Is your Vagina Friend or Foe?
Have you ever thought about your relationship with your vagina?
Is she your best friend - you know you visit each other often, it's like you can read each other's minds?
Or do you have a frenemy thing going on? Like you've got a love hate thing happening.
Or maybe you've never really thought about it and she's just sorta this part of you that's like an old favourite dress that sits neglected in the back of your closet.
I promise you, wherever you are at there are 1000s of women there too. Wherever you are is ok to be. I was there too.
Not so long ago I was in a state of all out war with my vagina. We were at the gyno on the regular trying to figure out discharge, and pain during sex. I was readying myself for a vulvodynia diagnosis - vulvodynia is when your vagina tenses to sexual stimuli resulting in painful intercourse - and I had just plain had it. I was single so my sex life was nill. I was paranoid for YEARS after this whole episode that I stank, that my discharge wasn’t normal, that sex would always hurt in some way or another.
On top of all that I was in my mid twenties and the big ‘O’ felt elusive to me. Sex felt nice, sometimes pretty great, but it never went anywhere. The grand climax, the magical unfolding, the denouement as they say was just not happening for me.
I raised my hand in a workshop once and asked, frustrated, “Has anyone here even had one? A magical, unicorn, rainbows everywhere, forget your name orgasm??!”.
I just felt like Fuck! What is the POINT!?
Have you been there? Has sex never felt quite what it’s made out to be? Maybe you’ve had a few peak experiences but the rest has left feeling pretty ambivalent about sex. Maybe you’ve lived through a sexual assault, maybe you are tired of catcalls and people staring at your breasts, and you just feel invaded all the time. Maybe your libido never woke up, or maybe it’s gone into hiding? Maybe you feel like you just don’t get this whole sex thing? Maybe you’ve been so buried in negative messaging about sex, and being a woman that you don’t even know what’s real for you anymore.
The number of stories and experiences we have all had is as varied as the number of women on the planet. And yet the common thread is the same. A disconnection from our bodies, a disconnection from our pleasure, a denial of our right to feel safe as we are and fully expressed in the world.
As I started to read, and explore and put things together I started to understand. This whole frenemy thing I had going on with my vagina was probably not the best way to get to a really great orgasm. In fact, being disconnected from my body meant I was disconnected from myself - which resulted in me feeling pretty glass half empty about my career and my life in general.
I started to realized that focusing on a happy vagina could be a way to a happy life. What could I unlock for myself, what version of myself could I become if I became friends, maybe even best friends, with my vagina, my body and my pleasure.
And thus was born the Happy Vagina Project - a space to share all that I was learning about sexuality, womanhood, pleasure, desire and unleashing my inner awesome on the world.
So - If you've never thought about it before, this is an invitation to take a few minutes this week to take stock of your relationship with your vagina and vulva.
How did you first meet?
What are some of the best experiences you've had together?
What are some of the hard times you've experienced together?
If your relationship is not where you want it to be - what needs to shift? How can you celebrate together, how can you make amends?