Meghan Trainor has opened up about having painful sex – but why are people congratulating her husband for her sexual struggles?

“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.

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*.”

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. **