The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

It is important to note that Mr. Brown did not confine his caresses to the little girl’s clitoris. At length he actually penetrated her hymen with his finger. She remembered this because it was painful, but she also recalled that the sensations of pleasure outweighed the pain. Thereafter he would masturbate her vaginally whenever they met in his house.

This seduction lasted for some time, when one day while she was sitting on his lap he took his penis out and rubbed it against her. She was so initiated to the pleasures of sexuality by this time that the act did not seem strange to her, nor did the sight and size of a grown man’s penis cause her the alarm it would normally occasion in a child. Her vagina was of course too small to admit more than a very partial entrance, but (and this she remembers clearly) though he did not thrust in any way, the little girl herself pressed her body toward him despite the pain it caused.

This occasion ended this bizarre and shocking experience. Apparently Mr. Brown was tardily overwhelmed by feelings of guilt or by a fear of getting caught, for he was not home when she next called for a visit and he did not return for over two years. By that time she had put the matter out of her conscious mind, or at least held the memory very much in abeyance.

This seduction was not difficult for Molly to recall, however, but she found it hard to recapture other feelings which had been associated with the experience, primarily the feeling of guilt.

Now let us take the matter step by step. Why, in the first place, did Molly react with excitement rather than shock to this whole experience? There are two reasons. In the first place, the seduction was done by a person who was loved by the child. He was a friend of the family, no less acceptable or trustworthy to the little girl than her own father and mother.

In the second place, Molly had not yet passed completely through the stage of infantile sexuality into the latency period, when normally sex goes underground until puberty. She was still able to be excited by sensual experiences. A year or two later she might not have accepted the situation, probably would have reacted to it with shock or horror; it might have contributed to a different kind of frigidity, perhaps the anesthesia of total frigidity.

It was clear, however, that she had felt guilty about her reactions. She had not communicated the experience to her parents—a clear indication of guilt feelings. And later she had separated the seduction and its sensual pleasures from her conscious mind, made no connection between it and her later unconventional behavior. If she had not experienced guilt she would have had to make no such separation.

While Molly had no further sexual experiences in her latency period, she began to behave differently from the other girls in her group very early. At twelve she began to pet with a boy next door and was certain that she would have had intercourse with him had he not been so frightened of her advances. At thirteen she would sneak out at night to meet one of several older boys, and on one of these occasions she had sexual intercourse. She went around with this boy for about a year. He then graduated from high school and went away to college, and Molly promptly started another sexual relationship with another senior in high school.

Sexual affairs from then on followed one after the other through high school and college. The only concession Molly made to conventional morality was the afore-mentioned fact that she did not allow the affairs to overlap.

As she entered her teens another aspect of Molly’s behavior became apparent. More and more she sought out individuals markedly different from those on her own social level. By fifteen she had become distinctly “wild,” coming in late at night and refusing to obey her parents in any way. She would not go out with any of the high school or college boys she met. She had made friends with a group of girls on a lower economic level whose social life consisted largely of picking up men at dances. In this way Molly met several men who played in bands and who were, of course, not what her family could possibly have approved of. She did not care in the least; she felt she told me, “unutterably bored” with her family, felt “they were sunk in their way of life,” led absolutely “joyless and pointless existences.”