Suzanne Noble explains vaginal atrophy, which affects up to 80% of menopausal and post-hysterectomy women, causing dryness and thinning that damages sexual pleasure. She criticizes doctors for dismissing it or defaulting to HRT, and outlines practical fixes: pessaries, lubricants, moisturizers, and sex toys. The key is talking openly with partners and clinicians.
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I want to talk about vaginal atrophy. It's a condition that is said to impact up to 80% of all women who are hormonally compromised and makes sex very painful. It can cause dryness, the vaginal walls thinning, it can cause your clitoris and other areas to become, to have atrophy, and it's It's, as I said, a condition that is so common that many women who are perimenopausal, menopausal, or younger women who may have had cancer and then had to have a hysterectomy may suffer from. I'm trying to imagine if I lived in a world where men, for instance, 80% of all men found sex painful, whether the medical establishment would frankly ignore their condition as they have this one. And on our podcast this week, we talked to a woman called Lindsay Hamilton about how this impacts women in all sorts of ways, because let's face it, if sex is painful, then it's going to impact on your relationship, on your ability or willingness or desire to be intimate with your partner or any, or, or anyone in that way and makes things very difficult. There are things that you can do about it. You can use pessaries, you can use lubricants, you can, you know, you can keep that area moist through even if you want using toys on yourself and that sort of thing. Apparently there is a Facebook group for women who struggle with this condition and there are things that can be done, but it is significant and I know that we talk a lot about pleasure pleasure on Sex Advice for Seniors, but I do think that when something like this impacts on such a significant size and proportion of women of a certain age, that we have to deal with it and we have to recognize it because it's really causing problems, like I said, in all sorts of ways. And I think if men— if 80% of all older men struggled with having sex and sex being painful. I suspect that doctors would kind of take an interest in this, but, you know, my experience of going to a doctor with any sort of female problem is that, frankly, they just want to chuck you on HRT, which is— which I didn't do, or they don't really know what to do with you because, let's face it, women are so ashamed of themselves when they're not able to be sexual, to feel great about sex, to feel the sort of pleasure that we're told that we should experience, that they just shut up and we just suffer in silence. But it's really important that we don't suffer in silence because if— unless we speak up about these issues that impact upon such a significant number of older women and younger women too, then I don't think anything's going to get done about it. If you're one of those women who might want to know about the Facebook group anything, then you can send me a— you, well, you can just put a comment in and I'll post the Facebook group in the comments. And, and of course, I think just generally we should speak up about this because it's important to share with your partner. If sex is painful for you, then he or she should know about it.
