The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

As I have pointed out, frigid women have little knowledge of what men are really like. Basically they see men as “powers,” without worries or fears. When they learn from their husbands’ own lips their real feelings, these women are very greatly aided in changing their underlying attitudes.

One woman told me that her whole marriage-long conception of her husband had been completely altered by one emotional confession from him. She had told him that she had finally realized her frigidity had been the cause of the problem between them and that she had determined to attempt to change herself. He listened quietly as she talked and was silent for a moment when she finished. Then he said in a low voice: “I have been terribly lonely without you.” This honest communication reached past all her neurotic defenses, informed her simply and directly how important her decision was to him, how human and needful the husband she had feared and rejected really was.

It is in such real, such personal exchanges with his wife that a man most often begins to reap the rewards his wife’s decision to change will bring him. As he expresses himself more and her security in him deepens, he begins to encounter the depths of tranquillity that have always lain beneath her defensive exterior; he begins to feel her great capacity to give him something that he has missed, missed terribly—a companionship, support, and love that ask for nothing but to be needed. In this way a new and profound mutuality develops and, cleared of the fears that have impeded it, the real marriage between these two people can begin to flourish.

In the sexual aspect of the marriage, as in its psychological aspect, sensitivity is also the key word for the husband who wishes to help his wife.

In every case of frigidity that I have encountered the sexual life between husband and wife has, through the years, become an extremely self-conscious one. The wife generally is acutely aware of every genital sensation that she has or every sensation that she does not have. Her chronic sense of failure is at the root of this hawk-like attention to her reactions. Often this self-concern has been encouraged by reading books that emphasize the mechanical aspects of sexual love, giving her false hopes that somehow she is going to be able to solve her orgastic problem if she can only get in the right position, make the right movement, contract the right muscles at the right time, or teach her husband the right techniques.

Under such circumstances it is impossible for a husband not to react to his wife’s hyper-narcissism. He tends then to put his awareness of her experience ahead of his own enjoyment. This is one of the prime reasons why the sex act for both of them has become anxious and dull.

In sex one’s body can feel only its own raptures. Even the exquisite sensation of giving the partner pleasure is psychological and, by definition, important only when it heightens one’s pleasure, not when it decreases it.

It is very important, therefore, for the husband to drop his self-consciousness about his wife’s pleasures or lack of them during intercourse. In fact, both must start with a clean slate on this score, take the healthy natural view that sexual sensation is a self-centered, even selfish, matter basically. Overconcern for the other can rob it of its lusty spontaneity entirely.

This may strike a man as a new conception. In most books on married sexuality the mutuality of the act is the point emphasized; such books always speak glowingly of the pleasure one experiences in the other’s reactions. When frigidity is present this “mutuality” can become a mockery.

A woman suffering from frigidity will be very relieved if her husband will make a gentle but blanket announcement to her that she is to drop her entire concern with orgasm until it happens. I have pointed out before that this indeed must be her working attitude before she has her first orgasmic experience. For a husband to affirm that this attitude is also his can be a great reassurance to her. She will then allow herself to really enjoy his “selfish” ecstasy without neurotically fixing on her own localized sensations. Indulging the deeply feminine role of giving pleasure can be more exciting to her than any other thing.