Reply To: Treating vaginismus before the first sexual experience

[minnied]

Hellenmia has made some pretty good points here.

I agree we shouldn’t generalize things too much, but in general European women are more used to seeing naked bodies. Breastfeeding is often done without covering up, women (young and old) go topless on beaches, youth magazines show nude pictures of ‘real’ teens so girls don’t end up only seeing picture perfect bodies from porn and glossy magazines, sex ed is pretty explicit, etc, etc. As Hellenmia wrote, this doesn’t mean teens start having sex at a younger age, on the contrary, I think here in Poland the average age when girls have sex for the first time is 19 or 20.

At the same time, virginity seems to play a much more important role when compared to the States. I have the impression virginity over there is something you need to “get rid off”, while in Europe having sex for the first time is generally a very valuable moment – one of the reasons for this is probably the influence of the catholic religion. When using tampons or inserting things in your vagina is discouraged, and masturbation (like in Islam for instance) is forbidden, the first time girls have sex automatically gets more valuable. But this also has a strange side effect: next to the pictures of naked teens in magazines promoting normal bodies, you can read articles on how normal it is to bleed and have pain when you first have sex. The fact it will hurt the first time is so widespread it becomes normal. Girls talk about it all the time. Boys are told they should “take it easy” when they have sex with a virgin. Unintentionally, pain and sex are associated and considered to be normal, which opens the path to vaginismus.