Brea Perry

So we need to start putting things in place now to prepare for these heat waves because we do know that they are coming and going to be more and more frequent moving forward.

Thanks so much.

Me too.

Yeah.

So I think that that's part of what our study aimed to kind of contribute to science is the fact that pain during sex and sort of like a non-medical setting is more common than a lot of people think, but it's not necessarily normal.

And so that's what we were hoping to start a conversation about.

We didn't get real specific in asking people about the nature of the pain, but rather had it ever happened or not.

This was more of an exploratory study.

There's been a lot of research on pain during sexuality, but typically with clinical samples,

People who have some sort of diagnosed medical or physical issue that might cause them fairly chronic pain during sex, that's not what we were interested in.

We were interested in just everyday, occasional forms of pain.

And so we got our participants to explain why they thought people might feel pain without having them tell us specifically about their pain.

But we found out a lot from doing that.

Yeah, there's a lot of different reasons that we found and we broke them down into several different themes.

And it was everything from, you know, like maybe desire to please a partner.

They don't want to speak up and like ruin the moment by saying that they're in pain.

Maybe they feel some sort of like pressure or obligation to finish the sexual activity.

Or maybe the pain is normalized for them and they don't think that it's something that needs to be brought up.

Oh, yeah, it definitely does a little bit, which is interesting.

There are quite a few participants who were concerned about their partner's reaction, but they were also concerned about how it might make them feel that they were not good sexual partners or they were not real women or that sort of concern.