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| Meme that says "Are the straights okay?" (Please note, I actually am straight though. But I'm not heterosexual.) Image source. |
[content note: sex, vaginismus, my sex life]
The Carnival of Aces topic for this month is Changing Labels, so I want to write about the time when I, after identifying as asexual for several years, seriously considered that I might not be asexual/ might not be asexual anymore. (At the time, I wrote this post about it: How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus).)
There's a "before" and "after" here. Before my baby was born, I had vaginismus. After giving birth, I no longer have vaginismus. And actually, in the "before" part, I didn't even know I had vaginismus, because I didn't have any point of comparison to tell me that what I was experiencing wasn't "normal." I had read about vaginismus, and thought "wow finally people are talking about sex in ways that make sense" but there were always little details about it that didn't exactly match my experiences, so I didn't think I really had it. It was only after I did not have vaginismus any more, that I was able to realize that I actually had had it. Because the difference was so huge, it was impossible to not realize that something had been very wrong before.
That's when I realized that my experience of asexuality had been so tied up with vaginismus. And I wondered, was I not "really" asexual, and it was "actually" "just" vaginismus? Now that I don't have vaginismus any more, am I not asexual any more?
And I didn't want to blog about it at first, because people are often telling aces that asexuality isn't a real thing and they need to go see a doctor. If the reason I thought I was asexual was actually because of something that literally is a real medical condition, does that mean I was wrong about being asexual, and I'm making all the aces look bad?
Well, let me start at the beginning.
I thought I was heterosexual, because I'm attracted to men. And purity culture says that everybody has a desire for sex and you have to be on guard against it, because "temptation" might suddenly overtake you, and you'll somehow have sex without even trying.
Then I got out of purity culture, and when I finally decided to have sex with my boyfriend (who is now my husband- we had sex before marriage) it was because I love him, we'd been together for a long time and we feel really comfortable together... and I was giving myself so much anxiety trying to convince myself that there's this one specific arbitrary action (PIV sex) which is going to ruin my life if we do it... Asking myself "why not just try it?" and not having a good answer, but still terrified that it would "ruin my life" like purity culture said. I told myself "I don't believe that any more" but I was still terrified- what if they were right? It made no sense that this one specific action should be banned; we were already so comfortable with each other, but purity culture said that if you have sex, it totally changes everything and makes everything bad. (Unless you're married, in which case, sex is the best thing ever, apparently.) And it was taking such a toll on my mental health, trying to convince myself that there totally must be reasons why we must not do this one specific action.
And looking back on it now, I see that was an extremely asexual reason to have sex. Feeling like, I need to find out if there's a real reason people are making such a big deal about this. I just want to know if it's gonna "ruin my life" or not, so I can quit worrying and move on.
I was very happy to discover, it did not ruin my life! Didn't really change anything about our relationship. It just meant I didn't have to be afraid any more, which was great.
But, after a while, it occurred to me, wait, but isn't this supposed to feel good, like, physically?
Why was sex so difficult and confusing and painful? Why couldn't I find any sex-ed resources that were talking about what I was experiencing? Sex is PIV [penis-in-vagina], I thought, but I can't figure out how to get the penis to go into the vagina, and none of the sex-ed resources address that specific aspect. They just seem to assume that that part is not an issue at all???? Why does no one talk about how tricky it is to get the angle exactly right? Why does no one talk about how if you get it wrong, it hurts so bad that you just have to give up and maybe try again another day? Why does everyone seem to think the "default" sex position is with the man on top- how can that position even work for anyone at all? Why would you let the penetrating partner control the movement- they don't know how to go slowly and carefully to avoid pain.
When I thought I was heterosexual, I looked for help and couldn't find anything useful. I even asked doctors and they told me useless things like "just relax."
Then I found the aces. They were saying things like "I don't understand why people like sex." Like, wow, finally someone is talking about sex in a way that makes sense! (Which, as I said above, is also how I felt when I found people talking about vaginismus.)
It seemed to make sense. I know I'm attracted to my partner, it's just that sex doesn't work. So, doesn't that pretty clearly mean I'm a heteroromantic asexual?
