#AdviceHijack! My vagina says your boyfriend is repulsive
13 May, 2013 17 May, 2013 ~ Sarah Ditum	~ 10 Comments	
Well here is a problem, and here is maybe the worst imaginable response to it from Pamela Stephenson Connolly:
My boyfriend of three years has never actively looked at my vagina or shown the slightest interest in it other than the usual foreplay. He performs oral sex occasionally but always under the darkness of the duvet and has admitted he doesn’t find vaginas particularly attractive, joking that mine is especially repulsive. I feel hugely hurt and ashamed and his behaviour makes me consider him childish. He jokes that bodily fluids are disgusting and always washes after sex. I feel self-conscious and unattractive and worry that we’ll never enjoy the explorative sex life I’ve had with previous partners.
Besides biological factors, each person’s sexuality is created and influenced by early experiences: family attitudes to sex, friends, religion, along with the messages about sex received from school, the media and society. Your boyfriend’s background may have made it difficult for him to be comfortable with his sexuality, or with your genitals. And like many men, he may have picked up a misleading notion of an ideal kind of vagina (“neat”, evenly proportioned and hairless) from media images. Help him receive some sex education to adjust his sexual attitudes by inviting him to join you either watching educational DVDs or reading a well-written book that accentuates sexual and physical diversity (for example Our Sexuality by Crooks and Baur). Discuss the material as equal adults, not teacher/pupil, and reward him when he demonstrates maturity.
Lady, I don’t know your boyfriend, but I know this much: my vagina finds him repulsive, and so should yours. He sounds like a heel of the first order. And not one of those fun, romantic heels who you stick with while you wheedle him into being not-a-sociopath, because under his heeldom there’s a shining and irresistible humanity which it is your job to coax out.
No, under your boyfriend’s heel-like exterior, there’s just more heel. Layer on layer of heel to be peeled back, revealing more heel until you reach the very core of him, his true essence – which is a teeny-tiny, minuscule and crusted heel. And the reason he isn’t the salvageable kind of heel is that salvageable heels are a made-up thing. They don’t exist.
The kind of man who tells you that he finds all vaginas – yours especially, lol! – disgusting is not the kind of man you want anywhere near your fanny. You are not going to be the possessor of the one very special vagina that can change his mind, and Jesus Christ, why would you want to be?
I’d consider it a bit out of order if a partner told me he found all chili con carnes revolting – especially mine (joke!) – then went to brush his teeth immediately after dinner. That would be a flat-out dumping offence, not for the difference in culinary opinion (hey, a man is allowed not to like chili! Or vaginas) but for the utter bastardly rudeness with which it was expressed.
If you are generous enough to give someone access to the squishiest, tenderest bits of your body, a little bit of politeness is the least you should expect. Someone who makes you feel “hurt and ashamed” is not your friend, and they’re definitely not your boyfriend.
But before you ditch him (maybe with a parting shot about how his perineum always made you nauseous? Think about it, at least), consider taking the opportunity to ask him this: why would a man who finds vaginas repulsive ever want to have sex with a woman? Women, after all, often include a vagina, so it would make sense for someone strongly vagina-averse to consider avoiding women.
The fact that he’s decided to have a relationship with you, and seems determined to make you share in his absurd disgust at your anatomy, makes me suspect that he doesn’t hate vaginas so much as he hates women. You have encountered an honest-to-goodness misogynist. Take a moment to marvel at his unpleasantness. Then kick him right out, and “reward him” by not vomiting on his nutsack.