What to Do When Sex Becomes a Painful Ordeal

When sexual pleasure becomes painful, it is known as female sexual arousal disorder. This affects the wellness and wellbeing of thousands of women every year. Female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD) is defined as the recurrent or persistent inability to enjoy sexual activity and a lack of lubrication and swelling response to sexual excitement.

 

This condition is both a physical one, which may come alongside other physical issues associated with sexual dysfunction, and a psychological issue. There are a few different types of FSAD.

 

Genital sexual arousal disorder is when the genitals fail to become aroused, even although other areas of the body may be aroused and the sufferer may be mentally aroused.

 

Subjective arousal disorder occurs when there are diminished feelings of sexual arousal, even when sexual stimuli is present.

 

Combined genital and subjective arousal disorder is when both of the above conditions occur at the same time – feelings of sexual arousal and a physical response to sexual stimuli are both absent at the same time. It can be present on its own or at the same time as other sexual or physical disorders.

 

The causes of female sexual arousal disorder are varied and it can have many different causes. It may be due to problems with the bladder or bowel, as a result of arthritis or following on from previous surgery on the pelvis. Sometimes it occurs alongside neurological problems, fatigue or headaches. Irregular hormone levels can be to blame in some cases, as can untreated depression or anxiety, or even severe stress.

 

In some cases the cause is far more subtle, as it can be something like a negative body image or a problem with self esteem that causes the woman to fail to feel aroused. Others are responding to religious or cultural issues surrounding sex, and in this case counselling may be the most appropriate treatment.

Categories: arousal, arousal disorder, Disorder, female sexual, nbsp, ordeal, painful, Sex, sexual, sexual arousal, sexual stimuli, subjective arousal

How Blood Flow Problems Impact Your Sexual Arousal

When you think about sexual arousal, you tend to think of it as the same thing as wanting to have sex. However, sexual arousal is actually the second phase of lovemaking. First, you want to have sex and then you become aroused through foreplay and intimacy. This makes it easier to understand how sexual health issues impact on your wellness. If your mind says yes but your body doesn’t listen, your wellbeing may be affected by sexual arousal disorder (SAD). SAD – not to be confused with seasonal affective disorder – is defined, medically speaking, as a persistent or recurring inability to maintain sexual responses during the excitement stage of sexual activity. This means you are unable to maintain adequate genital lubrication, swelling or other responses, such as nipple sensitivity. As you need the blood vessels in your genital region to swell for your vagina to become lubricated, any impediment to blood flow could potentially cause SAD. This includes:

 

1. Pelvic surgery: There are 600,000 hysterectomies performed each year and, according to Drs. Jennifer and Laura Berman, two of the nation’s top experts on sexual health for women and authors of Women Only: A Revolutionary Guide to Overcoming Sexual Dysfunction and Reclaiming Your Sex Life, the research on this procedure is contradictory. The Berman sisters note that while some studies claim that hysterectomies can improve your sex life, others have shown negative results. These include decreased vaginal lubrication and a loss of genital sensation, even if the surgery spares your ovaries. The Bermans point out that having your cervix removed and your nerves injured during surgery can severely compromise your blood flow, thereby setting the stage for SAD to impact your wellbeing.

 

2. Childbirth trauma: If suction or forceps causes vaginal tearing, you might find some nerve and vascular damage to your vagina. This leads to problems with sensation in your vagina and clitoris. If you’re breast-feeding, it’s not uncommon to experience decreased lubrication due to your body’s elevated level of the hormone prolactin.

 

3. Blood flow diseases: If you have coronory heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, any one of these diseases can get in the way of the blood flow to your pelvic region and, as a result, reduce your ability to become aroused. You may think that high-blood-pressure medications, such as beta-blockers, can help to address this issue; but you’d be wrong; weirdly and ironically enough, beta-blockers can actually cause sexual dysfunction. Because of this, the Bermans asserts, calcium channel blockers have become more popular as a treatment for heart disease, as they have less of an impact on your sexual function. If you have a blood flow disease and are experiencing loss of sexual function, calcium channel blockers may be a good option for you, so speak to your GP.

 

4. Hormonal changes: As a woman, there are many things in life that can influence the balance of your hormones. Fluctuations can be instigated by the onset of menopause, childbirth or medications. If you take progestin-dominant birth control pills, for example, you might find that you experience a loss of libido and vaginal dryness. This latter side-effect is also a common complaint of women who take medications to prevent recurrence of breast cancer, such as Tamoxifen. However, the biggest and most dramatic change will be from a drop in oestrogen, which occurs when you go through menopause. With less oestrogen in your system, your vagina will lose lubrication, and you’ll also go through a number of other unpleasant symptoms. If you’re going through menopause, or any of the above causes of reduced blood flow, speak to your doctor about your options.

