Help me End V Pain with a Tweet and a Post!

We all want effective treatments for V pain, right? In order for that to happen, we of course need to build public awareness. Without public awareness, there will be no demand for treatment, and without demand, there will be no supply!

Therefore in order for hurting vaginas to become happy vaginas, we need to create an effective communication, i.e. marketing, campaign. Which is exactly what I am going to do. 

I've entered a scholarship contest for Marie Forleo's B-School program, a course about non-sleazy, totally awesome online marketing for big-hearted people who want to change the world.

It will increase my chances of winning if my 90 second video is tweeted like crazy and posted on Facebook a gajillion times. Please help me out!

Note: If you don't want to "out" yourself, you can totally get around that by framing it as "I heard about this from a friend of a friend and thought it was cool, re-tweet this!" or "I know someone who is affected by this health issue so I'd love to spread the word! Re-post this!" (and the person you "know" can be me, not you, ya know?)

The contest goes from now to February 20th, so a Tweet and a post (or five) a day would be much appreciated. Put it on your calendar!

Guidelines 

Twitter

1.) Use the hashtag #winBschool and the link http://joinbschool.com (That's what the scholarship committee is looking for.) 

2.) Use the combo of #womenshealth and #painfulsex to maximize the chance of re-tweets. Even people who have never heard of V pain will get it, and women generally care about women's health.

Sample - (It's tough getting an effective message into 140 characters, so feel free to use this verbatim):

#WomensHealth=important! Build awareness re: #painfulsex. Watch http://bit.ly/1zIdRsQ and re-tweet! #winBschool http://joinbschool.com

Facebook

1.) Use the terms @marieforleo's B-School, #winBschool, http://joinbschool.com (again, this is what the scholarship committee is looking for.)

2.) No one really "gets" terms like pelvic pain, pelvic health, or vulvodynia, so framing it in terms of women's health and painful sex makes it more likely that you will get people's attention. Include a "call to action:" an easy thing that people can do right away, like "watch the video," "like this!" or "please re-post." If you just say "Geez, this is depressing" or "Did you know about this?" the message won't get passed on.

Sample:

"Holy crap have you seen this video? I had no idea lady part pain was so common! Build awareness about #painfulsex by helping this bad-ass lady win a scholarship to @marieforleo's B-School. Re-post and tweet the video with the #winBschool and http://joinbschool.com link."

You can also re-post my posts ;) which can be found at facebook.com/yatrayoni and facebook.com/faithcornwall. (The first is public, the second private - feel free to friend me if you are not comfortable being publicly associated with the YatraYoni page.)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

I've been doing a lot of background work on this website lately, figuring out how to grow it, brainstorming, making plans, figuring out what needs to get done and in what order. During that process I realized that there was one thing I really wanted and needed to change. A small, subtle detail that would have large repercussions about how I proceed.

Today I made that one small change, and you probably didn't even notice it. The subtitle of this website is now "Support & Sisterhood for Women with V Pain" instead of "Support & Sisterhood for Women with Pelvic Pain."

Why the change?

A number of reasons, the main one being that the female pelvis has so much going on that I couldn't adequately cover all of the pain disorders contained therein.

Unfortunately, none of these issues are given the attention they need: endometriosis, fibroids, interstitial cystitis - the list goes on. 

But those illnesses are not part of my personal experience, and I came to realize that despite my good intentions I wasn't doing them justice.

And frankly, as overlooked as those issues are, they get way more attention than vulvar and vaginal pain disorders. "Fibroids" is something women have heard of; "vulvodynia," "vestibulodynia," "lichen sclerosus," "clitorodynia,"...no one's heard of those.

Vulvar and vaginal pain are so under-researched that "clitorodynia" isn't even the name of a specific disease. It literally means "pain in the clitoris" and there are at least 11 different causes.

The crazy thing about all this is that studies show that chronic vulvar pain affects somewhere between 6% and 28% percent of the female population at some point in their lives. That's more than breast cancer (12%), diabetes (9.3% of Americans, not just females,) or heart disease (43 million women, about 7% of American women.)

V pain is not some little thing that affects .000001% of the population. Even the widely varying data we have on its prevalence indicates that V pain is a mainstream health issue - and yet it is completely ignored by mainstream medicine and mainstream media.

Out of solidarity with our pelvic pain sisters, and in recognition that many of us are in the multiple-diagnosis camp, I will continue to have a variety of pelvic pain resources on the Resources page.

But the intention of this site has shifted, and I believe for the better.

Free “Wake Up Your Libido" Tele-seminar for Women Experiencing Painful Sex - Tonight!

Sarah Kennedy, a pelvic pain life coach, is having a free, 3 session tele-seminar on sex and pelvic pain. The second one, "How to Wake Up Your Libido and Have More Energy" is tonight at 6pm PST! Can't make it? Sign up anyway and she will email you a recording. You can sign up here.

Whether you call in or listen to the recording, it will be super awesome to have further proof that you are not alone, amiright? Yay for community!