For Women Only: A Strategy to Increase Your Pleasure Receiving Genital Touching and Oral Sex

How do you feel about the way your vulva looks?  If you are less than comfortable with it, please read on.

Women with poor genital self-image tend  to experience sexual dysfunction, and I imagine that  feeling inhibited about genitals often increases a woman’s  inability to enjoy  receiving oral sex.  As a female sex therapist, this issue seems critical to me, because other research has found that  the ability to enjoy receiving oral sex is correlated with positive feelings toward sexuality.

One piece of  hard evidence for the relationship between concern  about how one’s genitals look and sexual  hangups   is a recent study in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy***, where  scientists  studied 1619 women who had had sex the four previous weeks.  They proved it!  They found that concerns with genital appearance were distracting and, in turn, women with genital appearance concerns experienced less sexual pleasure.

      I have seen this phenomenon  over and over in the women who come to see me.

   One of my patients, Anne,  had I especially intense feelings of shame about her vulva. This prevented her from having any pleasure with gentle genital  touch, and for her,  oral sex was completely off the table.

     Toward the end of one  session,  I suggested that Anne spend the next week looking at pictures of vulvas on the internet.  I was sure that  this kind of exposure therapy would be effective.  I was right. It worked wonders.

Anne came back in to see me, reporting that she had been much more comfortable with her partner’s giving her genital touch after our  experiment.    She was amazed.  She reported, “I looked at a lot of different pictures.  This was so helpful because I found that all vulvas  are not the same.  The pictures ran the gamut of different sizes and shapes.  When I looked at all the pictures, it neutralized my inhibition.  I must have looked at 100 vulvas,  all sorts.  I really couldn’t believe how different every one looked. It was shocking to me. 

She was so happy that her ability to enjoy herself was improved, and she vowed that she will keep working on herself until she was willing to try receiving oral sex.

Do you want to try this yourself?  If you  Google  Mamamia.com  vulvas, you will come up with a website that has photos of 50 ordinary women’s vulvas.  

***Vigil KE, de Jong DC, Poovey KN. Roles of Genital Self-Image, Distraction, and Anxiety in Women's Sexual Pleasure: A Preregistered Study. J Sex Marital Ther. 2021;47(4):325-340. doi: 10.1080/0092623X.2021.1874581. Epub 2021 Jan 25. PMID: 33492188.