All About That Bass singer Meghan Trainor was recently slammed online after openly discussing her sex life with Spy Kids actor Daryl Sabara on the Workin’ On It podcast last week.
During the episode, she talked about having vaginismus, a psychosexual condition which causes involuntary contractions in the vagina and can lead to pain during penetrative sex.
“Wow, good for him,” writes one commenter on Twitter. “You dropped this, king,” writes another, punctuating with a crown emoji, right next to “The way I would be so proud of this,” from another social media user.
You wouldn’t think these were comments beneath a post about a celebrity’s medical condition, but they are.
Vaginismus is “the body’s automatic reaction to the fear of some or all types of vaginal penetration,” according to the NHS.
Whenever penetration is attempted, the vaginal muscles tighten up on their own, which can mean struggling to insert penis/fingers/toys, and those experiencing it don’t have any control over it.
One in 10 women is confirmed to be impacted by the condition, but it’s thought to be much more than that as, like Trainor, many women assume it’s normal and don’t get their symptoms addressed.
The singer spoke about how intercourse with her husband, Spy Kids star Daryl Sabara, is “painful” – and that she doesn’t necessarily enjoy sex in the typical sense that others do.
“I was told I have something called vaginismus,” Trainor shared.
“I thought that every woman walking around was always in pain during and after sex. I was like, ‘Doc, are you telling me that I could have sex and not feel a single bit of pain?’
“[It’s got] to the point where I’m like, ‘Is it all in?’ and he’s like, ‘Just the tip.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ I don’t know how to fix that.”
Meghan Trainor speaking about her condition so candidly should be taken as a win for women who have or may have, the condition. It’s hard to identify, investigate and get medical support for reproductive and sexual health symptoms, and many people who suffer from it struggle with shame and feeling ‘broken’.
For a celebrity of her stature to speak about her experience with vaginismus so openly helps remove shame and stigma, encouraging more women to question the pain they experience in the bedroom. As someone who has vaginismus, I know first-hand how important this is.
Well, it would if that was the part of the interview anyone focused on. As tabloids wrote up the story, and the public took to social media to share their thoughts on the podcast, comments poured in over the presumed hugeness of Trainor’s husbands’ penis, with mostly male commenters rewarding him for her sexual struggles.
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“Take the win, Junie,” says one commenter. “she couldn’t fit her husband’s massive fat cock in her extra-shallow vagina,” writes another.
I’m not sure how long I’ve had vaginismus. I only know that as soon as I started (trying) to have penetrative sex as a teenager, the symptoms started showing up and causing problems for me. And as someone who knows these symptoms in and out, the reaction to Trainor’s comments feels all too familiar.
My symptoms first showed during secondary school when I had my first boyfriend, and he would take my inability to receive penetrative sex from him as a compliment. When I was struggling, sometimes failing to get sex started at all and experiencing huge bouts of pain afterwards, just like Trainor, he would assume it was all about his penis.
The more I struggled, the more his ego inflated. And has he inevitably told half of his friends, as schoolboys do, his social status somehow went up.
TMI does not even begin to describe it.
It was completely dehumanising, and so is the reaction to Trainor. Watching comments from grown adults parallel the ones I remember from school, after a celebrity has sincerely started an honest and important conversation about women’s pleasure, is abhorrent.
Away from the grotesque comments on her vagina (and her husband’s penis), Trainor has also been slut-shamed online for speaking about sex openly at all.
Page Six also reported on the story and removed any mention of Vaginismus and Trainor’s experience with it, instead opening the article with “No one wants to know about Junie’s junk,” and detailing the more sensational parts of her interview. Many other tabloids, of course, followed suit, with some added slut-shaming.
Soon everyone had forgotten that Trainor mentioned vaginismus at all, and she became subject to the same slut-shaming other famous women, such as Madonna, are cruelly subjected to whenever they speak about sex.
“Tacky, tacky, tacky….” one user tweeted, while another wrote, “being so hellbent on constantly oversharing intimate information to win cheap attention points is decimating any potential for women to actually *cultivate a mystique*.”
The idea that women don't deserve their fame because they made a sex tape is rooted in misogyny.
It’s troubling that, even post third-wave feminism and the sex positivity movement, Trainor is being slammed for simply speaking on her sex life generally. And her pain, which she was brave to speak so frankly about, is still taken as a story to be sensationalised as a win for her husband Daryl Sabara.
It’s not a win for Sabara, or any man, to have a female partner who suffers from painful sex. It doesn’t mean your penis is overwhelmingly huge. It doesn’t mean you’re so good at sex that she can’t take it anymore, and it doesn’t mean her vagina is “perfectly tight.”
75% of women will experience pain during sex at some point, according to the American College of Obstetricians, and being taken seriously by others is, unfortunately, often a woman’s only way out of it. That starts with empathy from their partners and peers, and is supported by those who hear stories of vaginal pain reacting kindly and sympathetically.
Anyone making cruel jokes about the tightness of Trainor’s vagina is only exposing their own lack of understanding of the female anatomy and about sex.
It’s thankfully unlikely, given her celebrity status, that Trainor will be severely impacted by the comments unfolding online. But those with vaginismus – or any kind of pain symptoms during sex – who are witnessing the reaction to Trainor’s story will likely be put off from speaking about it.
Individuals who interpret women’s pain as some kind of win just reinforce that fear. With so many women experiencing pain during intercourse, we owe it to them to do better when hearing a story like Trainor’s.
**If you are concerned about vaginismus, it's always recommended to book an appointment with your GP to discuss diagnosis and treatment. You can find your local GP here. **
Her talent has been questioned because it had the audacity to best theirs, or because she used it to call them out.
