When an employer began stripping away duties and relegated her to a tiny desk in the kitchen unit of the office, Barbara Stensland knew her recent multiple sclerosis diagnosis was behind it.
This was an attempt to push her out of the workplace.
Eventually, after repeated requests for accommodations went unmet – with the exception of some limited flexible working – Barbara was let go from her role as a community outreach worker, a job she loved.
Carrie and her husband Aiden have been married for nearly three decades. However, for the last 11 years, the couple has had to survive on a single income and constantly fight to make ends meet.
‘If I died, Aiden couldn’t afford to bury me,’ Carrie tells Metro matter of factly. ‘The only way we could get by without really, really suffering is if we got divorced.’
“Have you always been such a slut?” says my friend. “Yup,” I reply with a grin.
In my life, some people called me a sex addict and some – like my friend – have called me a slut. But years after this particular friend queried my supposed promiscuity, a therapist offered up a different descriptor: hypersexual.
“Your boobs are huge,” my partner quipped from the hotel bed as I wiggled into my swimming costume.
I laughed it off and jiggled them in his face before taking one last swim on our holiday in the Dominican Republic, trying to quiet that voice in the back of my head, whispering, “What if you are pregnant?”
“He expected sex; it was never just helping me. The more help I needed, the more I had to beg for it. The more bedbound I got, the worse it got. I had to give up my body to get basic, essential things done because that was the only thing I had to trade,” says Maisie*, a 39-year-old from Northamptonshire who became disabled following childhood cancer.
If you aren’t feeling sexual arousal like you used to, it might not be low libido, but it could be clitoral atrophy.
Clitoral atrophy is a pleasure-stealing—and vastly under-researched—condition looming over people with vaginas.
As a result of either poorly adapted education or ill-informed parents and teachers, disabled people are often sidelined or excluded entirely when it comes to sex education.
Perhaps assumed to be nonexistent, the community’s sexuality is taboo, and representation is typically limited to appearing in pornography as an objectifying fetish. A lack of inclusive sex education leaves disabled people vulnerable to exploitation as they grow into adults without information on sexual health, consent and pleasure.
Your pelvic floor matters, but it’s easy for certain conditions to go unresolved, and the idea of a too-tight vagina doesn’t often enter the conversation.
However, hypertonic pelvic floor dysfunction is more common than you’d think.
Most everyone vents their feelings. It’s part of being human. We verbalize emotions so we can better process them.
At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.
There’s a line, however, between letting off steam and callously dumping raw emotions on your loved ones. Unfortunately, the line is not always recognizable.
