What are the Symptoms of a Short Vagina?

The following are a number of true life symptom scenarios:

Deep thrusting on intercourse causes sharp pain like the cervix is getting bruised.

It feels like there’s a blockage up in there, like the penis hits something solid and hard. It causes soreness and aching.

There is pressure and dull aching discomfort on deep penetration. As long as he doesn’t insert too far it’s fine.

How Can Your Vagina Be Too Short?

The length of the vagina does not cause symptoms unless your partner is long enough to hit the top of the vagina on deep insertion. If enough pressure is applied by the penis, it places the uterosacral ligaments and overlying highly innervated peritoneum on stretch resulting in pain. Repetitive thrusts during intercourse tend to make the whole sexual episode unpleasant and more difficult to achieve orgasm. The pain tends to fade away fairly quickly after intercourse.

Women can have a shorter than average vagina from birth because of the normal variability in the development process. However, the most common reason is that the vaginal mucosa shrinks due to overall lower average estrogen levels, making the vagina shorter. The vaginal is very dependent on estrogen. When there is sufficient estrogen stimulation, the vagina is thick, very elastic, non-sensitive and produces natural lubricant. When estrogen effect wanes, the vagina becomes more “atrophic.” As the effect advances, the vaginal mucosa lining turns pale pink, then pale, and finally whitish with sub mucosal hemorrhage spots. The vagina becomes more dry, less elastic, and sensitive to touch. Under these conditions the vagina begins to shrink in length as well as diameter. Intercourse gradually becomes uncomfortable, if not painful and sometimes impossible. There are a number of reasons why the vagina can become under-estrogenized. Estrogen can wane in overall amounts with less ovarian production beginning in the mid-forties.   Lower systemic estrogen levels can occur due to increased life stress, excessive exercise, and being significantly under-weight. These are called hypothalamic factors because they down regulate the hormones secreted in the brain which control ovarian estrogen production. Some women on birth control pills can experience this problem. Although these women are getting flooded with high levels of estrogen, its synthetic estrogen known as ethinyl-estradiol which does not always effectively stimulate the natural or 17-beta estradiol receptors present in the vaginal mucosa. Changing pill types doesn’t help either because all the pills contain the same type of estrogen. Other women may have vaginal estrogen receptors that no longer function as well as they did in their youth. Smokers metabolize their estrogen faster. In many women, the effects of vaginal estrogen deprivation can occur after menopause or by stopping or reducing the dosage hormone replacement therapy.

Also, women can experience shortening of the vagina when the top of the vagina fuses together following surgery involving the vagina, radiation therapy, host vs. graft reaction, vaginal lichen planus as well as for unknown (idiopathic) reasons.

Intercourse can prevents the occurrence of vaginal length shortening for the majority of women who have intercourse at least twice per week. Hence the reason for the sometimes true vaginal cliché, “Use it or lose it.” The good news is that FowlerGynInternational can help you can “Get it back!” It does require some work and putting up with self-induced discomfort to stretch the vagina longer. But you can do this in the privacy of your home on your own time.