Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/51

 women I have known, and not always clinically. If you stop to think as you read about her, you may realize that you have known such women too.

What, then, is she like? First of all to give us a frame for our portrait so that we can see what we do know more clearly, let me state what we cannot know about her; what, in fact, is irrelevant.

We don't know what she looks like. She may be tall or short, red-haired, blond, or brunette. She may have large breasts and round hips and sloping shoulders, or she may be small-breasted (or even flat-chested), have wide shoulders and narrow hips. She may have a career or not have a career, be more intelligent and better educated than her husband or less intelligent and less well educated. She may have children or be unable to have children. She may be rich or poor, come from the "400" or from the slums. She may be a bit shy or quite at ease socially. She may be athletic or totally unathletic. These things we don't know about her and, for our purposes, they do not matter.

Here are some of the things we do know.

In the first place, she is very much "at home" in the world. Deep inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can't imagine what it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her husband makes the world safe for her.

This feeling may seem unrealistic, in view of the very clear insecurities in the world today. As you will discover, however, it is based on a far deeper understanding of reality, on a far deeper reality than the one reflected in the alarums published in the daily newspaper.

This sense of reality almost invariably leads her to select