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?’