Sex toy
From taboo to therapy for re-evaluating bodies, pleasure and self-awareness.
Chronic Pelvic Pain is a widespread yet little recognised condition that affects mostly women (but not only), and it includes pathologies as endometriosis, vulvodynia, and pudendal neuropathy. Only in Italy it affects millions of people, but very often it is underestimated. Obtaining a diagnosis can take years, during which symptoms are trivialized or attributed to psychological causes. Chronic Pelvic Pain is a persistent and invalidating pain that can compromise the quality of life, limiting movements, everyday activities, and personal relationships, including one’s sexual life. Treatments are often difficult to obtain and expensive, also beacuse some pathologies are not recognised by the public health system. Upon that, there is a strong cultural taboo, which make it difficult to discuss about it openly, contribting to isolation and misunderstanding.
What do sex toys have to do with this?
As Alessia, a physioterapist specialised in Chronic Pelvic Pain, explains: “From a rehabilitation point of view, the shape and typology of some sex toys make them especially useful for a deep treatment aimed at relaxing the interested muscles, because they allow to reach internal points that cannot be reached manually. Vibrators also allow, when well tolerated, to use a customizable vibration mode, as the muscle of each person can be relaxed differently”. The choice of using sex toys in pelvic floor rehabilitation, however, does not come only from anatomic considerations: they are devices allowing for autonomy, thus “being especially useful for all those patients who want to take care of themselves without a partner, heightening the awareness about their own bodies and speeding up the rehabilitation process”. It is also a precise choice of therapeutic approach, because “usually, medical instruments and devices are suggested, but they make people feel “ill”, closing the door on trying out things autonomously, and this especially affect younger people” Alessia explains. “A different device assumes a different approach, which in this case addresses the patients’ well-being and is friendly and ludic, as sex toys can be used for recreation in everyday life and not only in rehabilitation”.