It is often assumed that vaginal women know nothing about sex or porn. This is not true. Vaginismus is not just a problem of ignorance, it is more broadly a problem of dissociation.
There is something very simplistic and reductive about articles about vaginismus. Either the woman has seen "too much" and puts pressure on herself to the point of blocking herself. Or she knows nothing, and her ignorance leads her to the same result. In reality, the vaginal woman can often know what it means to have sex without allowing herself to. She is unable to represent herself as a sexual being, and porn can help to maintain this dissociation.
Pressure on the body.
This is one of the most common criticisms of pornography. Pornography shows bodies in which the vagina-positive (or not) woman does not recognise herself. The bodies are idealised according to strict standards: total hair removal, breasts, buttocks, lips, and for the biggest industries the sex of the actresses itself has been operated on. When you watch a superhero movie, you don't care if you don't look like the main characters. When it comes to porn, it's immediately different.
The current use of porn makes us forget what it really is, namely a fiction. It then has a normative use. No one would feel guilty about not looking like the spider man. Yet women are invited to blame themselves for not looking like porn actresses. Men too are subject to desirability criteria. But they are rarely strongly sexualised. Male bodies are rarely staged, except in the homosexual world, they are not made to be desired. Pressure is therefore put on women's bodies in the sphere of desire, of intimacy, when it should on the contrary constitute a space of confidence, security and self-assertion. Sexuality can be the place to imagine oneself differently, but without having narrow standards of beauty imposed on it.
Something reserved for others.
For the vagina woman, this pressure can also be articulated differently. Penetration (because that's what porn most often features) can appear to her as something reserved for others, reserved for those who have the body for it. It is no longer a question of complexing oneself, but of detaching oneself completely from this identity of sexual being. The woman with vaginismus thus dissociates both the visual medium and her person, and her vagina and herself. Thus, many of the women concerned do not know their vagina. They know what it is, of course, but they have never explored it. As if the vagina was something reserved for others. They don't formulate it as their own, and they don't imagine themselves in control of it. It is something apart, not to say extra.
This is why a woman with vaginismus can encourage her friends to have sex, talk about it freely, and yet not allow herself to do so. The vaginal woman is wrongly imagined as a woman who is outside the idea of sexuality itself. Many women raised without sexuality do not have vaginismus, and vice versa: apparently very liberated women can be affected. If vaginismus affects 1 in 10 women, it is because there is no set archetype. But pornography, when considered as a representation of reality, can fuel this dissociation.
The school of pain.
This is my last point and yet it is the one that may seem the most obvious: the violence contained in the pornographic industry can be problematic. Mind you, having violent fantasies is not in itself a problem, but pornography today is characterised by the predominance of violent scenarios. Whether in the titles, in the thumbnails or in the video itself, violence is omnipresent, and almost exclusively directed towards women. For example, the actresses regularly act out screaming and even crying. These images can play a role in the way one constructs one's relationship to one's sexuality.
In addition, many pornos play with the concept of consent. "By surprise", "by mistake", "because she deserved it", the multiplication of these video titles draw the contours of a woman who is not a desiring being, who undergoes without really participating. Penetration appears as a painful and sometimes humiliating punishment. The brain proceeds by association of ideas. Negative images remain in the memory and serve as the basis for the sexual imagination of vaginal women. It is a vicious circle, they see women suffering during sex, fear penetration and therefore end up suffering themselves.
The art of dissociation
The consumption of ultra-violent images, in a society where sex is still seen as something taboo, does not encourage people to see sex as a source of pleasure. If we stopped associating pain with female sexuality, vaginal women might be less apprehensive about penetration. In magazines, women with penetrative sex do not come, in books they are no longer "pure", and in porn they scream, that is how female sexuality is portrayed. How can we be surprised by an unconscious desire to dissociate on the part of vaginic women?
Is vaginismus a product of the porn industry? But to cure it is to reappropriate one's body, to get out of passivity and to start thinking about what influences our representations of sexuality. The aim is not to demonise porn, but to question the use we make of it.
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