Unlocking the Venus Fly Trap

The horror and humor of coping with vulvodynia

Despite being relatively sane and a solid 8 with makeup on, I haven’t had sex in over a year—out of choice. My last sexual partner was a corporate real estate tycoon I met at a karaoke bar in Koreatown. After catching his eye with a particularly powerful rendition of Jefferson Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” I went home with him and we ended up having sex. When he entered me, pain shot through my pelvis, my eyes began to water and I gasped for air. Misinterpreting my pain for pleasure, he pushed back my legs until my knees were next to my ears, grabbed the headboard with both hands and began to fuck me hard. Before I could ask him to stop, he pulled out and asked if I was on my period, because I was bleeding all over his sheets. I wasn’t on my period, I wasn’t a virgin, and it wasn’t rape; this is just how sex is for me. I have vulvodynia, a disorder that makes any vaginal penetration unbearably painful.

“Vulvo” is straightforward enough, and “dynia” is the Greek word for “pain.” The term serves as a catch-all for various conditions with the same effect: chronic pain of the vulvar area. In my case, my pelvic floor muscles are inexplicably too tight, restricting oxygen flow and creating a buildup of lactic acid in my vulva. Eve Ensler’s vagina may be a mysterious, beautiful flower, but mine is a Venus flytrap locked around a struggling fly, making any penetration from a pinkie to a penis almost impossible.

Losing my virginity hurt, as I’d been taught to expect, but I didn’t expect the second, third, and fourth time to be equally unpleasant. Concerned, I went to my gynecologist for help. After half-listening to my problem, my doctor stared thoughtfully into space for all of five seconds and said, “Painful sex usually means you were either molested as a child or have herpes. I’ll get a nurse to come in and take a blood sample.” And with that, she ran out of the room before I could ask any follow-up questions, leaving me to wonder which side of that devil’s coin toss I’d rather land on. I was almost disappointed when my STD panel came back clean a week later and actually called my mom to double-check that I hadn’t been molested as a child. (We’re both fairly confident I wasn’t.)

I went to three more doctors looking for answers and was met with the same level of disinterest and condescension from each one. A male urologist who called me “sweetheart” told me it was his medical opinion that I just needed to take a bath and relax. I was livid. As if the answer to all of my problems was to take my vagina out to a nice wine bar, get her back to my place, light a few scented candles and turn on some John Legend. I left each doctor’s office feeling embarrassed and ashamed of my body, and decided that was the last time I’d talk about my problem to anyone, let alone a doctor.

A few years later, I was lying in bed taking a rare break from being depressed and masturbating when I turned on MTV, which happened to be airing the “I Can’t Have Sex” episode of the docu-series True Life. The episode followed three twenty-something females as they struggle to come to terms with the toll the inability to have sexual intercourse has taken on each of their lives, and seek ways of treating their shared painful medical condition—vulvodynia. After spending a small fortune and seeing four top-rated doctors, that was how I learned about vulvodynia: from a trashy, sensationalized MTV reality show.

After being properly diagnosed in 2011, I learned that one in six, or 13 million American women suffer from vulvodynia, but the numbers may be substantially higher when you take into account the women too embarrassed to talk about it. That’s a huge number, making it all the more surprising that doctors and friends had never heard of it—except that it’s now socially unacceptable to be a woman who doesn’t enjoy sex.

While women were once taught that sex is not something to be enjoyed, but rather a necessary part of our womanly duty to procreate, we’re now taught that we should love sex and openly talk about how wonderful it is over cosmos with our girlfriends. As someone who can’t enjoy sex, however, I’m not part of that conversation, which means I have few chances to talk about how sex really is for me. This silence complicates the issue—the less noise that’s made about vulvodynia, the less attention it receives from the medical community, the longer it’s excluded from medical school curricula, and the longer it remains a mystery.

I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that there is no quick fix for vulvodynia. The cause is unknown, and doctors wildly disagree on the best means to treat it. I’ve gone to weekly vaginal physical therapy sessions where an ex-Army nurse in her late fifties fingers me for 45-minutes while we talk about Washington sports teams; I’ve inserted slightly chilled vaginal Valium suppositories nightly and mastered meditative breathing, all to no avail. I avoid relationships altogether because when I finally work up the courage to tell my partner about my vulvodynia, it becomes fetishized: I don’t have a painful chronic muscular disorder; I have a tight pussy that needs a man to fuck it loose.

Overwhelmed by my inability to find an effective treatment, I threw an epic vaginal revolt. For the past year, the door to my vagina has been slammed shut: no boys or doctors allowed. I figured it was easier to take sex and treatment off the table altogether than continue to be painfully poked and prodded by rough partners and stumped doctors. What I didn’t factor in, however, was the toll this strategy of vaginal isolationism would take on my emotional well-being and how profoundly lonely I’d become. The factors against my sexual enjoyment may be stacked high, but there’s still a world of treatment options left to explore, and I’m ready to take my vagina out of early retirement. I don’t know if I’ll find an effective treatment, but I’ve come to realize I deserve the effort of looking for one.