Pain During Sex and Speaking Up
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Please be advised that the following program contains audio content that may be graphic and potentially triggering for some listeners. This content may include descriptions or sounds that some may find disturbing. Listener discretion is strongly advised. This is The Last Show with David Cooper. Pain in the bedroom happening during what should be otherwise a pleasurable experience. Turns out it's pretty common and men are less likely to speak up about it and say something than women. I'm here with two researchers who are in psychology who have done a study on this. They are both Terry Fisher and Mary Bullard from the University of the South in Tennessee. Terry, welcome to the program.
Thank you.
And Mary, welcome to you as well.
Thank you.
So when we think about pain during sex, I tend to imagine something pretty clinical, something pretty rare, something most people don't talk about. Your study suggests that it's almost normal. Where did we go wrong when it comes to educating people about this phenomenon?
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.
So let's dive in. Let's start the conversation. In what ways does pain show up? Is it just like hurting in my private region? What are some of the pains that people might describe who actually experience this?
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.
Got it. The stat that jumps out, I think the headline, at least that we latched onto why I'm so curious about this is that men are experiencing it and not speaking up about it.
What are the common experiences of pain during sex?
What might be the reason for this kind of like silent suffering?
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, obligation to finish the sexual activity.
Why are men less likely to speak up about sexual pain?
Or maybe the pain is normalized for them and they don't think that it's something that needs to be brought up.
Latching up to this whole idea of ruining the moment, there's something theatrical about that for me. Like, I wouldn't want to speak up about my discomfort to ruin the scene or ruin the pleasure for somebody. It sounds almost performative or something like that, doesn't it?
Oh, yeah, it definitely does a little bit, which is interesting.
Did you want to follow up, Terri?
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. And with regard to the men feeling the pain and not speaking up, a lot of them were concerned it would make them seem like less of a man. So gender roles were definitely playing a role.
That's such an interesting one, like traditional gender roles, someone feeling like they just need to power through or something like that. I'm a bit disappointed to hear that, but it totally makes sense. Are women more likely to speak up during moments of discomfort when things should otherwise be going well?
Definitely. Yeah. So women are twice as likely to tell their partners about pain as men are.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:04–2:50
2
What are the common experiences of pain during sex?
2:50–3:15
3
Why are men less likely to speak up about sexual pain?
3:15–5:59
4
What did the study reveal about pain during sex?
5:59–8:29
5
What are the different types of pain experienced during sex?
8:29–9:34
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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