The Power of Sexual SurrenderRobinson, Marie Nyswander
Science
The Power of Sexual Surrender
Robinson, Marie Nyswander
Frigidity (Psychology); Sex (Psychology); Women -- Sexual behavior
There is no field of endeavor that a man may enter where he can count
on complete economic safety; competition, the need for unremitting
year-in, year-out performance, is his life lot. Over all this he
knows, too, stands a separate specter upon which he can exert only the
remotest control. It is the joblessness which may be caused by the
cyclical depressions and recessions that characterize our economy.
It is true; all men have nightmares.
Few if any women could take the kind of daily strain and worry men
commit themselves to when they sign the marriage contract. And no woman
in her right mind would want to take it. It is true that many women go
into the market place, but most of them are waiting only for the day
that they marry, or they are already married. Those who stay of their
own free will are few and far between, and in my experience some have
proven to be difficult people in their family relationships, though
some of them are talented. Women are designed for duties different from
those of the market place, another kind of stress entirely, and lose or
tend to lose their essential womanliness if they stay by choice.
As women look at man’s characteristic of aggressiveness in terms of
the tremendous duties, daily struggles, and awful responsibilities men
must and do assume, they can begin to call up in themselves a different
emotion from anger or envy. They can begin to see how altogether worthy
of their highest admiration man is. Not just some abstract man, either;
the man they love, the man they have married, the man upon whom they
have been heaping their criticism, their jealousy and rage.
Far from seeking to enslave our sex, to exploit us through his strength
and his aggression, man has put these two great and basic attributes
entirely at our service. It is (and always has been) this fact that
makes it safe for us to be women, to bear his children with a sense of
security, to rear them, knowing that he is there, always and forever,
earning our bread, watching over us ceaselessly, keeping his terrible
anxieties about us and our safety to himself so that we will not worry
as he does.
Certain it is that boys are generally given their freedom a lot earlier
than girls. And it is also true that the quality of aggression in the
male makes him the wooer and the woman the wooed. I have yet to hear a
woman suffering from a frigidity problem who did not deeply resent both
of these facts.
But now, looking at the end to which male aggression is directed when
it matures, can any woman honestly hold onto such resentment? When she
realizes that society instinctively grants him more and earlier freedom
so that he may develop the great self-reliance necessary to take on the
responsibilities of a family, she cannot validly hold this view any
longer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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