On Having Trash Pussy

Or, “Can A Girl With Pelvic Floor Dysfunction and a Man With a Normal Libido Live Quietly Beside One Another?”

My mother instilled in me as soon as I knew what it was that sex is imperative to keeping love alive, that it is the bed rock of a relationship, that when the sex dies the relationship becomes more of an arrangement, a wholly different dynamic predicated mainly on logistics and convenience than on passion or spiritual entanglement. I was 17 when she told me most of my friend’s parents didn’t have sex anymore, that most of them hadn’t had sex in the decade and change since we’d all been alive. They slept next to each other and coordinated school drop-offs and chores and split bills down the middle, but they did not hold hands, they did not kiss, and they did not fuck. I was befuddled by this revelation. My father left when I was two for a woman he met on adultfriendfinder.com and my stepdad left when I was sixteen to ride a motorcycle across the country as he stared down the barrel of his sixtieth birthday. I know that my mom was loyal to them until they didn’t want it anymore, until they couldn’t keep leveraging the pros against her—and, in my darkest ideas, my— perceived cons. It felt unfair that my friend’s fathers could still show up for them and be around to shut off all the lights in the house at night and take the dog out and cook breakfast in the morning without pussy as a boon to make it all worth it. You mean to tell me that for some men the entire experience of being a father and a husband is fulfilling enough on its own? And even if it isn’t, that convenience and routine can keep a man around because it seems better to do the same old thing with no sex than to uproot your life in pursuit of fucking anew? That some men are resigned to being middle-aged and tired and domestic, and don’t have the energy to muster up a new identity as a free agent, to become someone who introduces himself not as a dad or an alimony payer but as simply a man, untethered? That it’s possible for a man to be sated by what is in front of him? I was raised by two men who started to love looking out the window so much that they forgot about the woman staring at the back of their heads wondering what they were so absorbed by out there. I didn’t understand her dogma about sex being the anchor to love and monogamy, because love and monogamy were carrying the cake with four hands at every birthday party before middle school and sex packed boxes into a U-Haul and changed your zip code. So why am I curled up with my heating pad the night after having sex with the man I’ve been “seeing” for three months (whom, I guess, if labels matter, is not my boyfriend and probably never really will be) worried sick that my pelvic floor pain and general anxiety induced low libido will keep me single and alone, unmarried and childless, for the rest of my life?

My biggest fear, really, in this whole world, is that having clinically obstinate pussy will lead me to having a will that says give it all to charity because my looks and personality were not enough to keep someone around in the face of rigid and infrequent sex. At best, sex makes me feel like a purse; like someone is putting their hand in the pocket of my jeans. At worst, sex feels like slapping a sunburn; like skinning my knee and having an ovary explode upon impact with the ground. I fear that I am too complicated, that life with me would be too particular and difficult, to make domestic monotony worth grinning and bearing it without the guarantee of regular and satisfying boning to make a hard week in Ivy Land a little worth it. I only like it face down, ass up, because from there my pelvic floor is open and relaxed enough to feel pleasure on a great day and no pain on a good one, and it also becomes a signifier for the performance of a dirtier and less repressed-seeming woman who I hit my pillow at night dreaming of being. I am in sex therapy, I am in pelvic floor physical therapy, I am cracking my legs open, and I am sucking dick even when my jaw gets tired or when I’d rather be talking about actresses or pop stars, I am really trying to ensure a future for myself as a kept woman, but I have a gnawing worry that it is all futile.

My girlfriends are cumming and moaning and slapping and choking and squirting and cheering all over town, and I am so proud of them, because every woman to some degree has fought for the freedom to be happy and satisfied, and it’s a prize well-deserved. But I feel like I am fighting really hard, that I have given up so much and tried so much, and my body and mind can’t even reward me with an orgasm at the end of it. I feel lonely. I know that asking someone to commit to me wholly would be unsatisfying, a potentially years-long edge and goon sesh with all the overstimulation and sensory overwhelm but no promise of a creampie at the end of the rainbow. It’s hard to explain to men how to accommodate me sexually, to get through to them how hard I am trying, how I often feel frozen under their weight or have to turn my mind to the Sunday morning cartoons to escape the feeling of my hair getting matted against a pillow as I’m rocked up and down by a thrusting anchor inside me. They all know more about sex than me, and speak as such everytime, and while I know this is true because the disparity in experience between me and every partner I’ve had is Grand Canyon wide, it still has an air of unjust cruelty that makes me think it’s not worth it to articulate in the first place. Who am I to be all Princess and the Pea when I should just be happy someone has invited me over? It’s ridiculous, really. Me fucking with the fantasy of a patient marriage is like Hillary fucking Bill to become president. Good luck, babe!

The pelvic floor therapist puts her fingers inside me and wiggles them around while asking me to describe the feeling. The ultrasound tech sticks a long plastic rod with a latex free condom over it into my vagina and takes pictures of the canal, swiveling it side to side. The gynecologist finds a ring of thick skin at the entrance of my vagina, a ring so large you can fit a thumb through it, and tells me that my hymen didn’t disappear all the way when I had sex for the first time. These things all feel like constant reminders that my wounds are not solely mental, that talk therapy is not squats and thrusts, is not implementing lube, is not a hymenectomy… My vagina feels like it is one thousand fucking years old. I have to get surgery soon where they will cut off and cauterize the hymenal ring and sew me back up. I can’t have sex for like two months afterward, which is fine for me, seeing as until three months ago I was celibate for almost two years, but it’s not really conducive to the situationship arrangement I’m in. If I don’t get great at sucking cock soon I’ll be on the street corner outside his apartment with a bindle slung over my shoulder and a worse-for-wear fedora sliding off my head.

Honestly, getting “cheated on” (can’t defy commitment with no real commitment, oh loopholes!) would probably be good for me… I’m addicted to a self-fulfilling prophecy and designing my life to include only narrative arcs that agree with every horrible thing I think about myself. Everyday I write the book, said Elvis Costello… It’d probably give me a few months worth of stand-up material seeing as no one wants to hear from the girl who is fucking well and smiling because she’s in love and doesn’t hear the other shoe hurtling toward her as it begins to drop. It’s always better when the other shoe drops, anyway. You can’t run away with one shoe! That’s quite hard! These problems will all be moot in a few months time when I’m yet again rendered involuntarily celibate by circumstance and my pelvic floor tightens a few notches from inactivity, but at that point it won’t matter and eventually I’ll repeat the cycle of being broken in until the man realizes it’s not worth the hassle and the hole closes up on it‘s own. Maybe the vaginal surgeon will let me keep my hymenal ring to wear since I won’t ever get a diamond like this.