Squirting stops me enjoying orgasms

[knifecat]

I’m a trans guy but I still have a vagina, and I don’t like having orgasms. It makes me feel so broken because I know I’m supposed to like them, but I squirt a lot and it makes them miserable. I can soak through two towels easily and can only let myself orgasm with at least one towel and one of those dog pee blankets. It happens every time I orgasm and always has, although luckily I don’t orgasm every time I masturbate. Mostly this is deliberate these days, although sometimes the sexual frustration gets so bad that I really want to get some relief. When that happens, I almost always end up crying afterwards because I didn’t enjoy it thanks to squirting. I just want to experience proper pleasure, but I can’t unless I can learn to stop squirting. I’ve never allowed myself to come even close to an orgasm during partnered sex. Often, I don’t allow myself to orgasm during masturbation either.

It’s not as if I don’t know how to handle the clean-up or anything. I do. I just genuinely don’t enjoy how it feels and how I feel afterwards. Orgasms supposed to feel good and I feel like a broken freak because they don’t to me, but I still want them.

I don’t want to learn to love squirting, especially not because other people like it. All the advice I’ve found seems to lean that way, but it feels the same to me as telling someone who doesn’t like or want anal sex that they just have to keep having it and learn to love it.

I wish I was asexual because then I would just choose to never have an orgasm again. But more than that, I wish I could have an orgasm without squirting.

Please help me stop. It happens literally every time - either I don’t orgasm or I squirt and make myself miserable.

[Heather]

Hey knifecat. I'm so sorry that feeling so miserable is what's brought you to the boards, but I'm glad you've found us and that you're here.

You know, we do have the idea that orgasm is supposed to feel good, but I will say, that's a cultural idea we have and it's arbitrary, rather than set in stone. In other words, that's a value judgement most of us place on it and have mostly decided by wide cultural consensus. In reality, orgasm doesn't have any "supposed to's", really, it is a response of the parasympatetic nervous system to stimulus, and often what we also call how that reaction feels for us. As someone with a seizure disorder, it hasn't escaped my attention that it's an awfully fine line between what happens to my body if and when I have a seizure and when I have an orgasm, and yet how I experience them, how I think about them, and how the world at large thinks about them is so different, and in a lot of ways, that's totally arbitrary.

I say all of that not to tell you that you don't have a right to enjoy orgasm when that's what you want, but just to give you some food for thought because sometimes this cultural given that orgasm is "supposed" to feel a certain way can really make it extra hard to deal with when it doesn't, especially if anything around that already has us feeling like we, our bodies or our sexualities don't fit or belong like everyone else's, or like we or they are broken. <3. I want to make sure too, that you hear that when it comes to ideas like "proper pleasure." Please know there really isn't any such thing. There's such diversity, and any idea there isn't is based on us internalizing false norms, you know?

I hear you. If you just hate this and how it feels, for whatever reason (including no reason) that you do, than trying to learn to love it, or even accept it, is going to be the last thing you want to try and may feel wholly unattainable. I'll be frank with you: it may be that -- sparing after bottom surgery, if that's a place you plan to eventually go -- you may need to try this, at least the acceptance place, now or eventually. But! There are also some other things you can try first, off the top of my head.

A caveat: I can't say whether these things will come with things that you also don't feel good about. They might. And some of them might involve things that create feelings of dysphoria for you, which obviously isn't good either. They might not be attainable. But I just want to put them out there for you so you know what your options are.

1) You can work on your pelvic floor muscles. It's possible that this might be about being so relaxed in your pelvic floor and its muscles that you're -- for your wants -- *too* relaxed. Working to tighten those muscles might help you out. You can get help with that from a pelvic floor therapist. Some are trans-friendly and literate, others will not be, and I can't speak for what might or might not be covered under the NHS here. But you could certainly call up your local trans clinic (I can help if you want) and ask them about access to a pelvic floor PT for this purpose. I should also mention that some of the exercises and how they feel may themselves cause the thing you are trying to avoid and other unpleasant emotional feelings. We also have a pelvic floor PT who writes for us I could ask about this behind the scenes if you'd like. She's wonderful. You also can look up information about working on your pelvic floor online, and there are books available, too.

2) You can do some experimenting to try and learn very different ways to masturbate and *reach* orgasm than you have been so far. It's understood that ejaculation in people with this kind of genital system comes primarily from the Skene's gland, so not only can you try and think about what I said about the pelvic floor above, but if you also try and take it easy around your urtethra and the vestibule (the area around it externally), and, inside the vagina, the area of the internal clitoris often called the G-spot, both areas that can engage the Skene's and other paraurethral glands, you might learn some ways to enjoy yourself genitally and get to orgasm without also ejaculating.

3) You can talk to a (I would absolutely say a trans) sex therapist about this. If you like, I also have someone in my networks who fits that bill who I could see if she might have a second to poke her nose in about this with some additional thoughts. Or, you can seek this person out yourself to work with. This is so clearly causing you serious distress. A sex therapist is someone who could work directly with you to help alleviate that distress, and who implicitly understands that you are entitled to a sexual life where you feel comfortable and able to experience pleasure without distress.

I'm happy to talk more about this from here.