The Power of Sexual Surrender

The self-exploration described in the last chapter results in the surfacing of hidden feelings, attitudes, and fantasies. Getting them up and out, exposing them to the bright light of reason and judgment, clears the psychological atmosphere almost miraculously.

The next most helpful step to take, I have found, is a re-evaluation of the male sex. The woman who suffers from frigidity has, by definition, very little knowledge of what men are really like. Since her attitudes toward men were formed in her distant past and have altered little through the years, she has a child’s-eye view of men. To her, as parents to a child, men are powers, not people. Projecting her own childhood fears and hopes and needs upon them, she has been calling that reality and acting accordingly.

This next step, the conscious revaluation of men, can be achieved by learning what the male sex is really like—how it differs from the female sex, what makes men think, act, and feel the way they do in everyday life—and by contrasting this knowledge with the negative attitudes and feelings she has now brought to the surface of her mind. In this way she will soon learn to understand her husband as he is, and thus achieve the ability to love him in all of his uniqueness and individuality.

The central characteristic of the male, and the one that most clearly differentiates him from the female, is his aggressiveness.

In the sexual sphere this shows itself most clearly in the fact that the man takes, for the most part, the initiative in wooing. He it is who is the pursuer, the girl the pursued; he it is who proposes and he it is who initiates sex.

An analogy to this fundamentally aggressive activity of the male in relationship to the female is seen, in a primordial biological form, by the function of his sperm. As you may know, the individual spermatozoon is an individual cell which is propelled by a microscopic tail. After the deposit of spermatozoa in the vagina, the individual sperm actively seeks out and joins the ova, which has been passively waiting for it. This physiological metaphor, according to certain leading theoreticians, well expresses the fundamentally aggressive nature of man in relationship to woman, psychologically as well as sexually.

The male’s aggressiveness is, in general, directed to mastery of the outside world. It shows in him from his earliest years. The sports that he selects have to do with physical aggression almost exclusively (of course some girls also like certain aggressive sports at an early age, but most give them up in puberty). He likes the sports in which he has to run hard, to charge, to tackle, throw, and hit. In his adolescence he will spend years in mastering skills that concern such aggressive activity. A component of this aggressive desire for mastery is his competitiveness with other boys. He wishes to be as good or better than they are, to make his mastery known to the outside world.

In the mental sphere, too, this basic aggressiveness is clearly displayed. His chief passion is in mastering the outward environment that surrounds him, in, to use a phrase from football, “throwing it for a loss.” This desire leads him to become a scientist to control-through-knowing some aspect of the world or even of the universe. Or it leads him to become a businessman, wresting a living from the competitive market place. Or it may lead him to become a philosopher, aggressively probing the “why” of the world. Whatever role he plays in life, he must use his aggression to master the environment he selects as his province.

Because of this basic thrusting aggression which largely defines his role in life, a boy is generally given a larger amount of freedom than a girl is. One reason for this is that the male role in life will demand a great deal of self-reliance in the individual, and this has been recognized by society. Men need the protection of the childhood home for a much less protracted period than women do.

In contrast to men, women have a much smaller store of aggression directed toward the outside world. Their activity is largely directed inward. Psychologically speaking, woman is, in a very real sense, conditioned by her final biological function. At the very center of her nature she is preparing herself for motherhood, and this fact determines the main direction of her psychic energy. Her childhood interests show this clearly. She plays with dolls, she plays house, loves to be around Mother, fantasies marriage, is enormously curious about all of her internal functions. She has, of course, a certain store of interest and aggression which she can direct outward, but this characteristic becomes very secondary to her when inward or outward circumstances do not force her to use it.

Intellectually woman is also basically inward. Her most potent faculty is her great intuition, her almost magical ability to understand another person by consulting her own inward nature. This is contrasted to man’s objective “intellectual” type of understanding.

In describing the essential characterological structure of the male and contrasting it with the female I am describing absolute types, not people as they are. In actuality most men have a certain store of passivity, of inwardness; and normal women have a certain amount of aggression. However, the normal male will be preponderantly outgoing and aggressive; the normal female’s psychic energies will be preponderantly directed inward.

As a direct or indirect result of man’s aggression and his commitment to the outside world, in maturity he develops certain behavioristic patterns that are diametrically opposite to female characteristics. Inevitably the frigid woman will use his attributes to show that her man has no interest in her, or is weak, or is withdrawn, or is cruel and wishes to exploit her. Having no objectivity about men, she will find in his differences from her further cause for estrangement, fear, and hostility.

Let me give some instances of these behavioristic differences in everyday life.

