Dear editors,
It was 11 p.m. on a Friday and I was panicking in the bathtub, waiting for my boyfriend to come home. I arranged my hair in an attempt at a seductive tousle and contorted my body so a sliver of skin peeked through the bubbles. I imagined him opening the door, seeing me, and being so overcome with desire that he would strip down right there and jump in the tub.
My production didn’t meet expectations: When he saw me, he laughed and said, “I’m gonna go smoke a joint.”
Was I really so ugly that he didn’t want me, even when I laid myself out for his taking? Since I was a child, body dysmorphia and obsessive-compulsive rumination over my looks stopped me from feeling loveable—except when a man wanted to have sex with me. Then, for a few minutes, I was desirable.
After several months of this cycle, one May morning I woke up with a pain I had never experienced before. It felt like an anvil in my pelvis, pulling down and out, making it unbearable to stand still and excruciating to urinate. I took ibuprofen and Tylenol and laid in bed with a heating pad for hours. I cried every day, unable to understand or stop the pain.
After a month, convinced that I had a urological issue, I checked in for a cystoscopy. Anesthetized from the waist down, I was once again laid out in front of a man—this time, a doctor who inserted a scope through my urethra, into my bladder while nurses pinned my arms down. But my bladder looked fine. Taking out the camera while nurses wiped the tears from my face, the doctor said, “Maybe it’s your pelvic floor?”
The pelvic floor is a web of muscles that acts as a bowl for the bladder, vagina, and uterus. It should expand and contract with ease, but trauma and stress can keep it permanently clenched. A chronically tense pelvic floor was causing my anguish.
For two months, I attended pelvic floor rehabilitation. Staring up at baby pink ceilings while a cadre of women relaxed my muscles, I realized how the past six months pushed my body to that state. The first time a therapist inserted her fingers into me for an internal massage, she asked, “Do you feel how tight this muscle is?” Yes, I thought—it was the same sensation I felt during sex.
The statement is not “It’s all about sex,” but “It’s all about validation.” People use different outlets to reassure themselves that their insecurities are just in their heads—drugs, alcohol, food, adrenaline. For me, it was sex. I realized I had been forcing myself to have sex with someone solely for mental validation, with no endogenous physical desire. In a way, I sexually assaulted myself and my body reacted by contracting my pelvic floor in an act of self defense.
Usually, the mind restrains the body’s sexual desires. In my case, the roles reversed. My body initiated an innate protective mechanism of severe pain to override my brain and make me listen to it. I am grateful for the pain my body put me through because it shocked me enough to change my behavior. I am learning that a man’s sexual desire for me is not the ultimate indicator that I can be loved, and that I must follow my bodily intelligence and honor my desire.
Now, it’s 11 p.m. on a Friday and I’m lying alone in my bed, finishing my pelvic floor stretches and internal massages, acknowledging that my recovery is a long term process of physiological and mental recalibration.
Resiliently,
Georgie Hallbach
Image: George Wesley Bellows, Nude Man and Woman, pen, brush, and black ink with crayon on paper, 1920 (The Art Institute of Chicago, US)