11-13-2004, 03:35 AM
Marie N. Robinson MD, a Cornell educated psychiatrist devoted her New York City practice to the treatment of frigidity. Her book, “The Power of Sexual Surrender” is a revealing study of the feminine psyche.
Dr. Robinson says that millions of American women suffer from frigidity. While she explores many different causes, she notes that “frigid women universally adopt the feminist view”. This view, that a career as a wife and mother is demeaning and men exploit woman, creates an "emotional logjam" which obstructs sexual response and psychological development. Her self-expression and power are based on making her husband and children her first priority. Similarly, her sexual satisfaction and spiritual fecundity depend on self-surrender.
Robinson says: "Women are designed for duties different from those of the marketplace, another kind of stress entirely," writes Robinson. They "tend to lose their essential womanliness if they stay in the marketplace by choice….Modern women have an identity crisis because they think they are no longer needed as women. Before the industrial revolution, the home was the centre of all life and a woman was its heart. She nursed and trained the children, prepared clothing and food, and helped with farm tasks. The industrial revolution seemed to make women obsolete. Children were not needed and were even considered a liability. Everything could be bought in stores. The home was empty. Children went to school, husbands to work.”
The other response to the industrial revolution was not feminist, but "Victorian." Robinson says Victorian women took "revenge" on men by denying women had any sexual feelings. They "were amazingly successful in convincing men in general and even the scientists of the day that frigidity was indeed a basic attribute of the female."
Thus, feminists and Victorian women both laid the foundations for modern female neurosis. The feminist-Victorian antagonism to men was handed down from mother to daughter so that "to millions of women, hostility towards the opposite sex seems almost a natural law. Although many a modern women may pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact, to supplant him, to exchange roles with him."
Robinson says that if feminism had brought women happiness, the game might have been worth it.
"But it hasn't been. The game has brought frigidity and restlessness and a soaring divorce rate, neurosis, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency all that results when a woman in any society deserts her God-given true function."