To the woman, the bearer of children and the nest-maker, the home and everything in it are all-important. She invests her home with a great deal of pride. She loves clean sinks, clean windows, clean floors. She wants things in her nest to be neat and orderly; she has made them that way and she wants them to stay that way.

It will be very easy for her to misunderstand the fact that her husband has invested a major portion of his pride elsewhere: in his work, in his achievements in the outside world. The cleanliness and neatness of his home he takes for granted. He may even be, by his wife’s standards, seemingly antagonistic to neatness, actually sloppy, throwing his clothes around, leaving the sink cluttered, forgetting to use the ash tray, and what not. These things, of course, are not in themselves pleasant traits, but the frigid woman will generalize about them, use them to indicate her man’s essential indifference to her.

He may also not notice a new rug or even a new chair in the house. He may have very small patience with any household duties he is forced to undertake: replacing a broken step or even a burned-out bulb. These attitudes can be quite confusing to a woman, and if she has any motive to do so she can easily interpret this kind of male behavior as further evidence of her husband’s indifference to her and to the family. It is not; when it occurs it is just male. It may be helpful to her to try to imagine how long her interest in the details of his business life actually hold her attention. The house is her business, and it is not surprising that he behaves the way he does in it, nor is it indicative of any lack of love in him.

Another aspect of man that can be easily misinterpreted is the fact that the male tends to be more sociable, likes to seek out and find a vigorous and sometimes quite varied social life. This, too, is part of his aggressive nature. A woman, though she may be quite gregarious, is generally more content to sit at home, and her immediate circle of friends is enough for her. The frigid woman may try to make much of her husband’s aggressive sociability. She is not enough for him; he is restless and dissatisfied, etc.

The vigor and aggressiveness of a man during the course of a social evening are also often misunderstood by women. He may on occasions be quiet, but he sometimes wants to do a great deal of the talking, may even, in his enthusiasm, raise his voice in a conversation. His competitiveness may even embroil him in an actual argument, perhaps a violent one. The woman likes things to run smoothly, to be utterly friendly and tranquil. Her husband’s normal social aggressiveness can appear to be rude and crude to her. It can frighten her. Afterward she may confront him with it, accusing him of strutting, of showing off, of cock-of-the-walk behavior. She is merely confronting him with his maleness again.

A very odd difference between men and women is the difference in their reactions to pain and fatigue. Women have a very high threshold for both, and most men have a relatively low one. If a woman gets a burn on her hand she can stick it in butter or in cold water and go on making the dinner. A man with the same burn could be completely incapacitated for a while—and awfully angry at himself besides. The same is true of all sorts of minor aches and illnesses that occur in the normal course of events. Because of this difference in pain thresholds, men tend to pamper themselves or want to be pampered when they have head colds, headaches, sore throats, or other minor illnesses that a woman might ignore. The frigid woman, of course, finds this difference a rich mine to work. She can and does use it to taunt her husband with his “weakness,” again showing her essential ignorance of and lack of sympathy with the male nature.

Of course sex itself remains one of the most fruitful sources for resentment and misunderstanding in the frigid woman. Here male aggression can be most clearly seen. The man is stimulated easily by things that would not excite his woman in the least. He is susceptible erotically to all sorts of sights, sounds, and odors. His wife undressing may excite him; her perfume may excite him; he may become aroused if she is looking wan or looking bright-eyed. The frigid woman, not comprehending male reactions or their plural causes, generally feels that his lust is unselective and impersonal. She takes his ardor as an affront for that reason.

In the sexual act the aggressive thrusting of the penis offends too. As passion increases during the act, the strength of the thrust increases, sometimes becomes quite a formidable series of pushes (one of the slang expressions men use for intercourse is “a bang”). This sometimes violent thrusting is a perfectly normal aspect of male sexuality and to the normal woman is of course highly desirable. Frigid women are frightened of it, experience it as an invasion of their integrity, an act of hostility against them.

Nothing could be farther from the fact. In his aggressive movements a man is showing his love in his particular way, his passionate need to lose his isolation, to rid himself of it, to join with his beloved. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand all.

Doubtlessly we could make a longer list of the characteristic things men do and feel that anger or are misunderstood by women with a frigidity problem. If you have started the form of self-inquiry I have advocated you have made your own list and have felt strong negative emotions about many of the items on it.

But the point I wish to emphasize now is that the majority of these negative emotions is caused directly or indirectly by man’s underlying and most distinguishing characteristic—his aggression. It is this trait that most clearly defines him, and it is this trait that is at the root of the frigid woman’s anger, fear of, and feeling of rejection by men.

