This guest review is from Jane! Jane credits romance novels with at long last sorting out the muddle of misconceptions she grew up with about sex and identity. She only wishes she’d learned the word “demisexual” sooner! She and Sarah talked about the prevalence of penetrative sex in romance novels in episode 658 of the podcast. Jane writes cozy romantasy, copyedits science papers, and teaches bread-making classes in North Carolina. You can find her on Bluesky as @ephemerily and online at janebuehler.com.

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I was super excited when I learned about Thighs Wide Shut by Hayley Fleming, which has a heroine with vaginismus, or pelvic floor muscle spasm. A few books have included characters with pelvic floor dysfunction (the Smart Bitches had a Rec League on it in 2023), but in this story, the condition is front and center. It’s the main driving force of most of the conflict and is ever present in heroine Emma’s thoughts. She even fends off a running commentary by her set of colorful vaginal dilators, from tiny Lavendar to giant Cobalt, who pop into her head to mock her and play up her fears throughout the book.

Emma grows up in Florida and arrives at college in Boston ready to start hooking up with guys. During her first such experience, when “Hot Boy from Spanish Class” puts a finger inside her, she feels intense pain and accidentally knees him in the crotch. She thus is led to get help and is diagnosed with vaginismus at 18, but she doesn’t proceed with pelvic floor PT or using her dilators to reduce the symptoms because of fear and shame and avoidance. She keeps hoping the condition will resolve on its own.

After college, Emma returns to Florida and becomes a teacher for five years, then quits and returns to Boston to work in her friend Jo’s coffeeshop, which is when the book begins. Emma has vowed to “do better” and deal with her condition, starting with pelvic floor PT.

So, we go with her as the therapist teaches her breathing exercises and yoga positions to relax her pelvic floor. She uses what she learns throughout the book, each time she has an experience that causes her muscles to start clenching, causing pain, which can happen even when nothing is inside her. Even though Emma has (1) a diagnosis and (2) access to various health professionals, dealing with her condition is still hard. Progress is slow. I appreciated that she wasn’t miraculously cured.

One of the hard parts of pelvic floor conditions like vaginismus and vulvodynia (pain in the vulva) can be figuring out the cause. Sometimes there’s an obvious cause, like a traumatic experience, but other times it seems like the condition just is. I liked that Emma didn’t have a clear idea of what caused her condition. She has kind, loving parents who don’t seem to have imparted any harmful ideas about sex, and she first approaches sex with excitement.

She reads as allosexual, feeling sexual desire but not able to act on it. By describing Emma’s experiences as a teacher in Florida, related to banned books, the story hints that the origin of her vaginismus might be psychological, perhaps in part developing from inadequate sex education.

I thought a lot about misconceptions as I read. Even if we’re given accurate information, we can misinterpret it, especially as inexperienced children, and carry those skewed ideas into adulthood. Or, we can be told something, but we’re surrounded by images that tell us something different, and the images paint a much stronger picture in our minds and overwhelm what we were told. I often wonder, what could someone have said in 1985 sex ed class to set me on the right track? Even if someone back then had had the knowledge to say, “Some people feel interested in sex and others don’t, and love and sex are two separate things so it’s okay if you want one and not the other,” would I have retained that knowledge into adulthood, when every romance I saw seemed to lead to sex?

Speaking of romance, at this point, you may be wondering, is there any romance in this book? Yes! Emma makes two best friends in college, her roommate Jo and her freshman dorm neighbor, Harrison, whom she meets shortly after her upsetting experience with Hot Boy from Spanish Class. Emma and Harrison are inseparable for four years, but she always avoids letting their friendship blossom into anything more because of her condition, which she can’t bring herself to tell him about.

Something happens to cause a rift between the two at the end of college, and Emma leaves Harrison behind when she flees to Florida. When she moves back, she accidentally becomes his downstairs neighbor, and many awkward interactions ensue as the two struggle to rebuild their friendship.

A lot of times books are criticized for having conflict based on misinformation that could be cleared up with one conversation. And Thighs Wide Shut mostly falls into this description, with Emma keeping her condition secret for various flawed reasons, like Harrison “deserving to be with someone who’s easy to love” or a fear that if he doesn’t reject her, it will be out of pity, and he’ll never be truly happy with her.

But I think this book might be a rare case where the situation is believable. Emma has no conception that a cis-het M/F relationship is possible without sex, or that “sex” can mean interactions without penetration. Her handful of dating experiences have reinforced this misconception, when she is rejected after not agreeing to have sex, by which her dates mean penetrative sex. And since she lives in the real world, we can imagine that she’s been inundated with the same media we are, which also reinforces flawed narratives.

Emma and Harrison are not perfect. She pushes him when he’s only just let her back into his life, when I wanted her to be more patient, and he has trouble standing up for himself. I found myself frustrated with both of them at times. But Emma’s voice is funny and irreverent, and they both learn throughout the story and keep trying to improve. Emma’s “do better” refrain is repeated each time she catches herself making a mistake. And as twentysomethings, they are literally half my age, so I should cut them some slack. (I am often judgmental, something I myself am trying to do better at!)

Parts of the book were hard to read because they brought up memories. Like when Emma goes to a gynecologist for a pap smear, speaking up about her condition, and the doctor tells her PT is a good step but then asks if she’s “tried having a glass of wine before attempting penetration?” (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told to just try wine, instead of solving an underlying problem.)

Or like how throughout college, Emma indirectly misled people, including Harrison, into thinking she was sexually active. I trace this behavior back to middle school for me, when there was pressure to fit in and everyone else was talking about sex, so I learned to behave as if I were down with whatever people said.

Central to this story is how misunderstandings can begin and persist and grow over time. Sometimes, even if someone tells you something true (like “there’s all kinds of ways to be physically intimate”), the words fall by the wayside when you’re constantly presented with images and videos showing something else.

While I did have some frustrations with the characters and their romance, I loved all the medical parts and found so much of the writing to be very fun. If you ask me, romance novels are at the forefront of broadening the narrative, and Thighs Wide Shut is a great leap forward.