Brooke Shields Says Sex Is "Painful" After Non-Consensual Vaginal Rejuvenation Procedure

Brooke Shields opened up about how her life and body have changed as she's gotten older in her new book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman. The actress, who is now 59, revealed that she regrets not embracing her sexuality as much as she could have when she was younger, and explained that now that she's in a better place mentally with her body, she has physical limitations holding her back.

“I had a fervent sex drive when I was young, but I never felt like I could step into that appetite in the way that I wanted to,” she said in an excerpt from her book, noting that she lost her virginity at 22 to her college boyfriend. “I waited that long because I had the weight of the world on me. And even once we started sleeping together, I never really let loose...Oh, how I wish I’d just let the lust take over!”

Now that Shields is in her 50s, sex is complicated in a different way. "Here I am, more than thirty-five years later, sometimes pretending I’m asleep when I know [husband] Chris [Henchy] is in the mood. And that has nothing to do with Chris—he’s hot!” she wrote. “I’m going through all the bodily shit that comes with aging as a woman even in the best of times—the thinning hair and the peach fuzz and the brand-new belly fat and vaginal dryness and the diminishing sex drive—and in my natural state I feel less appealing to him than I ever did before. But, on a personal level, I’m in a place where sex can be painful,” she said in the book.

The pain that Shields experiences from sex comes as a result of a non-consensual and irreversible vaginal rejuvenation procedure that was originally meant to reduce the size of her labia. “It felt like such an invasion—such a bizarre, like, rape of some kind," Shields previously told Us Weekly.

As a result, “For me to fully enjoy sex at this point, I need my lotions and potions, the right sleepwear (maybe calling it sleepwear is contributing to the problem), my special pillow, and maybe a tequila so I can relax,” she wrote in the book. “My doctor told me I should start taking testosterone—sure you might get a few more whiskers, but that’s what tweezers are for—but I haven’t gotten there yet. For now, I’m counting on the old ‘the more you have it, the more you’ll enjoy it’ approach.”

Read the original article on InStyle