She is antagonistic to this aggression because she does not understand it. Since she cannot understand or accept her own role, her feminine nature, she feels that male aggression is opposed to her and she takes every opportunity to prove to herself that this is so. His strength, his ability to master the outside environment make her feel personally nullified, a drab, a slavey. She endlessly contrasts his essential quality of aggression with woman’s essential traits, to her detriment.

Now if men were out to enslave them, women would be very justified in fearing, hating, envying man’s central strength, his aggressiveness. But is he?

A re-examination of this single point can put the whole basic attitude of the frigid woman (once she has allowed herself to feel the negative power of her emotions) back into proper perspective, to correct her fundamental distortion of view. We can do this by looking at the single most important thing men do with their aggression in our society.

“All men have nightmares.”

I heard a fellow psychiatrist say those words during an impromptu discussion of male psychology recently, and the phrase struck me as dramatically true. For the majority of men, when they come of age and marry, take on an enormous burden which they may not lay down with any conscience this side of the grave. Quietly and without histrionics they put aside, in the name of love, most of their vaunted freedom and contract to take upon their shoulders full social and economic responsibility for their wives and children.

As a woman, consider for a moment how you would feel if your child should be deprived of the good things of life: proper housing, clothing, education. Consider how you would feel if he should go hungry. Perhaps such ideas have occurred to you and have given you a bad turn momentarily. But they are passing thoughts; a woman does not give them much credence; they are not her direct responsibility; certainly she does not worry about them for long.

But such thoughts, conscious or unconscious, are her husband’s daily fare. He knows, and he takes the carking thought to work with him each morning (and every morning) and to bed with him at night, that upon the success or failure of his efforts rest the happiness, health, indeed the very lives of his wife and children. In the ultimate sense he alone must take the full responsibility for them.

I do not think it is possible to exaggerate how seriously men take this responsibility; how much they worry about it. Women, unless they are very close to their men, rarely know how heavily the burden weighs sometimes, for men talk about it but little. They do not want their loved ones to worry.

Men have been shouldering the entire responsibility for their family group since earliest times. I often think, however, when I see the stresses and strains of today’s market place, that civilized man has much harder going, psychologically speaking, than his primitive forefathers.

In the first place, the competition creates a terrible strain on the individual male. This competition is not only for preferment and advancement. It is often for his very job itself. Every man knows that if he falters, lets up his ceaseless drive, he can and will be easily replaced.

No level of employment is really free of this endless pressure. The executive must meet and exceed his last year’s quota or the quota of his competitors. Those under him must see that he does it, and he scrutinizes their performances most severely and therefore constantly.

Professional men—doctors, lawyers, professors—are under no less pressure for the most part. If the lawyer is self-employed he must constantly seek new clients; if he works for an organization he must exert himself endlessly to avoid being superseded by ambitious peers or by pushing young particles just out of law school and filled with the raw energy of youth. A score of unhappy contingencies can ruin or seriously threaten a doctor’s practice, not the least of which is a possible breakdown in his ability to practice. A teacher must work long hours on publishable projects outside of his arduous teaching assignments if he is to advance or even hold his ground.

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.

Nor can she hold onto her resentment of the fact that it is generally the male who initiates the sexual act. For it is the same male aggression which protects her, allows her to be wife and mother, that makes him the wooer and she the wooed. Again, knowing how easily women are distracted from sexual feeling by trivial upsets, by the small things that occur during the day, imagine what would happen if women had to take the male’s anxieties and yet be responsible for initiating sex at night. Should such a reversal of roles ever happen to mankind, the world would soon be depopulated. Women must learn to thank God daily for the enormous energy and drive of their men.

In terms of this lifelong commitment of man to the service of his wife and family, let us take another look at the things in his conduct which irritate women, or at least irritate women with a frigidity problem, for now they begin to be understandable. Minor irritabilities, cock-of-the-walk behavior, slackness, sloppiness, whatever—these are either the outlets or the results of the accumulated tensions of a man’s day. He will not tell you of the humiliations or defeats or worries of his day in any direct manner usually. As his wife, you must understand that these are the only remonstrances against his hard and anxious struggle that he will permit himself. If you see his behavior in this light it will be difficult to harbor any deep-seated resentment against him; one can only wish to comfort him, to help in any conceivable way to make his burden less onerous, his worries less sharp, his nightmares less frequent.

The espousal of this view of the male, the accurate one, can be another great forward step toward femininity. Seeing her man’s aggression in its true light, aimed first and foremost at procuring her safety, happiness, and security, she can now dare to take down, one by one, the precarious defenses she has maintained against him from the beginning of their relationship. She sees that her husband’s wonderful aggression actually defines her true role, makes it ever clearer and more desirable to her.

Let us now see how her altered attitude can ultimately affect her and what she can do to hasten and further the process of change.