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"Close your thighs": When the word becomes the deed.


In our societies, women are injected with the idea of being good girls. Girls who don't have sex. If they say it too often, why be surprised when they do?


Injunctions and patriarchal society.


Women's education has been marked since childhood by the repetition of universally accepted advice such as "close your thighs", "drop your skirt" and sometimes even more directly "stay a virgin". This pseudo-advice - which in reality is an order - is spouted without the author being able to measure its impact. The most violent and insidious impact is probably vaginismus.

A sexual disorder that causes pain during penetration, vaginismus is the assurance of the "virginity" of the person concerned. Because unless you hurt yourself or are forced to, penetrative sex is impossible. In reading tons of articles on vaginismus, I have rarely seen it linked to patriarchy. But this link is fundamental if we want to understand the origin of this psycho-somatisation.

We talk about pressure put on women, about fear of penetration, without ever naming the person responsible.


Figure of the Virgin Mary: the female paradox.


One of the interesting figures for understanding this link between patriarchy and vaginismus is the figure of the Virgin Mary, present in the Catholic religion. In other religions and more generally in other cultures, similar representations exist, but the Virgin is the most accomplished spokesperson of the feminine paradox. She is an idealised woman, a good girl par excellence: she is a mother without having been penetrated. She is and will remain a virgin, as women are so often asked to do. It is the praise of purity, the mother figure to which women are more or less invited to conform.

And yet, women are also in the collective representations, penetrated beings. Things that are taken, holes that have to be filled. But if a woman's existence is determined by penetration, then the Virgin Mary becomes the opposite of femininity. She leaves this vast market. She withdraws from the existence of woman. The Virgin becomes an anti-model. She is both a perfect woman and no longer really a woman.


Vaginism is in a way an ultimate conformity to this female dualism. It is a desire to be a perfect girl. It is also a reclaiming of the self. The woman summarised as being penetrated, withdraws from this task. Like the Virgin, she leaves the sexual domain. She is both the good girl par excellence and the woman who is not a woman. She closes herself off. The hole ceases to be a hole, and resumes its own existence. Much advice on vaginismus is insufficient because it does not take into account this feminine paradox. The vaginic woman does not simply refuse penetration out of fear, but also because she has always been forbidden to do so. And if we often hear that it is only a problem of too strict education, it is not taking into account the ambient climate.


One solution that does not work: marriage.


In patriarchal societies, women oscillate between two representations, penetrated and impenetrable. The two figures are feminine, intertwined, so that both are required. It is therefore impossible for women to make a choice, and to fulfil themselves by freeing themselves from the two models. They have to conform to both, even though one cancels out the other. The woman is thus caught between the guilt of being penetrated because of the risk of being considered a slut, and the guilt of not being penetrated because of the risk of not being a woman. Not really. Caught between being a prude and a whore, the woman no longer knows where she belongs. This is one of the causes of vaginismus.

The answer to this dilemma is marriage. A woman who has been a virgin until then becomes a penetrated being for a while. She modulates herself to the demands made on her. She is a good girl, and at the same time she conforms to her role as a penetrated being, to her role as a receptacle. This response is totally dislocated by vaginismus. For if the vaginic woman has admitted that she must remain a virgin, it is not a contract - however symbolic - that will suddenly make her open up. It is too late for that. Vaginismus is the integration of an injunction into the body, and the body does not detach itself from it so easily. The word leaves its mark.


Internalized violence.


So men (and women) are so insistent that women remain virgins that they have become sick of it. Sick of closing their thighs uncontrollably. Sick of closing their thighs when what they really want is to spread them. Vaginismus is a psychosis that only affects women. How can we be surprised? It is only women who, in order to punish themselves for doing good to themselves, do harm to themselves. Not voluntarily, of course, but because they are pushed into it. Vaginismus is the ultimate integration of guilt. An injunction not to have sex, engraved in the pulpit.


The victory of patriarchy is not the violence it exerts against women's bodies. Its most complete victory is to have turned that body against itself. That it madly punishes itself for existing. The vaginal woman feels a great deal of pain during penetration, because she has always been forced to see it as an evil.


The word is the deed.


The vagina woman thus conforms to being the girl who closes her thighs, the good girl. And at the same time, she renounces the existence of a woman, by refusing to be penetrated. She is the result of an unattainable imaginary woman, an initial paradox, which makes her always unfit, always dual.

The word is the act, and the vaginal woman is the main witness to this.






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