OUCH! PAINFUL SEX
Painful sex? You’re not alone, not even a little bit. Pain with sex is common; studies show that almost 75 percent of women have experienced it. It's even got its own specific medical term: dyspareunia, which covers every kind of genital or pelvic pain about sexual experiences, with or without penetration and before or after the experience.
In contrast to diagnosis for male sexual pain or dysfunction (which is typically more easily diagnosed partly due to a long history of gender bias— in the world— but specifically in medical education), female sexual dysfunction often dismissed or mislabeled because it depends on the individual’s perspective on their symptoms. For instance, female sexual dysfunction is an umbrella term that covers symptoms like pain during sex, low libido, and difficulty with arousal or orgasm.
There are many things that can influence how sex feels: pelvic floor muscles, libido levels, sleep levels, trauma, inadequate foreplay and lubrication, breast-feeding (which lowers estrogen), postpartum recovery, negative feelings about the partner, infection, hormonal birth control (which can affect the bodies’ #estrogen and #testosterone levels, causing changes in the vaginal tissues) and other life factors. There can also be fairly serious underlying clinical causes that can usually be resolved with holistic or pharmaceutical treatments.
Bottom line: you don’t have to suffer through painful sex, and you definitely don’t have to suffer alone. You deserve pleasurable sexual experiences