[hellenmia]

That’s kind of an evasive answer, no? 🙂 Of course you will be asked if it is okay the therapist will touch you, but he/she WILL have to insert dilators, fingers or instruments to help you out. Part of therapy is talking and giving instructions and training, the other part is purely medical and involves being nude and touched.

[hellenmia]

As far as I know this practice isn’t changing at all.

[hellenmia]

It was me who wrote about this.

In certain African cultures, sand is indeed inserted in the vagina when a couple gets married. This is done by friends and relatives of the bride as a “rite of passage” and its purpose is indeed to make sex dry/painful for BOTH partners. In males, the foreskin will be pulled back by the dry sand and the frenulum will tear, which causes bleeding (this is the so-called “male defloration”). In females, the hymen will tear and the sand will cause little scars, adding to the bleeding. The couple has no privacy and needs to have sex in front of their family so they can see the blood. As a researcher, I’ve seen videos of thise rites and the couple is in so much pain the images are difficult to watch.

I wrote about this because afterwards, lots of those young women end up with vaginismus due to their painful first experience.

[hellenmia]

In general, Europeans have less issues with nudity. Going topless on beaches, nudity in saunas, pubic hair, breastfeeding in public, nudity on tv… this is all pretty normal for most people here. However, this does not mean everyone is sexually active or interested at a young age. On the contrary, there have been some studies showing that the more open you are on nudity and the more it becomes normal, the longer teenagers will wait before having sex.

This all sounds positive, but it has a side effect: feeling pain the first time you’re having sex is considered to be ‘normal’ for most girls, which it probably IS since most of them still have an intact hymen. Girls read stories about it in teen magazines, your friends tell you about their experience, basically the message is “sex hurts” the first time, which opens the path (but not always!) to vaginism.

My impression is that the lack of nudity in public life in the States, causes women to have a more problematic relationship with their vagina, but on another level. They’ll start thinking about how they look down there, compare with porn, they’ll shave, go to the gyn at an earlier age, use tampons, have cosmetic surgery… while Europeans have “seen it all”: they know every body is different and they accept the way they look, which removes the need to touch/change things. I’m generalizing too much here, but you get the basic idea.

There are large parts of the world where religion is so important (like in most parts of Asia and Africa for instance) that having an intact hymen is crucial, and tampons cannot be used at all (they aren’t even available!). When a girl doesn’t have pain of bleeds during the wedding night, this is considered to be problematic. I know that in certain African cultures women put sand in their vagina to make sex as painful as possible – you could say they PROVOKE vaginismus instead of trying to get rid of it.

[hellenmia]

Good point!

I wrote a paper on this when I graduated from college.

In many European countries, especially in the more Catholic areas, inserting something in your vagina is considered to be a taboo. There are differences among countries of course, but generally speaking the majority of girls in Catholic countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, etc… masturbate less, don’t use tampons, internal exams are only done after being sexually active, etc… Girls are told not to touch themselves down there, it’s a sin, etc…

If my memory serves me right, 80% of all European girls were in pain when they had sex for the first time, vs. 30-40 percent in the States, which is a remarkable difference. The only explanation I could find for this phenomenon was that in Europe, most girls still have intact hymens and aren’t used to feeling something in their vagina. Girls often end up in a downwards spiral thinking the second time will be painful as well, which is sometimes – not always! – a trigger for vaginismus.

I live in Greece myself and over the past years, several articles have been published in youth magazines and newspapers on how girls can tear their own hymen, which is a good thing. I’m convinced a part of the vaginismus cases reported in Europe can be avoided when more girls do this. It’s not difficult to learn and it can take a lot of unnecessary stress away from the first sexual encounter.

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