Perhaps the hardest part of having vaginismus is the stigma associated with it. “No vaginal or penetrative sex” seems to automatically mean “no sex at all” to some people, and so thousands of women are going about their lives feeling ashamed of their virginity (not that virginity is anything to be ashamed of). I know I definitely felt that way at one point, thanks to the rude and insensitive feedback from friends, lovers, and doctors. But I’ve got news for you: you are not automatically sexually inexperienced if you have vaginismus. Ladies (and people of all kinds): if you’ve had a hot and heavy makeout sesh, given/received oral sex, or have been stimulated to the point of orgasm, then you’ve had sex! Sex looks like so many different things, even way beyond my very short list, and vaginal penetration isn’t the end all be all of sexual experience. The majority of cisgender women orgasm from clitoral stimulation anyway.
But the fact is that there is just so much focus on penetrative sex, especially between hetero or hetero-seeming couples. For people like myself and my friend Georgia Haire (who also has vaginismus), people who can’t experience vaginal sex often have their sexuality downplayed or completely invalidated.
“There are so many different ways of having sex to explore that are really exciting and satisfying, so it’s frustrating when there is so much focus on penetrative sex,” she told me in an email, “and then feeling so affected by that focus that you end up feeling really bad about not achieving it. I think if there wasn’t that kind of obsession about penetration, then I would have felt more OK about talking about my issues and, like you, wouldn’t have felt excluded and crap when conversations about ‘normal’ sex came up.”
Penalizing people for their disabilities, and labeling them as “frigid” (as vaginismus sufferers are often called) instead of showing respect and compassion for their condition (caused by anything from physical factors to anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress) is messed up. Just because I can’t fulfill your limited idea of what sex is, that doesn’t mean I’m less sexual nor do I owe you anything. But that didn’t always feel so clear to me.
In the past, I’ve had partners that put me down and even assaulted me as a result of my inability to have vaginal sex. And at the time, I felt I deserved the mistreatment. I didn’t know why my body wasn’t working to meet the standards of these straight men I was sleeping with.
Oftentimes, and in my own experience, gynos will attribute the tightness from vaginismus to sexual inexperience and nerves. In a Mic article from December about the condition, 29-year-old vaginismus sufferer Marla described her own experience after talking to her doctor about it for the first time.
“She was no help at all. I told her that sex was very painful and I didn’t think I would be able to have a pap smear. She told me that sex was supposed to feel nice, and that I should try to relax. That was it. That was all there was to it. That really put me off,” she told Mic.
My vagina tenses up because I have vaginismus, not because I don’t want to have sex. After all, I have the highest sex drive compared to most people I know. But at the time, I didn’t understand how I could be my oral-sex-loving and spanking-enthusiast self, while also being the virginal and naive person the boys I slept with saw. However, my current partner (a sex posi queer and super sensitive cutie) helped me let go of the latter idea, a self that was constructed by heteronormative society that was just simply untrue. Based on their lack of questioning and subtle implications, I never felt pressured into having penetrative sex with them. “I never prioritized vaginal sex,” my partner Skylar tells me. “In fact, I don’t generally prioritize sex in a relationship. Which is not to say that I don’t love it — I do. But the most important thing to me in a relationship is getting to know the person I’m with.”