“Get ready for some embarrassing/personal stuff. First off, I am single and want to be that way. I do not want to have sex outside of marriage. Second, I cannot feel my vagina. Third, I have been really horny lately. And, although my religion forbids it, I have been trying to masturbate a lot. Without any sensation “down there”, I really do not get any pleasure out of it. Basically I have a lot of sexual tension but no healthy way of releasing it. Do you have any recommendations? How can I make my masturbation more enjoyable?”
There’s so much talk about sex in the media but it’s still difficult for us to talk honestly with one another about sexuality, particularly when we’re feeling stuck or frustrated. Reaching out in this email was no small thing and I appreciate you doing it.
I want to offer some thoughts about your email and at the bottom you’ll find more concrete suggestions. As you are reading keep in mind that we don’t know each other, so some of what I’m saying may not fit for you. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you! Only that I’m speaking generally, and the truth is that what sexuality looks and feels like is different for each of us.
Let’s start with the un-enjoyable masturbation. It can be easy to think that if you aren’t enjoying masturbation you aren’t “doing it” properly, or there’s something wrong with your body. While it is possible that the problem is one of technique, it’s more common that what gets in the way of our pleasure has to do with our thoughts and feelings, and not our bodies alone.
Of course we can’t completely separate our thoughts and feelings from our bodies. This is often the muddy place we get stuck.
So, for example, you mentioned that your religion forbids masturbation. If you grew up hearing negative messages not just about masturbation and sexuality but about your body in general, it is hard not to have those messages come up when you’re exploring your sexual body and trying to feel pleasure. Even if you are touching all the “right” places in all the “right” ways, if at some level you feel like what you’re doing is wrong or dirty or that you aren’t worthy of feeling pleasure, that can get in the way of you physically feeling pleasure, no matter what kind of stimulation you create.
Another example of how our thoughts and feelings about our bodies can get in the way of us feeling pleasure is the experience of internalized ableism. This is a fancy term that in part refers to the ways that our society values some bodies and lives more than others. Whether or not you identify as disabled, or a person living with a disability, if you move through the world and are read or treated as disabled, you likely know this means that people don’t value you or your body the way they do others.
Even when we “celebrate” disability, it’s always about what your body can do, how it can be more like a non-disabled body. These aren’t just attitudes, they are ingrained in our culture and society and they can make it so hard to figure out how you want to be sexual when everyone and everything around you says you can’t be sexual at all.
There’s no one way to start to challenge this for yourself. It helps just to recognize it. To see that the way we feel about our bodies isn’t just some internal thing, but it’s the result of the world we live in. And when we begin to see it happening we can slowly start to figure out how to resist the impact of all that negativity on our own sexuality.
Before I move to concrete suggestions I want to respond to your comment that you can’t feel your vagina. I’m not sure what your experience was with rehabilitation after your accident but I want to share with you what I’ve heard from friends and many others I’ve spoken with over the years.
I’ve heard from many people who, like you, had a spinal cord injury, and who were told they would never be able to do X, Y, and Z, they won’t feel this or that, etc… Most people I know have found that those guidelines may be true in general, but there is usually some grey area, and what it means for them in particular is something else. People have a range of sensitivity from no sensitivity at all to mild to intense. Some people are told they will never have an orgasm and then they find they can.
I’m not saying this to suggest that you’ll experience some radical change in your body, or even to say that it would be better if your body could do X, Y, or Z. We can all feel sexual pleasure and the path to that is different for each of us.
I mention it because especially when it comes to sexual experience, often there is a difference between what medicine and doctors tell us about our bodies and what our bodies actually feel like.
So when you say you can’t feel your vagina it makes me want to ask more questions. You have no feeling inside your vagina? You have no feeling outside or around your vagina (which is a part of the body we call the vulva, the part that’s outside). Do you have any external clitoral sensation?
Also, are you talking about direct sensation, or about feeling in general. There’s sensation that comes through the stimulation of nerve endings by touch, but there’s also feeling that is emotional and psychological.
I’ll share an example from a different context. Some people who weren’t born with a penis enjoy the experience of wearing a dildo around their waist (called a strap on) and having their partner perform oral sex on them with the dildo. There are no nerve endings in the dildo, so from one perspective they can’t “feel” the dildo, but many people talk about the pleasure felt from being on the receiving end of this. In part it might be that the dildo itself is providing stimulation, but there’s also a pleasure from watching and from the energy that comes with the intent to give pleasure. This is something that can happen when it’s us giving ourselves pleasure as well.
It’s also possible to feel something in one part of your body through having a different part of your body stimulated.
So there are many possibilities. It may be that in fact your vagina isn’t a body part that you want to be involved in your pleasure, which is fine too. But I share all this to make sure you know that our bodies and the relationship between physical stimulation and pleasure is much more complicated than what one usually learns from a text book or a medical example.
It’s also worth knowing that the vagina is not a very sensitive area for most people. There are not a lot of nerve endings in the vagina, so even though people talk about penile-vaginal intercourse as being the climax of “real sex” it actually isn’t a very easy way for most women to feel a lot of sexual pleasure or to have an orgasm.
We do think about sexuality as being focused on the genitals but sexuality and sexual pleasure is something we feel in our whole body and our whole body has potential for pleasure. The thing we each have to do for ourselves is explore.
Which brings me to some recommendations of how to try and shake things up a bit.
Pay Attention To Self Talk
There isn’t an easy fix to this, but you may want to pay attention to the thoughts you have and how you feel when you are masturbating. Do you find yourself getting distracted by thoughts and feelings? Do you find that you want to just get it over with? Does it feel like something you have to rush or hide? Of course there may be practical reasons for feeling this way (if you don’t have enough privacy, for example) but sometimes it comes from those early messages we received which can really stick with us.
If you’re comfortable touching yourself and want to explore your sexual potential, it’s good to start to explore your body from scratch, without thinking about some parts as sexual and other parts are not sexual. What you want to do is figure out where it feels good and where it doesn’t. And you may find that stimulating different parts evokes different erotic thoughts and feelings.
Expand Your Creative And Visual Sexual Horizons
One of the things that’s great about masturbation is the way it can allow us to explore our own desires and fantasies with less of a fear of judgement or shame about it (since there’s no pressure to share it with anyone). But our fantasies don’t always come easy, you have to give them space to grow. You might want to learn a bit more about sexual fantasies.
One thing that can be helpful for some people is to find representations of disabled bodies that are sexual and beautiful. It’s rare to find this in mainstream media or pornography, but there are more and more people who are making disabled culture who are dealing with sex.
Internalizing Shame And Ableism
It’s also important to give yourself space to think about the place of sexual shame and internalized ableism in your own life. These can be painful thoughts to explore, and in an ideal world you’d have a friend or counselor you trust who you can talk to about this stuff. There’s no quick fix here, but beginning to think about what if any impact shame and internalized ableism is having on your life, both when you are wanting to masturbate but also just in daily life.
If you’re not sure what I mean by this but want to share, you’re welcome to email me back with some of your thoughts and we can email a bit about it as a way to start.
Explore More Options For Stimulation
Last, but certainly not least, it’s possible that part of why you aren’t feeling pleasure is that you need more stimulation or different stimulation than you get from your hand. Some people explore by using sex toys. There are many different kinds of sex toys, and different ways to adapt them. But for example vibrators provide a kind of strong and consistent stimulation no human can.
But before you try a vibrator you should know that vibrators can trigger autonomic dysreflexia. If AD is something you need to worry about, you probably already know about it. But they may not have mentioned that vibrators can be a trigger.
I know that’s a lot of information. I hope it doesn’t feel overwhelming and instead feels like proof that there’s lots of ways of putting together a sex life and exploring your sexuality.
