Physical difficulties often disappear. I have known women who had been plagued with intense pre-menstrual and menstrual pains all their lives to lose such symptoms in a matter of weeks. I have known women whose irregular periods have become regularized. And I have also known women with one or two desperately difficult pregnancies behind them who, becoming pregnant again, went through the entire nine months not only without discomfort but with a highly accelerated feeling of pleasure and well-being.
These, then, are the results, or some of them, that a woman who is willing to give up the things of childhood and yield to her true self may expect. The return on such an investment of self is enormous. It is paid in the coinage of love returned for love given; love from one’s husband and children, love from friends, new and old, attracted by the endless largesse of the woman who has surrendered all to find all.
Chapter 17
SEXUAL SURRENDER
The ability to achieve normal orgasm can be called the physical counterpart of psychological surrender. In most cases of true frigidity it follows on a woman’s surrender of her rebellious and infantile attitudes as the day the night. It is the sign that she has given up the last vestige of resistance to her nature and has embraced womanhood with soul and body.
The achievement of orgasm, usually, is the last step in the process of growing up. If one reviews in one’s mind the actual orgastic experience it is not difficult to see why this is so.
For a woman orgasm requires a trust in one’s partner that is absolute. Recall for a moment that the physical experience is often so profound that it entails the loss of consciousness for a period of time. As we know, in sexual intercourse, as in life, man is the actor, woman the passive one, the receiver, the acted upon. Giving oneself up in this passive manner to another human being, making oneself his willing partner to such seismic physical experiences, means one must have complete faith in the other person. In the sexual embrace any trace of buried hostility, fear of one’s role, will show clearly and unmistakably.
But there is even more to the psychic state necessary for orgasm than faith in one’s partner and readiness to surrender. There must be a sensual eagerness to surrender, in the woman’s orgasm the excitement comes from the act of surrender. There is a tremendous surging physical ecstasy in the yielding itself, in the feeling of being the passive instrument of another person, of being stretched out supinely beneath him, taken up will-lessly by his passion as leaves are swept up before a wind.
There can, it is clear, be no crossed fingers about such yielding, no reservations in such surrender. As one thinks of it one can certainly feel why, of all the steps in the process of yielding, of surrendering, the orgasm should be last. To those who are moving toward it the experience often remains for a time elusive because its very totality, its uncompromising demand that the whole being be swept up in the experience, remains somewhat frightening.
Orgasm, as I have said, is the physical aspect of surrendering. However, while there are similarities between the physical and the psychological experience, there is also an important difference between the two.
The difference is that orgasm cannot be sought entirely rationally. It will arrive when it will arrive, as the end process of a total change in a frigid woman’s deepest psychological attitudes. It cannot be sought separately or as an end in itself. Indeed, to seek it directly, to wait upon it, to try to force it are the surest possible ways of postponing its arrival.