December 10, 2010 | 11:30 AM |

More on Painful Sex And How To Treat It

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, listening to patients, pain during sex, women's health

MTV tackles the subject of pain during sex

After running a series of posts last month on pain during sex and how to treat it through a little-known type of physical therapy, we got a deluge of comments from women (and a couple of men) who had experienced painful intercourse (or watched their spouse suffer through it), and never knew that help was readily available.

Now, it seems, more women are starting to speak out. This week, Chloe Angyal wrote a piece for Salon on her years-long experience with sex that hurt. One problem, she writes, is that women are embarrassed to speak out about their pain, and so, the subject remains taboo, and not adequately studied.

“Despite the fact that we live in a sex-saturated culture, chronic pelvic pain remains widely unknown and poorly understood. Part of that stems from a lack of research. “The state of the research on vulvar and vaginal pain issues is pretty bleak,” says Dr. Debby Herbenick, associate director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion and co-author of this year’s study [that found one-third of women experience pain during sex].

Maybe things are changing. This week, MTV ran a segment (complete with pounding background percussion and a warning about the explicit material) called True Life: I Can’t Have Sex, with three twentysomething women, Tess, Tamara and Tali, disclosing their stories of painful sex and the toll it has taken on their lives.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →