Scared of my own vulva (let alone vagina)?

[icingsugar]

Hi. I'm an eighteen year old cis girl, a virgin who's never used a tampon, and I wouldn't describe myself as a very sexual person. (Anyone that knows me wouldn't, at least.) I'm not very good at making myself aroused - there'll just be a few days every few weeks or so (like today) where unless I'm actively doing something else, all I feel is horny. It's almost as if I'm going into heat or something? The sexual frustration is immense because I'm single, can't easily go out and find someone to hook up with, and most of all, am kind of terrified of doing anything with what's between my legs.

All the sex-positive, "love your body" stuff that I've seen around Tumblr and other parts of the internet (as well as having friends that are mature, laidback and frank about discussing sex and masturbation) has made me really want to familiarise myself with my own downstairs. I've read posts and had advice on how to do it, but I've had trouble being able to locate anything because:
1) I have a big butt and even bigger thighs
2) My inner labia are completely hidden behind my outer labia (from the POV of my hand mirror it just looks like a slit enveloped by pubic hair)
3) I don't shave my pubic hair; every now and then I take a pair of nail scissors to the seriously wild parts, and (TMI sorry) there's always some hair spiralling in getting caught between the outer labia
Not only that, but I get seriously anxious whenever I attempt anything like that. I attempted it today (I can't remember the last time I gave it a shot, it would've been months ago) and for the most part I managed to tell myself to keep my cool, but as I stretched my legs further and further apart and tried to pull apart my outer labia with my hands, I noticed that I was feeling nervous. My forehead was sweating, my legs were getting trembly, and I started to feel light-headed. Plus whenever my finger accidentally landed on something (probably inner labia), I could feel that the tissue was sensitive and the contact was really unwelcome.

When I recognised that I was feeling anxious, I decided to stop there and put my underwear back on, and almost instantly I started feeling even more anxious and upset, and I almost started to cry. I tend to set high standards and be hard on myself when I don't meet them, so I'm so frustrated in general whenever I fail to experience the autosexual awakening that all my cool, mature friends seem to have achieved ages ago. I'm envious of all the orgasms they've had and the familiarity they have with their own junk (more so with friends with dicks, but I've also got some vagina-having friends who are totally on top of their masturbation game) and whenever I think of how much of a naive child I still feel like compared to them I just want to burst into tears. It seems like there's so much I'm missing out on.

I even bought a vibrator a week or two ago - not sure if it's technically a bullet vibe, it's sort of made to match the shape of the vulva and the curve of your palm - and I've tried using it a couple of times. Most of those times I wasn't aroused, just curious, so it didn't have a pleasant or unpleasant affect on me, but one time I was actually feeling turned on and it still didn't feel like I was getting anywhere near coming. Granted, I didn't try for long - I've read that it takes some peeps with vaginas 25 minutes to get off, and I only persevered for about 3 minutes max - but that was also because I started feeling frustrated that it wasn't immediately working and anxious that I might never be able to come.

For some background info, I haven't suffered any sexual trauma or anything that would make it clear to me why I get so anxious about my bits. Sex was never discussed in my house when I was growing up, but my parents didn't tell us it was a sin or anything and I got decent enough sex education in upper primary school and high school. I've got some way of masturbating, similar to humping a pillow, but it tires my legs out pretty quickly and I know it won't get me anywhere near to climax - it's more useful in getting rid of a little bit of arousal if I need to go concentrate on something properly.

So, basically, I want to be able to achieve orgasm and be familiar with my junk. I've thought maybe that getting an experienced romantic partner would fix this problem for me, because if I was open with them about my nervousness maybe they'd be able to use some magical technique that I hadn't thought of yet. And I know that giving myself more time to get aroused and actually acquiring some goddamn lube would help me out in the masturbation area. BUT after thinking about everything a lot, I've realised that the very first thing I need to do is overcome my anxiety about both my genitals and my lack of experience. Although I know I shouldn't be so hard on myself about it, I still want to ask advice on how I can deal with it. I'd like to not want to cry every time I think about how "immature" and "childlike" I am, and I'd like to not feel anxious about touching myself even non-sexually.

I'm sorry this is so long, and so TMI, for a first post. But if anyone has any advice for me I'd really love to hear it. Thank you so much

- Icing

[Heather]

Welcome to the boards, icingsugar.

I feel like there are some pieces of information I'm missing that might give me (and maybe you) a better idea of what's going on, and thus, avenues to best help. Mind answering a few extra questions for me?

If not:
• Do YOU have any sense of where this fear is coming from? Have you always felt this way, even as a child?
• Do you feel like the body-positive stuff you're reading is helpful to you right now, or that it feels like pressure?
• When you get scared, do you have any sense of what you are feeling scared will happen? Like, are you afraid of injuring yourself, or doing something "bad," or...?
• Can you fill me in on why this feels like it's related to maturity or adulthood for you? I ask that because little kids pretty much ALWAYS have their hands up in their genitals, so I feel a little lost with that association.

[icingsugar]

Hi Heather, and wow, thank you for replying so quickly!

- I'm not sure where the fear is coming from. Sometimes when I was younger (before my first period) I used to get this weird irrational fear that when I was going to the bathroom, something would shoot up from the toilet bowl and stab me in the vagina, but I have no idea where that came from either. It never bothered me much, I was able to clear my head of it pretty easily & quickly.
I don't think that when I was learning about periods and masturbation and stuff I felt the need to get to know my vagina etc. - I think I just went "Okay, pads work fine for me" and "Sure, the pillow-humping-type thing will do for now" and didn't question it until I was a lot older.

- It does sometimes feel like pressure, come to think of it. Reading the "love yourself! get to know your body! everyone should get the opportunity to be comfortable with their anatomy!" stuff makes me glad because I'm happy that a message like that is being spread to those who hadn't considered it otherwise, but I guess I don't often think about applying the same message to myself. And when I do, I start to feel pressured/worried because I haven't got to know my body yet and all the body-positive stuff makes me think 'it's easy' and 'you should do this' and 'why haven't you done this yet?'

- I guess I'm afraid of injuring myself, maybe? It's definitely not a fear of doing something "bad" - maybe something I'm not entirely allowed to do, but I'll say more about that in a sec.
Going out on a limb here - I haven't thought about the reasons a lot but they feel right as I'm typing them now - I feel weird thinking of any internal stuff (anything further in than the labia minora) being exposed to the open air, probably because it's not usually visible and I don't usually think about it being there. And I'm afraid of putting anything up there I think because I can't imagine anything going up there and feeling natural. You know when you rub two dry fingers against one another and sometimes you're really aware of the little ridges on your fingertips? I feel like even that amount of texture would feel foreign and weird and kind of wrong. (I can't believe that lube never occurred to me before today, by the way. I feel like that would help me out here.)

- It feels like it's related to maturity because I never experimented in the "hands up genitals" way when I was a kid. I remember that I first did the rocking-back-and-forth humping thing out of boredom when I was like five years old, and I just stuck with that I guess.
Also, I've always felt kind of a conflict when it comes to what I know and what I feel: like, in high school, when people in my year started having sex, I knew that this was normal and something that a lot of teenagers do, but I felt like it was bizarre because we were all 'still kids' and 'sex is a thing that adults do.' Despite the all-encompassing body-positive messages surrounding me, I still have trouble thinking of myself as somebody who's allowed to be a mature, adult, sexual person. I know sex and masturbation isn't bad, and I know in general I deserve to be able to make myself feel good. I just never feel like I'm much of a grown-up.
I guess I've got this whole mindset about your first orgasm and first time having sex being sort of (optional) rites of passage, and new levels of learning to love your body, and if I haven't unlocked those things yet I'm still a child in some ways and I haven't had the experiences that some friends (people I look up to) have. Like (and this is really dumb, sorry) I can't join them in the cool experienced people club. And a part of my brain is telling me "you haven't learnt how to do these things because you're not mature enough. You're terrible for not being mature enough, you should really be mature enough by now." It's not much fun

[Sam W]

Hi icingsugar,

Hope you don't mind my jumping in. I think you've hit upon something that's tricky about body positive (and sex positive messages). When they're not applied carefully, it can feel like people are saying "this is so easy! This is so fun! Everyone should do this!" When, in fact, we all move at different paces when it comes to our bodies and to sex. So, maybe it would help to, when you hear messages like that and it starts to feel pressure-y, to mentally add in "if you're ready/when I'm comfortable."

Too, it can be hard to sort out our feelings around stuff like this because even if we are receiving a lot of positive messages, the negative ones can still creep in. And that can create a weird sort of current of negativity around our bodies. It can also help to read writings by people who are not body negative, but who address more directly that fact that being body positive is hard for some people, and that it's not always as simple as it is made out to be.

I think it might also help to start thinking about what other ways you could define adulthood or maturity other than sex (not that sex isn't a pretty normal metric people use, but as you've noticed, it's a flawed metric). That way, when your brain gets on the "no orgasm=no maturity" train, you have something to counter with. This might take some time, but practicing could be worthwhile.

Yep, lube might help in the masturbation situation just because it really does make touching you genitals more comfortable. So, if you want to experiment with it, that's totally something you can do.

