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Painful Sex Is More Common Than You Think. Is There a Fix?
Several new products are on the market. Whether they solve the underlying problem is an open question.
For the first decade of Emily Sauer’s sex life, pain felt like an unavoidable aspect of the pursuit of pleasure. During certain positions, she’d be struck with a deep pelvic pain, one that made it more difficult to get excited about sexual experimentation or truly let herself relax and get into the moment.
Sauer’s experience with sexual pain extended beyond her pelvis. “When I was having sex and it was painful, it wasn’t just a physical experience—it was also an emotional one,” she says. “I felt like I wasn’t just disappointing to myself, but also to my partner.” And because her pain intensified during periods of stress, that feeling of disappointment made her problem worse, fueling a cycle in which her stress about her pain intensified her pain during sex.
Although Sauer repeatedly tried to broach the topic of her pain at her annual gynecologist appointment, the conversations never led to a satisfying resolution. “I was generally rushed out the door without any advice or suggestions that were helpful,” she says. It was this reaction from health professionals that led her to view her pain as a personal issue, “and not one that a doctor found worth solving,” she says.
Painful sex is a common condition: According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, three out of four women experience pain during sex over the course of their lifetime. While some of that pain is fleeting and temporary — due, perhaps, to anatomical incompatibility or an overenthusiastic partner — many women experience pain during sex as a long-term problem or even as a chronic health condition. Different conditions, like vaginismus (an extreme tightness of the vaginal muscles), vulvodynia (pain around the vaginal opening), dyspareunia (pain during, before, or after intercourse), endometriosis (when tissue grows abnormally outside the uterus), fibroids, or even postpartum pain, can all make penetrative sex uncomfortable or excruciating.
Eventually, Sauer was diagnosed with deep dyspareunia, a term used to describe pain deep inside the pelvis that’s not due to an underlying…