Categories: arousal, Beta Blockers, blood flow, blood pressure, calcium channel, hormonal changes, sex life, sexual arousal, sexual dysfunction, sexual function, sexual health

Are There Things That Gross Out a Woman During Sex?

New research has shown that when women are feeling sexual, they don’t really care at all about how dirty they get, in terms of physical bodily secretions. Sex can be a messy business, with the exchange of bodily fluids of various sorts, and women who are concerned about their wellness and wellbeing are usually also interested in being clean and hygienic at all times, so it may come as a surprise to realise that they are not actually turned off by the fact that sex is a physically messy experience.

It’s a surprising phenomenon, but we can see (due to the fact that procreation has continued to exist since the start of time!) that the messiness and perhaps perceived ‘ugliness’ of sexual contact is not necessarily offputting for women.

The new study took place in the Netherlands, and provided a possible answer for why women are not put off by the messy aspects of sex. The researchers found that sexual arousal may actually dull the part of the female brain that lets women feel ‘disgust’ or other similar emotions. This was explored by the researchers, who took on a unique study that blended porn with plastic bugs, to see if the sexual arousal of the participant in the study would lower their disgust feelings towards the bugs.

If you think about it, the appetite for sex is not a rational feeling – a man who may be perfectly happy to kiss the mouth of his female partner with passion, inserting his tongue into her mouth and so on, would probably be quite disgusted by the idea of using her toothbrush. Why is this? Each has the same hygiene implications. It can only be the case, then, that sexual arousal takes away the elements of disgust that could otherwise exist.

Categories: arousal, disgust, Fluids, messy, Sex, sexual, sexual arousal, Women

Study Finds Link Between Vaginismus and Feelings of Disgust

No one loves sexual health by-products (aka semen) but if you feel utterly disgusted by the gentleman juice, your wellbeing may be at risk to an underlying condition; vaginismus. According to a recent study, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, disgust may play a role in your sexual wellness, causing a dysfunction that often renders penetration impossible. The results of the research may reveal a psychological component to physical sexual complaints.

 

If you have a disorder known as vaginismus, you are more likely than healthy women or women who have other sexual disorders to feel disgust in response to sexual by-products. When you have vaginismus, this means that your pelvic muscles involuntarily contract when penetrated, often preventing penis-in-vagina intercourse entirely. The National Institutes of Health note that the condition isn’t common, but your involuntary disgust at things of a sexual nature could cause this contraction as a defence mechanism. Mark van Overveld, a postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam, explains, ‘In this sense, disgust acts as an emotional equivalent to a cold shower.’

 

Let’s be honest, sex is – objectively speaking, a pretty disgusting pastime. The contact between body parts and the bodily fluids involved are often thought to be gross or even taboo. Van Overveld comments, ‘From that perspective, it is actually quite surprising that people even manage to engage in the act of sexual intercourse at all.’ It’s not easy to control such a strong emotion as disgust, as anyone who has ever vomited at the sight of someone else vomiting can attest. Until now, researchers haven’t really looked into the emotion as relates to sex, preferring instead the use of questionnaires that focus on more general questions, like how grossed out you’d be by eating soup that had been stirred by a flyswatter.

 

For this study, however, a sex-specific questionnaire was given to 762 students and university employees, and then 39 women with lifelong vaginismus, 45 women with dyspareunia, or pain during sexual intercourse, and 28 men with erectile dysfunction. The questionnaire focused on such hypotheticals as how disgusting it would be to handle someone else’s, or your own, sexual fluids. The questionnaire answers showed that the women with vaginismus were the most likely to report disgust for sexually contaminated items, suggesting that disgust has a part to play in either the origin or the continuation of the disorder.

 

Still, while there’s a link between disgust and vaginismus, what’s harder to discern is exactly how the emotion plays into the dysfunction. van Overveld surmises that either the disgust comes first and triggers the pelvic muscle clampdown, or else initial sexual problems perhaps contribute to disgust with the process. The key thing to take away is that disgust is an important defence mechanism, and so the tightening of the pelvic muscles could be a similar reflex to when you vomit at the sight of something disgusting. Previous research has pointed to the fact that disgust and arousal work in opposition to each other, with arousal dampening disgust and vice versa. In this study, even healthy women who had more feelings of disgust also had fewer feelings of sexual arousal.

 

If you have vaginismus, you shouldn’t now blame yourself or your feelings for your condition. van Overveld is quick to warn that disgust is not easy to control, and women with vaginismus have been shown in previous research to have normal sex drives. van Overveld commented, ‘An important next step would be to look at the relationship between disgust and sexual arousal more closely. Can sexual intercourse indeed perhaps be interpreted as a delicate balance between disgust on the one hand and a state of sexual arousal on the other? If so, can we help women with lifelong vaginismus to shift this balance?’

Categories: defence mechanism, disgust, healthy women, lifelong vaginismus, pelvic muscles, previous research, Research, sexual arousal, sexual intercourse, vaginismus, van overveld