The Golden Ticket

As an Obstetrician & Gynecologist, I’ve provided services to thousands of women since I started practicing. And although I can’t remember every visit, there is one visit that I will never forget. At the time, I was practicing in New Jersey. I remember a woman coming in for a Gyn visit. She was concerned that things were changing down there. Like most women who come to see me, she began to express the details of her concern. She wanted me to exam her external genitalia. Like many women, she wanted to make sure “everything looked okay.” She appeared nervous and somewhat anxious. Through further history taking, I learned that she had had a significant amount of partners in her lifetime. As a result, I asked her if she would like me to also test her for sexually transmitted diseases. She expressed, that she would.

After completing my Gyn exam, I begin to share with her that my findings (concerning her vulvovaginal exam) were normal on gross inspection. She began to cry. But these weren’t light tears, they were heartfelt and seemed to flow from a place deep within her soul. I moved closer to comfort her. She looked up at me with tears streaming down her cheeks. She was hurting but I didn’t know why. I had just given her news that has always made my patients sigh with relief and smile. But she was different, and I needed to know why. So I looked into her eyes, and asked her “Why” was she crying.

Her response, is why I still remember this visit over a decade later. I sat and listened intently as she expressed to me that as a child growing up, her mother constantly told her that she wasn’t going to amount to anything. She shared that she was often told she was stupid. As I sat and listened to her, my heart began to ache. But what she told me next—made my heart actually break. Somewhere in her early teens, during a conversation in which her mom was again telling her that she wasn’t going to grow up to be anything; she expressed that her mom then told her that her vagina was her “golden ticket” so she “better learn how to use it.”

All these years, she had accepted that her “golden ticket” was her vagina and now she felt it was changing. She had been making her living by providing sex for money. It was her business and according to her, she was good at it. Now, she expressed that it was changing. Specifically, it was “looser” and appeared to be “sagging.” For her, this was devastating because “if my clients aren’t satisfied with how it looks or feels, they’ll stop coming and I’ll lose business. I now understood her tears. After all, her vagina had given her the only value that she knew. It was how she had defined herself since her teenage years. She was now 40 years old.

Believe it or not—there are many women who are existing on this earth today who are very much in the same situation. Meaning, they only see themselves as sexual beings who have no ability to accomplish anything great in life. Unfortunately, they have come to believe that their sole purpose in life is to sexual please others and that they are not meant to achieve anything outside of that. How they came to travel this path in life? Their stories vary.

What’s important is that we as women come into an awareness that “we are more than our vaginas.” More importantly is the understanding that we were created for more than just sex and having babies. First and foremost, we were created to be equals with our male counterparts. And as equals we were created to partner with them in order to fulfill mankind’s basic need for companionship and to help our male counterparts meet their purpose in life. In other words, we need each other to fulfill our God given purpose in life. One cannot succeed without the other. Whether a business, plutonic, professional, or romantic relationship—we need each other. As women you must know that we are intelligent, beautiful, resilient, flexible, and absolutely phenomenal individuals on this earth. If you struggle to see your value, worth, and beauty; I encourage you to reach out to a medical professional or mental health specialist to help you heal and overcome any verbal, physical, or emotional hurts that have blinded your ability to see who you truly are.