One thing that tripped me up, though, was that I kept seeing sex-ed resources that said "Sex doesn't have to be PIV. Sex can be whatever you want!" And, I did enjoy doing other sexual things with him, which were not PIV. So, I wondered, maybe that meant I did like sex, and I wasn't asexual?
But... I could never get myself to really believe that sex doesn't have to be PIV. Like, can I really go around saying I'm a heterosexual woman and I like sex but I don't like PIV? Is that even possible? Heterosexual sex *is* PIV. Right? I know that I keep finding articles on the internet that say it doesn't have to be, but let's be real.
(Maybe I'm wrong here... If somebody claimed to be heterosexual and said "I really like sex! But I don't do PIV" wouldn't everyone think that seemed a little contradictory? In an ideal world, yes, everyone would believe that sex doesn't have to have to involve PIV at all, and it's 100% as valid- but I have trouble believing that any straight people in the real world believe that. Maybe I'm wrong. It would be great if I'm wrong.)
And, actually, looking back on it now, I see that even though I enjoyed some sexual things that were not PIV, I didn't know anything about female arousal or female orgasm, and I actually was enjoying just being with him because we're in love. Just excited to do things that he was excited about, regardless of whether those things were sexual. Which, thinking about it now, sounds really asexual.
So, if I hadn't had vaginismus, I wouldn't have figured out I'm asexual. And, if I truly believed that sex didn't have to be PIV, I wouldn't have figured out I'm asexual. Yeah, I would have just continued believing that sex is something a woman does for a man, and I wouldn't have known anything about female orgasms, and I wouldn't have realized anything was wrong.
That would not have been good, so I'm glad I found out about asexuality. And it gave me the freedom to figure out what I actually wanted- because aces said identity is something everyone can figure out for themselves. No one else can tell you what your identity is.
I then came up with this explanation for my difficulties with PIV: When a person is not aroused, their vagina is shut like a steel trap. For allosexuals, arousal is connected to their attraction to their partner, so when they're starting to do stuff with their partner, the arousal happens naturally, they probably don't even need to think about this process and how essential it is, and the arousal gets the vagina to open, so they can do PIV. And my issue was that because I'm asexual, attraction is not connected to arousal.
Looking back on it now, I think that some parts of this are true, but not all of it. At the time, I still didn't think I had vaginismus. I thought everyone's vagina worked that way.
But yes, at the time, that explanation made sense to me, and seemed to explain everything, and I was happy about it. I got to work figuring out other ways to get arousal to happen, since it didn't happen "naturally" for me, and eventually developed a process that could get PIV to be workable. So, that was all going much better. I figured it out my own damn self, no help from Heterosexual Land.
Anyway then I got pregnant, and then I gave birth vaginally to this big-head baby. And then in the months after that, I started to notice, wait, I don't really need to do this whole process any more? PIV isn't difficult any more. What a strange and new experience! It's like we can just have sex whenever we want, instead of it being this big complicated thing.
That's when I realized, it really was vaginismus before. So, did that mean I wasn't "actually" asexual before? Did that mean that since I no longer had vaginismus, I was no longer asexual?
(And, it turns out, anything I wrote on my blog about asexuality before March 2021 was actually about asexuality and vaginismus.)
And, what's more, PIV started to feel good. ??? Before, it was like "I like this because I worked very hard to figure it out and I feel successful", but now it was like... it just feels good in a very straightforward stimulating-one's-genitals way, not a complicated-layers-of-internalized-societal-expectations way. And once I had experienced that a few times, and started to associate PIV with it, then I *did* have a desire for PIV. Did that mean I wasn't asexual any more?
So I thought about that, and I kept coming back to "I'm pretty sure I don't have sexual attraction though." And remembering how hard I worked, and how I was only able to do that work using the concepts I learned from the ace community, how I was eventually able to figure out a way to have PIV sex, and even to do it enough to get pregnant, and that led me to the point where the vaginismus was cured... so then I have to be heterosexual? Really? After all that? After not getting any support in Heterosexual Land, and finding the support I needed in Ace Land- and I don't know if I even could have gotten pregnant, if I had stayed in Heterosexual Land- now I have to go back to Heterosexual Land, where nothing makes sense and I'm supposed to understand what people are talking about when they talk about sex?
Ugh, no, do not want.
