Panic at the Vagina!

Caroline grew up loving coming-of-age movies, but they taught all the wrong lessons about sex and triggered unexpected changes in her own body. 

Every millennial girl remembers that page in the book The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls by author Valorie Lee Schaefer and illustrator Norm Bendell. The puberty guide from American Girl covered everything from pimples, bras, healthy eating, and the dreaded use of tampons. In the drawing, a smiling girl sits over the toilet, using her fingers to point out the location of the vaginal opening and urethra, which are just represented as two miniscule circles. The second drawing is meant to offer an inside look at how the applicator is inserted into the vagina with the uterus above. The circular shapes of her private parts were too small and too abstract for me to fully understand exactly how to operate a tampon and put it into my body. 

Arming myself with this guide did little to help when I tried to use a tampon for the first time. It felt like I was pushing up against a wall. Was I aiming for the wrong circle? I couldn’t tell. Deep within the abyss of my subconscious, where my most mortifying and fearsome thoughts were kept under lock and key, I had a suspicion that something wasn’t right. I decided then and there I would just grow up to be the type of woman that doesn’t wear tampons. I’d have to skip any swimming and settle for bulky pads. 

Not only was I tampon-less during high school, but also sexless, which was easy enough when you attend a performing arts high school where there’s approximately two boys in your class, one who’s emo and the other who likes to dress up as Indiana Jones. I was still tampon-less and sexless in college, which kind of felt like being a unicorn. There was a looming pressure to go all-in on booze, drugs, and hookups, which I just wasn’t comfortable with. 

As a theatre major, I often felt like I was drowning in my own awkwardness while playing suggestive roles—like an edgy artist in SubUrbia or a flirtatious troll princess in Peer Gynt. Even though I was supposed to be an actor, fully submerging into roles different from myself, there was something about performing sexuality that felt completely fake. I couldn’t even put in a tampon—like literally every other girl I knew—so how was I supposed to act like some kind of sexual demigoddess? Going to the gynecologist was even worse. My first pap smear felt like I was being ripped apart. The second time I went, years after graduating college, the doctor could not even get it done because of my body’s automatic tensing. When I did finally try to have sex with my first boyfriend, I faced that impenetrable wall again. 

One day, I finally got brave enough to Google these symptoms that had been plaguing me for so long. I kept getting the same answer over and over. The black and white letters seemed to leap off the screen, and hit me like an anvil: VAGINISMUS. Vaginismus is “a condition in which your pelvic floor muscles involuntarily contract or spasm in response to attempted or anticipated vaginal penetration. It’s this involuntary reaction that may limit or even prevent vaginal penetration by anything at all — a tampon, penis, toy, finger, medical applicator, or speculum,” according to Dr. Ashley Rawlins. 

Is this really what I have? Am I going to be a virgin FOREVER? I tried to psyche myself out of the sinking feeling in my belly whenever I was faced with possible penetration. It just didn’t seem like something that was physically possible. It didn’t seem right. I repeated new-age-style mantras in my head, picturing my vagina as an open flower willing to be entered, but I couldn’t make leaps and bounds past my anxiety. 

It turns out that vaginismus is mainly a psychological condition. The most common causes are a painful sexual experience, fears about having sex, or a past history of sexual assault. It’s not so far-fetched to assume that any young woman would develop negative emotions toward sex just existing under America’s umbrella of purity culture. We’re taught that sleeping with someone leaves women dirty and discarded like a piece of used chewing gum. This ideology is even worse in religious spaces, where sex before marriage is viewed as a sin that will damn you forever and any desire is the work of the Devil. While I did attend Catholic school through eighth grade, I’m not sure I internalized much about their attitudes toward sex, which were often veiled. They preferred to leave any serious sex talks for the high school students. 

So, if none of my anxieties were coming from religious trauma, where were they coming from? I immediately thought of the movies. Movies, television, music videos, magazines, and any form of media is a prism through which we can understand the political forces, cultural trends, and social values of the times. As a passionate movie buff, I began to wonder whether some of the films I watched were subtly—or overtly—conveying uncomfortable ideas about sexuality. Losing your virginity in the movies is typically portrayed as the holy grail of adolescence, and what drives the entire plot. Male characters are often the stars. They are consumed by their lust, and their quest for sexual initiation is depicted as fun, exciting, inevitable, and occasionally awkward: the hedging bets on when it will happen in American Pie, traveling to Tijuana, Mexico for a brothel escapade in Losin’ It, and scoring the ultimate conquest—a teacher—in Private Lessons. When their erotic dreams finally come true, it’s often accompanied by soft lighting, sensual music, and close-ups of their female partner in pure ecstasy. It’s an unrealistic and over-the-top depiction of sexual coming-of-age. And it only belongs to men. 

Women’s first times on screen couldn’t be more different. I’m thinking of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where Stacy lies on the cold concrete of a baseball dugout, staring up at the graffiti-laden ceiling, while an uncaring guy thrusts away, oblivious to her detached expression. Heavenly Creatures has a dweebish young man pounding into Melanie Lynskey’s character, his face contorting in pleasure and filling the screen as if viewed from inside a fishbowl, while she winces beneath him. In the biopic Kinsey, Laura Linney’s character has to see a doctor because her first time hurts so much that it makes her scream every time her husband tries to insert. 

