This article is part of San Francisco Confesses, a feature series dedicated to anonymous stories from locals they’d never share with their name attached.
I lost my virginity in an excruciatingly stereotypical fashion: freshman year of college, cheaply made dorm loft, odd hour of the afternoon while the roommate was in lecture hall. The boyfriend: nice, but not “the one.” The sex: unsurprisingly subpar.
I’d waited until I was 19 — in no small part because my mom impulsively offered me $1,000 to “make it through high school without a baby” — so by that point, I was confident that rounding the last base to vaginal penetration wasn’t going to instantly open up a whole new realm of pleasure the other bases (and masturbation) hadn’t. I figured it was better to set middling expectations than be disappointed it didn’t live up to the scene in The Notebook that my basic teenage self rewound 1,000 times.
The other thing I’d mentally prepared myself for was pain. And that was certainly present, along with blood. I figured it was normal. Everyone had said it hurts at first. So, cherry officially popped, I skipped off into ex-virgin life expecting it to only improve.
I was 26 at that point and assumed every other woman must experience penetrative sex the way I did: gritting your teeth in intense pain while trying your best to look sexy AF.
Seven years later, I’d moved to the Bay Area, started a career, and was happily living with a (different) boyfriend of several years. But one thing remained unchanged: sex sucked. Don’t get me wrong, I was very much attracted to my partner and most of our sex life was great, but vaginal intercourse — ye olde P in V — was straight-up torturous.
I was 26 at that point and assumed every other woman must experience penetrative sex the way I did: gritting your teeth in intense pain while trying your best to look sexy AF. “Yes, I am crying because it feels that good, babe!” It had gotten so painful that missionary was the only viable position, and I’d started devising ways to act extra into it simply to hurry it along. It took him about 10 minutes to even fully get it in. I experienced tearing and bleeding every time, and I was left sore for days.
I resigned myself to a life of excruciatingly painful sex because I was so concerned with being “normal.”
In hindsight, obviously, I did not need to subject myself to that. And had my partner realized just how painful it actually was, he would have put an end to my fakery. But, for a long time, I genuinely didn’t realize it was abnormal. And even when I started to realize it might not be normal, I really worked to hide it; I resigned myself to a life of excruciatingly painful sex because I was so concerned with being “normal.” Part of it was that I just badly wanted to like that element of sex. I knew it wasn’t like the movies, sure, but based on peer reviews, clearly something was off with me.
One day, however, I was procrastinating on Reddit and a post about pain during sex crossed my path on /r/relationships. That post then led me to a much smaller, far more niche channel /r/vaginismus. The word — vaginismus — was so alien; it sounded like a vulvar Roman emperor. But the woman’s account was immediately familiar. A lightbulb that had been slowly getting brighter and brighter in my head finally lit up as a neon sign: You’re not crazy and you’re not alone.
I’d told gynecologists about my pain at nearly every annual exam for seven years, but every time I heard a variation of “use more lube,” “try to relax,” or “try numbing cream so you don’t feel anything.” (That was a deeply troubling suggestion to me — isn’t the entire point to feel something?)
After years of feeling like I was getting particularly aggressive speculum exams during sex, I finally had a name and definition for it: vaginismus — painful spasmodic contraction of the vagina in response to physical contact or pressure (especially in sexual intercourse). That information led my Kaiser physician to finally grant me the golden ticket: a referral to a specialist.
The presenter took us through common sources of pelvic pain and then led us in group exercises such as — and I kid you not — manually massaging farts out of our large intestines.
At my first appointment with the pelvic pain OB-GYN, I felt listened to for the first time. She was an intense woman who dealt with intense vaginas. She took it seriously. So seriously, in fact, that in our first meeting, she prescribed “the cessation of sex until we figure this out.” At that point, it was a relief to be told to just give the ol’ vag a break already.
Her next step was to eliminate other diagnoses before sending me to pelvic therapy. This approach included cultures and swabs, which I readily underwent. Finally, though, she introduced the pièce de résistance: a punch-hole biopsy.
The name is horrifyingly literal. She straight-up punched a small hole out of my labia skin. She had reassured me she’d use local anesthetic, delivered via a hypodermic needle. I expected a pinch. Instead, I screeched “Fuck!” at the top of my lungs and full-on kneed her in the face. Thankfully, the embarrassment of nearly knocking my MD unconscious was enough to distract me from the arts and crafts going on below my waist.
Satisfied she’d ruled out other issues (and probably a little bruised), the specialist gave me what I wanted—a diagnosis of vaginismus and approval for the second stage of treatment: pelvic pain class.
With Kaiser, I had to attend group pelvic pain classes before getting approval for therapy. I showed up to an extremely nondescript conference room in Oakland one Tuesday afternoon, feeling lucky to have health care and an employer who would let me out of work, but extremely unsure about what to expect from a session in which roughly a dozen women gathered to talk about their ailing pelvises.