And at the time, it was difficult to untangle it... my asexuality was so completely connected with vaginismus. But now that I've had more time to think about it, I see there's so much more to it. I see asexuality as a bigger background concept that influences a lot of things in my life, and probably caused the vaginismus. Yeah, here's a hypothesis, just guessing based on my own experiences, so maybe it's wrong, but: Maybe aces are likely to just never masturbate. (Especially aces who have a religious background and were taught that masturbation is a sin.) But people with vaginas who masturbate are able to learn about their bodies gradually, going at their own pace, just based on their own interest and curiosity and not because there's any pressure about what they're "supposed" to do, and in that way they naturally figure out a way to do penetration that's not painful. And then when they want to have PIV sex with a partner, they already know how the physical parts will work, so they won't have vaginismus. And maybe aces have no incentive to masturbate (this is not true of all aces- some aces have a sex drive, also I can't speak to what it's like having a penis) and then they try to do PIV without having any related experience to draw from, and that leads to vaginismus. This is a huge generalization so I'm sure there are lots of people that this doesn't apply to... it's just some speculation from me about why vaginismus might be more common among AFAB aces.
So I wonder if it is correlated- but not in a "this means asexuality is not real" way, but in a "this medical condition is more common among aces" way. And, listen: if somebody wants to ID as asexual specifically because they have vaginismus, rather than because they don't have sexual attraction, would that even be wrong? If PIV sex is always painful for them, so they're not able to enjoy sex, so they just choose to never do it, how is that functionally any different than not having sex because of a lack of sexual attraction?
And, you know what, if I had decided not to ID as asexual any more, that would have been okay. If I had decided that I was wrong to ID as asexual, because it was "actually" vaginismus, that would have been okay. Or rather, if not IDing as asexual made sense and felt right to me, it would have been okay. Maybe some people have similar experiences, and end up changing their label because of that. That's fine. Or maybe if I decided to change to gray-asexual, that would have been okay. It's totally fine to use a label for a short time and then maybe change it if it's no longer useful to you.
But if I still wanted to be asexual but felt like I "couldn't", because sex wasn't painful any more, and that meant I had to be a confused heterosexual again- no. No, don't let that stop you from using the labels that feel right to you.
And again, I fear I'm talking about this wrong, because I do "want to be asexual," so everyone's gonna think my asexuality is fake and I just want to be different or something... But it's not that, it's... like this whole ace way of talking about sex, and analyzing different kinds of attraction and specifically what the differences are between sexual attraction, sex drive, etc- it just makes so much SENSE, and I feel really comfortable in this world. Whereas in Heterosexual Land, there was just no help. Everyone said things about sex that just felt completely unrelated to anything I had experienced. Like I can't figure out what anybody's talking about at all.
(Note that this is completely different from my experience with mainstream society talking about romance. Romance, I understand what people are talking about. Even though they just describe the edges of their feelings without describing the main shape of it, I understand what they mean, because my feelings have a similar shape and so I know where those edges fit in. But with sex, no, I have no idea of the overall shape of the thing.)
One more thing: I don't really understand what an allosexual vaginismus experience is. I have read blog posts by heterosexual or bisexual women, talking about vaginismus, and it always really confused me how they write their whole story about "here's why sex was so painful and I didn't like it" and they didn't conclude with "and that's how I realized I'm asexual." For me, it was like... I really thought I wanted sex, but then discovered it was painful, and felt like "if this is what sex is, then NO I don't have any kind of intrinsic desire for THAT" and that meant I'm asexual. I'm really curious about how someone can feel like "sex is painful, I don't like it" and then not be ace.
Surely, for allosexuals who have vaginismus, there must be some other indication that they like sex, even though they don't like PIV. Maybe they have experience with arousal and orgasm, and they know they want those things, even though PIV doesn't work for them? Maybe they just really really believe that the definition of sex isn't tethered to PIV? Maybe they think that IDing as ace would mean they aren't interested in working through those difficulties to learn how to have sex? Maybe they could fit the definition of ace but they choose not to identify that way?
Maybe they actually understand what sexual attraction is, and I do not?
Anyway, there you have it, that's my life story about the overlap between vaginismus and asexuality. Without vaginismus, I wouldn't have figured out I'm asexual. But if I hadn't figured it out, that would have been bad, because I really am asexual.
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Related:
How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus)
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