 It was also destabilizing to see in The Ballad of Jack and Rose when Rose announces losing her virginity by hanging a white sheet stained with blood on a clothesline. I was also taken aback by Teeth, a horror film about a vagina that is literally a Venus flytrap. There’s a scene where a gynecologist lubes up his pinched hand and shoves it inside her vagina, leaving her writhing in agony in the cold stirrups. The tools lying on his work table looked positively medieval, and it was hard to believe that all of this—even an entire hand—could fit inside a vagina. I could almost pass out just thinking about it. Over and over again, I was presented with images of pain. These films framed a penis—or anything entering a vagina—as something unwelcome and intrusive, painful and debilitating, something that tears and draws blood. The message of these movies was clear: the first time for girls will hurt bad. 

Regardless of whether the portrayal was positive or negative, sex was always shown as a life-altering experience—one that felt impossible for me, since its very mechanics were so disturbing. A flood of shame washed over me as I struggled with parts of my body that were supposed to be perfectly natural, leaving me feeling broken and alone. Representation matters’ has been drilled into us time and again, but it truly does. When you see someone in any form of media that looks or behaves like you, it’s like a light bulb goes off—suddenly you realize that your existence is not an anomaly, and that there are other people out there in the great, wide world who can relate to your experience. As one can imagine, vaginismus is so rarely present in popular culture. Most people could not even tell you what it is. 

The Netflix series Unorthodox from 2020 lightly touches on the condition. Esty is an extremely conservative Orthodox Jewish woman who knows next to nothing about her body or its functions with men. She believes any sort of intimacy before marriage sends you straight to Hell. So when she practically marries a stranger and he tries to make love to her, Esty involuntarily tenses up. Vaginismus is actually named in the series, and discussed as something that those in the Hasidic community often deal with. Her husband Yanky forces her to power through the pain, while her mother-in-law and kallah teacher give her the extremely unhelpful advice: “Inhale through your nose and imagine you are smelling a fragrant rose for four seconds. Then breathe out from your mouth for seven seconds,” and do this every night. Yanky eventually pushes through her vaginal resistance like the breaking of a dam, but it causes her immense hurt. Ultimately, Unorthodox is more focused on how religion cultivates panic and guilt around sex—pressures that didn’t particularly resonate with my own vaginismus challenges. 

A TLC reality series—the channel notorious for its circus-like exploitation of big families, religious extremists, and Green Card hopefuls—would seem the last place to expect any sensitive representation of vaginismus. But Virgins, which follows later-in-life virgins, features an Indian-American woman Sonali who is deathly afraid of any sort of intimacy and cannot use a tampon. Although Sonali’s anxieties stem from her strict religious upbringing, the series provides an unflinching portrayal of the treatment she undergoes. It openly shows her using dilators, tube-shaped medical devices designed to gently stretch the vaginal muscles, in order to get comfortable with the sensation of having something inserted. When Sonali speaks directly to the camera about how awful penetration seems to her, it’s more impactful than a traditional movie narrative, because here is a real woman voicing her fears and frustrations in depth. Here is what vaginismus actually looks and feels like. She also explores other treatment options, such as counseling, Kegel exercises, and pelvic floor physical therapy. What Sonali goes through is what many women, including myself, experience when looking to cure vaginismus. 

For me, I attended the Women’s Therapy Center in Plainview, New York. The incredible team of Dr. Ditza Katz and Dr. Ross Lynn Tabisel have been curing women since 1996 with their special DiRoss methodology. They are true miracle workers who have transformed countless lives, helping women consummate their marriages and have children. I attended a two-week in-person program that combined counseling, medication, and yes, dilators. If you are struggling with vaginismus, the Women’s Therapy Center’s life-changing treatment is worth every penny.

TLC’s Virgins is not the only media that positively portrays vaginismus. In another Netflix series, Sex Education, the character Lily attempts intercourse to avoid being the only virgin at school, but it proves too agonizing for her. When she enters a lesbian relationship with Ola, she bluntly states, without any embarrassment, that she has vaginismus. She even shows off her kit of five different-sized dilators. The couple discovers that what works for them is clitoral stimulation and mutual masturbation.

When you’re dealing with vaginismus, it can feel like you’re lost in a sea of “normal” people who are not afraid of penetration—people who can have intercourse without panic attacks and wear tampons without breaking out in hives. It’s heartbreaking when you are in a romantic relationship and just want to express that love. It is devastating when gynecologists dismiss your anxieties as melodramatic. Having vaginismus taught me how profoundly the mind can shape your relationship with sex, and how deeply your attitudes toward it are influenced by the media you consume. When films, television, or other forms of media no longer keep vaginismus hidden in the dark, they not only educate about what the condition actually is—something far more than first-time jitters—but also reveal it as a deeply felt, very real obstacle that can be overcome. Vaginismus addresses a bigger, systemic issue that will be much harder to conquer: young women are constantly fed the idea that sex must hurt. If we change that narrative, maybe fewer women will grow up fearing their own bodies.