The Power of Sexual SurrenderRobinson, Marie Nyswander
Science
The Power of Sexual Surrender
Robinson, Marie Nyswander
Frigidity (Psychology); Sex (Psychology); Women -- Sexual behavior
Patricia really had two distinct attitudes toward her husband. The
first was expressed in her quarrelsomeness, her belief that he was
selfish, unattractive, and unlovable. This attitude was based on the
fact that, very literally, her heart still belonged to Daddy. With
her exaggerated childhood feelings toward her father, every other man
suffered by comparison, seemed unworthy of her love. Her husband was an
interloper who came between her and her ideal. Therefore, his normal
need for her to love him, to be a good wife to him, seemed hateful to
her, filled her with rage. Sex under such circumstances was a virtual
rape of Lucrece, with the husband playing the role of the dark and
frightening rapist, the father representing her true love, for whom she
must preserve her innocence and purity.
Another deeper and more hidden attitude was the exact opposite of this,
indeed contradictory to it. In this aspect of her mind her husband
stood for her father. Thus sexual feelings toward such a person must
be entirely taboo; she must repress them as she had in her earliest
years and she must keep them repressed. Too, she must excel in all
the things her father wanted her to excel in. To her husband she must
primarily excel in her wifely functions, and this was the essential
trap. For because she very consciously knew she was not and under the
circumstances could not be even a passable wife, she was constantly
inundated by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
You can see then what a complete trap Patricia was in. Actually, unless
she had been strongly motivated to seek help, she would never have
found an exit from her difficulties. Her periodic “breakdowns” were
a simple and direct expression of the hopelessness of her situation.
It was as if she were saying: “I am truly a helpless child; I can do
nothing grown-up. I must be taken care of as a child is.”
She did recover her lost sexuality and her lost capacity for happiness,
and in a later chapter we shall see how the Patricia Agnews of this
life can achieve such an outcome. But before we leave her I should like
to make one further observation of a general kind: Consider how totally
beyond any help she would have been if her irrational opposition
to her husband, to sex, and to real love between the sexes had been
bolstered up, made to seem quite justifiable by a philosophy of life
based on the feminist school of thought. From such a standpoint every
one of her difficulties would have been considered perfectly normal!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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