Jade Dowsett Roberts as Lucy

PROPER sex education is essential to women’s mental health, according to a playwright whose new work explores some of her own experiences.

The Big O, which began its run in the King’s Head Theatre in Angel on Tuesday, is a partly-autobiographical play about the trauma that comes from feeling like you are unable to have a “normal” sex life.

The play follows Lucy, who has just been diagnosed with anorgasmia, a physical and/or psychological condition where a person has delayed, infrequent, or completely absent orgasms. This diagnosis begins Lucy’s journey towards healing – and exploring her past.

“There’s a lot of similarities in the play to my life,” said the play’s writer Kim Cormack, 33.

“Some bits are verbatim, like quotes from this psychosexual consultant, a really bad one, that I had.” “It took so much courage to speak to a GP about it, and like so many of the issues that affect women, I also have PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), which had been ignored by so many male GPs.”

She added: “Finally, I got my referral for a psychosexual consultant and she was very old-fashioned in her views.

Kim Cormack wants adult sex education to be rolled out

She also told me that if I had any sexual trauma, ‘that was for another department.’” Stigma made Ms Cormack’s journey towards healing difficult for her mental health.

“I went into it feeling like I was such a sex-positive 21st-century woman. All of this fridge-magnet feminist stuff, which is all true, but it’s surface level,” she said.  “I hadn’t realised that there were things in my past that might have quite obviously impacted why I couldn’t have an orgasm. It’s so against the progressive ideas that we have now in society like ‘don’t give ownership of your sexuality to a man who’s abused or assaulted you.’ But, on a human level, that’s incredibly hard to hear.

“I started to feel like I’m not a real woman because I can’t enjoy my own body; I’m not a real feminist because of the way I feel about my body, my sexuality, and not feeling safe enough to really express myself sexually, because that has been taken away from me in the past, and I still need to deal with it.”

The Big O has also become a broader project, with plans to roll out adult sex education as part of an outreach programme Ms Cormack is planning.

“I was in foster care, and when I had my first sex education lesson I was still in school,” she said. “For the girls, it was just someone sheepishly talking about tampons and periods, and that was all we got. You’re just so very vulnerable about your ideas of your sexual identity and your worth – it’s so easy to be moulded by outside sources.”

Ms Cormack added: “It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I gained a proper understanding of consent. The difficulty is that when you realise that, you think, ‘oh shit, I didn’t consent to so much.’ And that’s a lot to deal with.

“What I figured out from that experience [of being in care] is that you’re just in survival mode. “If you don’t have an adult who has had a proper sex education to guide you, you’re screwed.”

l The Big O is playing from May 16-June 3 at The King’s Head Theatre.