Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/25

 their difficulties at the start, might have avoided the inevitable and innumerable poor choices and often disastrous decisions which are so characteristic of the woman suffering from a sexual problem.

Since I have designed this book to answer the needs of a specific audience I should like to ask you to read it through and not skip around trying to find the material that seems to apply directly to you or to someone close to you. For, if you follow me as I go, you will see that frigidity is not a single, simple, local symptom. It is a complicated and profound problem involving many factors and having profound consequences. One can grasp the nature of this problem, understand it, and cure it. To do so, however, you must have very specific and complete knowledge of it in all its complexity. It may take all your powers to master this complexity. To do so, however, will be more than merely worth while. It can be the first great step toward real love, upon whose threshold you have tarried already far too long.

Before we advance into the subject itself, I should like to dispose of a few widely held and thoroughly incorrect notions about frigidity. I do this to clear away some of the underbrush which can impede those of you who are seriously seeking a resolution of the problem.

In the first place, let us look at this problem of a woman's sexual "responsibility," as it has been recently called. Much has been written about it and much of what I have read is pure nonsense, based on a sort of mechanical conception of what love is and of what the act of love means. I fear that such books encourage women who have deeply rooted sexual difficulties to approach the problem from the wrong direction and before they properly understand the real nature of their difficulties. Such an approach leads them to attempt abortive "solutions" which can only further discourage and disillusion them. The basic error here is in trying to make