The setup looked like the layout for a vaginally preoccupied timeshare presentation — folding chairs, coffee and styrofoam cups in the corner, pelvic pamphlets on each seat. But instead of being sold on condos in Orlando, the presenter took us through common sources of pelvic pain and then led us in group exercises such as — and I kid you not — manually massaging farts out of our large intestines. As surreal as that afternoon was, I learned a lot about the pelvis (spoiler: Childbirth is a real bitch). Completing that class unlocked Stage 3: pelvic physical therapy.
My therapist would literally just stick a glove on, lube up, and manually stretch out my vagina with her hand once a week.
Before stumbling upon that Reddit thread, I had no idea pelvic physical therapy was a thing. I assumed when I finally showed up for an appointment that it would be in a gynecological-type setting. Or, perhaps, if I was really lucky, a day spa. Calming instrumental music and aromatherapy. Instead, it was your typical physical therapy gym. I walked through a room with hardwood floors, mirrored walls, resistance bands strewn about, and parallel bars off to one side. My room, however, was smaller, with a small doctor’s exam bed in the middle. And, thank freaking God, it was also private.
I wasn’t quite sure what physical therapy would entail but it ended up being very obvious. My therapist would literally just stick a glove on, lube up, and manually stretch out my vagina with her hand once a week. The reason for this is that vaginismus is caused by involuntary spasming of the muscles in your vagina. This makes penetration painful for most women, and it can get worse over time. It can be caused by many things — everything from a traumatic experience to skin issues that cause pain. For many, like me, the initial cause remains unknown, but the goal of therapy is to manually decrease the spasming.
When it dawned on me what was about to happen in my first appointment, I nearly bolted. Luckily, I stayed. And luckily, she was an angel on earth. She made me laugh, she put me at ease, and she somehow made it seem not weird that she was asking me about my place of work while knuckle-deep in my cooch. The appointments were pretty painful, but she was an excellent therapist, and slowly, amazingly, I started to see improvement.
One day, as she and I squatted on the floor face-to-face (pelvis pro tip: Squatting in a very deep “goddess” yoga pose can do wonders), she introduced me to Stage 4: self-dilation. Dilators, for the unfamiliar, are essentially the world’s unsexiest dildos. Made of hard plastic, each set comes with a handle and a series of six or so attachable hard plastic cone-shaped dildos. The thinnest is the size of a chubby pencil. The thickest, a particularly hearty cucumber. The dilators, she explained, would be introduced into our sessions with the aim of sending me out into the world on my own with my vagina stretched out and my dilator in hand.
I balked. She was abandoning me? This was the woman who told me about her kids while navigating her middle finger around my NuvaRing once a week. I thought she was the fairy godmother that would spirit me into a life of pain-free sex. I wasn’t ready. Again, though, she knew what she was doing. In the following sessions, she taught me how to stretch myself out at home in addition to our appointments. “Just stick it in while you watch YouTube videos,” she told me. I was equipped with the strangest six-minute at-home therapy routine I could conceive of.
At our second-to-last session, she instructed me to “go home and have sex.” It had been nearly 10 weeks at this point. But I did as I was told and made a doctor-prescribed dick appointment.
Not enjoying vaginal sex had unfortunately started to chip away at my self-worth, and I felt my doctors didn’t believe me.
Was it mind-blowing Noah-Calhoun-by-candlelight sex? No. But was it painful? No.
When I realized I wasn’t experiencing awful pain, I promptly burst into tears. My horrified boyfriend immediately stopped. “No!” I sobbed, wiping my nose. “Keep going! It’s great!” Nothing heats up the bedroom like ugly-crying.
I felt like a star pupil at my next appointment. “I had sex without pain!” I blurted out as she closed the door. She actually gave me a hug. And then, as quickly as my foray into the weird and wonderful world of pelvic pain began, she waved me out the door of my last appointment.
Today, years later, I still use my trusty, decidedly unsexy dilator kit. If I don’t keep up with it about every other night, the pain slowly returns. Sometimes if I’m traveling or feeling lazy, it comes back. And that’s okay. I feel lucky that I now know how to get stretched back out in the course of a week or two. I also feel lucky to have a partner who never pressured or guilted me. And, honestly, it was never really about him in the end anyway. It was about me, my own pleasure, and my complicated relationship with the finicky diva in my pants.
If some ugly plastic dilators are what it takes for me to stifle her spasms, then I count myself lucky. Many others have to endure more intense treatment in the search for relief, and many more never even identify the problem to begin with. Dilators and vaginismus make an appearance in the second season of Sex Education on Netflix, and when I watched it I jumped up like my favorite celebrity just made a cameo. It’s not an incredibly common issue, but more visibility means fewer women will have to go through years of pain.
At first, for my younger self, it was about feeling “normal” and about feeling heard. Not enjoying vaginal sex had unfortunately started to chip away at my self-worth, and I felt my doctors didn’t believe me. Today, it’s about freedom. I want the option to enjoy sex. And yeah, maybe I want the option for reverse cowgirl now and again. My vagina might not like sex, but she can’t tell me what do anymore.