I also want to check, are your genitals the only place where anxieties like you're describing pop up, or do you find similar worries appearing in other parts of your life?

[icingsugar]

Hi Sam, thank you so much, those are some really great things to start thinking about.

I do get anxious in other parts of my life, mostly about my relationships to other people and the way I feel. When I have a crush on someone, I guard my feelings, and whenever I start to be in a situation where I'm alone with them or there's a chance they could reciprocate, I panic and bring other friends into the situation so I'm not alone and not at risk of spilling my feelings or having to handle a situation I'm new to. Sometimes I notice myself getting anxious about stuff (like being nervous about a crush not replying to a text, or irrationally worrying that a friend dislikes me, or overthinking/overanalysing a situation) and I heavily criticise myself for it because I know there's no need to feel anxious. So I end up being anxious about being anxious, and sometimes it just piles up.

I also get anxious about not being as experienced/knowledgeable/clever as some of my friends - they gently tease me for being in the 'smart nerd classes', which would be fine but then in common sense stuff or puzzles I'm often stumped while they get it instantly. (Plus they've watched all the cool nerdy TV shows, and some of them just don't interest me but I always feel like I'm not enough of a 'real nerd' because I haven't seen them.)
And I get anxious about being too sheltered or babyish, because my life's been pretty easy so far, and in high school my friends and I didn't do anything wild. And like I said before, when I call myself out on that anxiety, it's never "It's okay, they wouldn't think less of you for any of that, you don't need to feel anxious about that" that I tell myself, it's "Oh my god, how silly is that, worrying that you're not cool enough? Grow up already, that's ridiculous. Why does that even matter to you?"

I'm generally seen as a person who's always willing to help out and support others, and I feel anxious when I can't live up to that. Like when a friend asks me about a revision thing for their exam and I don't have the time to find my old notes about it and I worry that they'll fail or somehow be at a disadvantage because I couldn't immediately help them out this particular time. So I guess the same thoughts apply here. 'How can I be a supportive helpful friend about [x] if I can't give advice on the subject because I can't even do [x] myself?'

Bleh. Lots of anxiety. There's always more to say about it than I think there will be.

[Sam W]

Okay, so something I am going to suggest is, if you haven't done so, finding someone (like a counselor) to talk to about a lot of that anxiety. They can give you some ideas and techniques for responding the anxiety spiral (I know that spiral, and man is it no fun). You might find that, after awhile, that helps cut down on some of the anxiety you're feeling.

Speaking as a fellow nerd, and person who did not have wild high school years, I think two things might be helpful. One is to apply the same types of thinking that are common to, say, sex positive circles, to other parts of your life. So, when thinking about your high school years compared to someone elses', remember that you did what made you happy/comfortable, and they did something that made them feel the same way. Neither of you chose the "better" way, and both ways are equally valid. They're just based upon different needs and preferences. It can also help to focus on doing fun/new things in your life now, as a way to counter the feeling of not having done much. Of course, our ability to do stuff is limited by things like location, time, and money, but there's usually a way for us to try something new, something that we've always been curious about.

The other thing that might help is to not search for subtext in your interactions with friends. So, if they act like they like you, seem to enjoy your company, invite you to spend time with them, treat that as a sign of what it most likely is: they like you and respect you. A missed text is likely someone busy, not someone who is angry, and so on. Trust the people you know to let you know if there's an issue or concern and that they won' make you magically intuit when something is wrong. This can be tricky at first, but it might help head off some of the stress you're feeling.

[Keda]

In regard to the body positivity stuff, I wonder if it might be helpful to hunt around for some ace (asexual) social media too? Whatever your sexuality, I can imagine that people in the ace community might have a bit more of the attitude you're trying to get into, of "Yes, sex is great and wonderful and good for those who want it, but it's also okay not to be doing sexual things", and getting some of that mixed in with your current body positivity input might help take the pressure off a bit.

Also, in regards to masturbation - I would try not to think about it in terms of the goal being orgasm. Orgasms are great, and they're definitely something you can experience if you want. But it can take some time to work out what gets you off, especially when you're just starting out, so I'd imagine it's common for people to need some practise in that area - especially for vagina-havers, as it seems the consensus is that we're very unpredictable and varied in what works for us. Plus, if you're going into masturbation with a head full of "How long is this gonna take?" "What if it doesn't happen?" and so on, you're probably not going to be relaxed and having fun, and that is, after all, the point of masturbation for the majority of people. So instead, I would focus on just finding something that feels nice, a sensation that you enjoy, and focusing on that, or on trying to find other such sensations if that's what you feel like doing - 'cause then, if you're having fun, it doesn't really matter whether or not you orgasm this time round; it's not wasted time either way, you know?