Online sexual health platform Motherbeing has played an enormous role in educating and empowering both men and women across the region, tapping into the lives of countless individuals in order to better understand and guide them through their issues. A recurrent condition, that has often gone undiagnosed and misunderstood, is vaginismus.

Vaginismus has been largely uncharted by women in the MENA region, especially since it is a sexual health issue rooted in psychosomatic origins which only affects women. The lack of information around it, however, does not at all impede its prevalence.

“It’s very difficult to get accurate statistics and numbers about its prevalence, but we know from four years of experience at Motherbeing that vaginismus is extremely common, due to the social and cultural factors that impact all women in Egypt,” Motherbeing founder and sexual health expert Nour Emam tells CairoScene. “Vaginismus is just one physical manifestation of that conditioning. It’s the body’s attempt at protecting you from something it perceives as threatening or unsafe.”

The pervasiveness of vaginismus in the Arab world calls for an intrinsic change in the way the women of the region are taught about sex. More urgently, it calls for the availability of therapeutic measures that would help treat the existent cases. This, unfortunately, has proven difficult because, as Emam explains, “Therapy still carries a heavy taboo in our culture, let alone sex therapy. On top of that, the number of sex therapists available in Egypt is very low, it’s still uncommon and is usually very expensive.”Besides that, the responsibility for treating vaginismus is often placed on the woman alone, when in reality, the treatment process is a collaborative effort between both partners in the relationship that would later benefit both of them, enabling them to engage more fully in their relationships. The necessity of learning about and treating this condition is illustrated in the sense of frustration, isolation and hopelessness it creates for women suffering from it.

“For years we have been receiving questions and requests from women all over the Arab world who are suffering from vaginismus and are in dire need of help,” Emam says. “Providing psychosexual therapy at our clinic could not meet the existent demand. We needed a quicker and more accessible solution that women could access from the comfort of their own homes.”

As a result, Motherbeing is launching an online program that would enable women, and their partners, to understand vaginismus, and work towards treating it. By teaching women everything they need to know about the condition, and supplying them with hands-on exercises prepared and nitpicked by various experts in the field - including a therapist, a pelvic floor physiotherapist and a somatic therapist - the program aims to, at the very least, set women on the path to treating their vaginismus.“We created this program because we wanted to help women overcome vaginismus from a multidisciplinary approach, where they work on their relationship with their partner, their nervous system, their pelvic floor, as well as their own relationship with their body and sexuality,” Emam says. “While not a replacement for therapy, this course offers a fantastic starting point for women who are overwhelmed and looking for answers.”

The program is to be launched at the beginning of February, with all necessary details being published on Motherbeing’s Instagram page at @thisismotherbeing around that time.