Join me in welcoming a new guest poster, who wishes to remain anonymous.
I’m in a zoom call with friends. The kind of friends where you don’t need to have known them for a long time for it to feel like forever. And that word is there. Haven’t heard it in a long time. Still stops me in my tracks.
Prude.
Yeah, that can get in the sea. I say so. They agree.
“And the F word too” says one
“What?” I reply - some of the sentence was lost to the internet…..
”Frigid”
Yep. That one absolutely - and quite literally - can fuck off.
This is anonymous. But you probably know someone like me. Someone who couldn’t have sex for a while. Or for a long time. Or forever. You just don’t know you do because it’s hidden behind horrible words and silence. But it happens all the time. To between 30 and 50% of women. It’s listed in the DSM-5. Because it’s all in our heads.
Except it actually isn’t.
Words like prude and frigid are used to cover up all kinds of issues like vulvodynia, vestibulitis, lack of desire is pathologised (asexual erasure y’all) and my own personal fun... Vaginismus.
Vaginismus is a painful condition where the muscles of the vagina contract in such a fashion that the entry of anything (speculum, fingers, let alone a penis or sex toy) can become difficult to impossible. Some things might be ok, other things not. Sometimes things can be ok one day and not another. I had no idea I had it until the first times I was attempting to have sex. And I was categorically told I did NOT have it when I consulted my GP (General Practitioner, or Doctor for those not in the UK) “Because you have had a successful smear test” - success meaning they got a sample, not that I had felt like a knife was left in me for days afterwards. It was the only thing I ever knew him to be wrong about, I just didn’t know he was wrong for a very long time.
We went on. I felt fortunate to have a loving partner with whom I was building a life - lots of good stuff was happening. But it became obsessive. Surely this didn’t add up? This was supposed to be coin A in slot B, so why didn’t it work? And all these people out there in the world, surely they were doing it whenever they liked. What was wrong with me? I read things - but of course nothing about vaginismus because I’d been told I didn’t have it, right?
Eventually, I was referred to CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). My therapist was perfectly nice, but what was happening to me was treated as a behaviour - and therefore learned - and I had nothing it would have been learned from. I am intensely grateful that I do not have sexual trauma or abuse in my past (neither then, nor now) - I could not shake nor make him understand that this was not in my mind. It was in my body.
The therapy was what we called “self correcting” - it didn’t do much for my sex life, but I did take batches of exams without throwing up. Definitely a win. But relaxation turned out to only be part of the story.
We went on. I put my back out badly, we moved house, I hurt my back again somehow and eventually got referred to physio. I was sent to remedial movement and met the physio who would finally get me the help I hadn’t known to ask for. As I lay on my back, learning how to move my pelvis and not hurt myself, using movement to ease pain and be stronger, I started to wonder what was connected. I had an appointment with the person teaching the class, and then another where I had something called a functioning pelvic examination where the practitioner prods your internal muscles. It’s awful, and strictly a diagnostic tool. As I lay there, with someone's fingers prodding me inside (and not in any fun way!) she suddenly exclaimed “Well there’s a massive lump of muscle in the way! No wonder nothing can get in!”
She carefully explained that the muscles of my vagina were contracted somewhat permanently, and were pulling back my bladder into my vaginal cavity. (We later discovered that my pelvis is slightly flattened as well, so everything is in a smaller space in there) The “bump in the road” as we called it, was placed in such a way that insertion of anything when you essentially couldn’t see what you were doing, was difficult, at best uncomfortable and at worst, intensely painful. (Which explained the smear test). I cried. And after I got home I cried some more. I wasn’t losing my mind. I wasn’t broken. I just needed a little bit of help. There’s a variety of treatments for vaginismus - the best known is a series of dilation rods which get progressively larger. But my lovely physio didn’t want to do that. She referred me for psycho-sexual counselling in a nearby city and said she wanted to try something with me that she usually used with her patients with pelvic floor damage/postpartum bladder issues. You can now buy devices like perifit, but back then it wasn’t as cute as it is now. I had a biofeedback machine with an insertable probe and a machine with a display. Rather than using it to learn the sensation to tighten my pelvic floor, I learned the sensations to release it. I used that device several times a week for the best part of a year. I had counselling once a month with a wonderful doctor who was both angry on my behalf.
I should never have had smear tests, let alone the horrific colposcopy I was subjected to where I wasn’t allowed my partner with me and was screaming in pain. I shouldn’t have had CBT for something that wasn’t a behaviour either - and she helped me unknot a lot of issues I’d developed from that process.
She helped me gently reach a point where sex felt approachable again. When my partner and I were deemed to have a measurable routine, I was discharged first from the therapy, then from the physio.
In time, I was able to have a child, (and help from the same pelvic physio again during and post-pregnancy) a sex life and gradually get free from the feelings of utter uselessness and failure that were present with me in that time. All kinds of dysfunction - including sexual - are part of life. Penises get help with it. Vaginas get ridicule. And I’m done with that. Sure, it definitely gets to me sometimes, and sometimes I find myself doing my breathing exercises and relaxing still at that time. But you know what? That’s ok with me. I know what to ask now. Mostly it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, and I do get anxious about that.
But it’s also possible to be intimate with someone without penetrative sex.
Now, I listen for when people (particularly people with vaginas) mention or allude to pain with sex. If it hurts and you don’t want it to, please try and get help. You are not broken, you should not have to carry shame, and you are worth asking the questions. I tell my story from time to time (and now here) and hope someone somewhere might get the courage to do the same. I’m neither a prude, nor am I frigid. I am not broken. It wasn’t in my head. I was right about myself. I lived it, I got help and I am here.
Happy PS: Vaginismus was covered in the C4 series “Sex Education” and for the first time I saw it portrayed with no overtones of someone not having desire, or being afraid of sex. It was played out as just a thing that can happen. No shock or shame. It wasn’t everything - but you shouldn’t look to tv for that - but it was a huge something. I cried. Again.
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