one; the domestic life was serene; they rarely quarreled; their civic duties were most often shared enterprises. And they genuinely loved their three children. There were two girls older than Molly, and they had led most conventional lives. They had married after college and each had had two children.

What, then, had caused Molly’s rebellion against her environment? And what was at the root of her inability to form a relationship? What was the cause of her psychic frigidity?

A psychiatrist familiar with this kind of case considers the possibility of an early seduction of some kind. It had indeed occurred.

Molly was unwilling to discuss it at first. And this was followed by an unwillingness to ascribe any particular significance to the event. She believed it was an isolated occurrence that had had no particular or permanent effect on her. Actually, as the matter unfolded, it became clear that this event was the very nucleus of her later difficulties.

It had happened when she was six. Three houses down from her there had lived a man in his early sixties. I shall call him Mr. Brown. He was a well-to-do person whose wife had died some years before and who now lived alone. He was very friendly, she remembered, with everyone, and often her father, out for an evening stroll, would drop in on him and spend an hour or two chatting on Mr. Brown’s screened-in veranda. Occasionally he would come to Molly’s house for dinner. She found out later that he was a director in her father’s bank. He was certainly, as far as her parents or any other grownups were concerned, above all suspicion.

Sometimes Molly would play jump-rope or hopscotch outside of Mr. Brown’s house. One day he invited her in and gave her a piece of cake and ten cents. She was delighted, and often thereafter he would have her in, always giving her something sweet to eat. He was pleasant and gentle and she loved him. She did not remember the first time it happened, but soon sitting on his lap became an integral part of her now frequent visits. He would tell her a story and ruffle her hair, touch her arms or hands. Gradually his touching extended to her legs and thighs. She liked the sensations and, being so young, she could not conceive of his doing anything that would be wrong.

Her visits now became almost daily occurrences, and then one day he touched her vagina. She could recall the whole event with great clarity. She remembered that his hand shook and that he looked very pale. Her sensations were exquisite and she involuntarily closed her thighs, pressing his hand against her vagina. At this point the whole “affair” became enormously exciting to her. For a period of almost a month she visited him as often as she could.