Feminista Vaginista

I’ve opened my legs for a certain amount of people since I was a kid. In the olden days, all of them were doctors.

They had to look inside when I fell off a jungle gym and landed sitting on my foot. My bloodstained underwear hinted that I had sort of impaled myself with the heel of my shoe. Then came the kidney infection. I felt something like a knitting needle piercing my womb from inside every time I peed. They stuck a tube all the way up into my bladder and pumped saline in until it felt like bursting. That was the only time in my life I’ve ever produced cold pee.

Sometimes I think I broke my hymen in the jungle gym accident because I didn’t bleed the first time I had intercourse, but I guess there is no way to tell if I didn’t get that checked back then. I mean, what for.

Anyway, who cares about bleeding and initiation when time passes and things keep coming in—gently or hard, worried faces staring at me from above—, and the pain just won’t go away.

You can’t simply stick your hand in and expect the girl to moan and squirm automatically. You just can’t. It’s not some pocket we’re talking about.

“Did you do this to your ex-girlfriend when you were together?”

“Yes.”

“How was it for her?”

“She liked it.”

But I didn’t.

And yet I let him—and his successors—give it a try and see if I wasn’t some sort of frigid who did not react the way other girls did. The way I was supposed to just because there was a hand stuck between my labia.

It took years for me to finally reach down, clench a lost wrist and make it walk my way.

The first time I heard the word it was far from applying to me.

I was a teenager in Catholic school and for some reason we had to do presentations on sexuality-related topics for Religion class. There was actually no reference whatsoever to God during this unit—I guess the teacher considered herself quite a liberal educator and perhaps found it useful for us to talk about this since the school’s official sex-ed program basically covered menstruation, menstruation, and more menstruation. Oh yeah, and a screening of The Silent Scream, which of course grossed me out but failed to turn me pro-life.

We were divided in pairs and did research on sexually transmitted diseases, some did on paraphilias. My topic was the absolute best of all: “pornography and obscenity”. It was great because it gave my partner and me freedom to proudly display smutty material to the whole class at the school auditorium. Pure fun.

In the midst of some group’s description of female conditions and diseases, a word popped up: vaginismus. An interesting name for a terrifying condition. After all, what could be worse than having your vagina shut? Yeah, the itchy, gooey stuff, yeah, but—your vagina! Shut like a Venus Flytrap! H-how?!? And still, the name sounded so not like that of a disease. It was sure to stay in my mind for a long time, even if only due to the sheer thrill of its own strangeness ringing in my ears.

This may or may not have happened to you.

You’re having sex with a guy. Everything’s going fine, and he wants to stick it in. Yeah, that’d be nice, why not. So he thrusts in and—surprise! The entrance is nowhere to be found! “Open, sesame” won’t work on this one!

The guy is very, very confused. So are you. What the hell’s wrong with you? Didn’t you want him? Weren’t you turned on?

Okay, let’s try again. He pushes. Success! Or is it? It freaking hurts!

The guy is even more confused now because you’re making weird faces as he moves, so he desists. You’re embarrassed. It’s like your vagina refuses to cooperate. It’s like she has a voice of her own and she’s actually protesting. For the moment you feel that she hates you.

This may or may not have happened to you.

It happened to me.

Time after time have I gone through the pain, through the shame. It’s made me wonder all sorts of things. It’s made me doubt myself. It’s made me hate myself. But you know what?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

So here I am. This is my story.