I’ve had an (admittedly small) kidney stone.
I’ve been both tapped and volley-kicked in the nuts. (Soccer) Vinnie Jones is an asshole.
I’ve broken toes through stubbing my foot.
Never took any pain killers or such in any of my many dental vists.
My least favourite pain of all time, though, has to be breaking my nose. (Well, I had mine broken for me, but you get what I mean.)
I think it’s a thing with pain is that you can sustain it when there’s a point behind it, it’s destined to end at some point, it’s eventually going to go away and so forth, except when it’s going to lead to permanent damage. There was just a line for me there that made it much, much scarier than, say, stubbing out a cigarette in my palm. Just the thought of being tortured by people who were willing to cross that line makes me cringe - at least, after having my nose broken. At some point I think I might actually prefer to just give up hope and die, rather than be rescued and heal broken.
(Then again, being kicked in the nuts ran a close second)
Obviously I don’t have personal experience with hot flashes from menopause, but I occasionally get flushing as a side effect of cholesterol medication. It’s annoying but not really a big deal.
I endured an induced labour with no pain relief* and a baby who was stuck on my pubic bone. The pain was so bad that I couldn’t speak. When I could still move, I raked my husband’s face with my nails. When I was still having coherent thoughts, I remember thinking, “this isn’t pain, this is so beyond pain that there are no words for it”. I certainly would have rated the pain 10/10 at that point - being the worst pain I had ever experienced. Then I had a caesarean and the anaesthetic didn’t work. Yes, there is pain worse than labour, even an induced one with a stuck baby and to answer your question, yes, I guess I would have to reluctantly choose the labour pain over the pain of being cut open, manipulated and stapled back up without an anaesthetic.
Naw, I don’t count that last bit as childbirth since it was iatrogenic in nature and ancillary to the actual birth–contractions themselves were the suckiest part in my opinion, and it only started getting better when I got to the pushing part because at long last something I could do made it better. Before that it was like being a passenger in my own body, and it really freaked me out. I felt the same way during the second labor, which was accomplished without perineal damage–at least that labor was half the duration of the first. If I’d had a few more kids it probably would have evolved into “Eh, get that for me Deirdre!” I pulled the plug on the lady bits at twenty, though, because I was NOT gonna go through that crap again no matter what!
My SO passed a small stone and he was hating life for a week or so–I’ve never seen a man start tearing up just from needing to take a whiz… He’s pretty stoic, too. Tell ya one thing, it definitely made him pay attention to his water intake! I’ve had UTIs and as a result I have no desire whatsoever to experience stones of any sort, thankyewverymuch!
What does it feel like? Anything like this?: Some invisible being grabs a hold of sensitive internal body parts and squeeeezes - or is it trying to tear things apart in there? - until you’re sick to your stomach, and the pain, which radiates up your back and down your thighs, has you wanting nothing more than to curl into a tight ball and wishing you’d just pass out? And it comes in waves, where it’s at first agony, then it only hurts, and then it’s agony again, then it just hurts again? For hours?
Is it like that?
I ask because most men’s vivid descriptions of getting kicked in the balls sounds an awful lot like bad menstrual cramps. I’ve never had kids so I don’t know how much worse labor is, but I’ve experienced the above 3 days (literally 24 hours, usually the 1st or 2nd day of a few periods) a year since my late teens, OTC painkillers often don’t touch cramps so you have to ride the pain out. Some women experience the same every month and some for more than one day during their period. How many guys get kicked in the balls more than once a year?
The funny thing is, as bad as cramps can be (and in July without fail they’re really bad) the worst pains I’ve ever experienced are ones guys can too, so I’m not even sure why gonad pain is held up as the baton to which all other pains bow down to. Real agony comes when you get a chemical burn on your cornea. And having a dentist accidentally hit a nerve while doing a filling leads to pain that is literally blinding once the novocain wears off; until then I thought “blinding pain” was a figure of speech. Accidentally jabbing something into your kidneys is up there. So is angering your sciatic nerve.
I’ve read that most guys will never be “kicked SQUARE in the nuts.” I know I never have. That’s the kind of shot that could kill you from the shock of it. Which is why it’s so rare. Outside of Darwin Awards collections, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone dying from a ball blaster.
But of course, even grazing the boys hurts like a motherfuck and until women everywhere understand that I don’t know why they get bent out of shape over all men not understanding that childbirth is a big hairy deal.
Paul Gascoigne - when he was young, sober and talented.
I heard a story once about a rugby player who was taken to hospital to have a dislocated shoulder put back in place. He was quite noisy about it and a nurse said “Really, sir, just down the corridor there’s a woman having a baby, and she’s not making this much fuss”, and he yelled “Well try pushing it back in and see what she says!”.
As for me, I’ve put a contact lens into my eye after chopping chillies and thinking I’d washed my hands enough, and if I absolutely had to choose, I guess I’d stand there with my legs apart and say “Go on, get it over with”.
Childbirth/menstrual cramps/nut-shot? The only reason they get dragged into the argument is so one side can smugly disqualify the other from even having a point of view. Silly really.
My wife’s sadistic ex-gynecologist was once doing a pelvic exam on her, in preparation for endometriosis surgery that would hopefully relieve her horrible menstrual cramps. He was feeling around her cervix while pushing on her abdomen, and all of a sudden she gasped and turned absolutely white. He said “Yeah, that’s your ovary. Hurts, doesn’t it? They’re just as sensitive as the testicles.” Then he kept pushing and probing for another ten seconds.
So apparently women CAN experience the pain of being smacked right in the nuts if the person doing the smacking really knows what he’s doing.
Fortunately for me, all of my kidney stones have been small and smooth, and not too painful. The worst pain I’ve ever experienced was from severe constipation, and if labor is anything like that, I salute moms everywhere. Man, if I’d had an epidural available, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.
Perhaps the difference between the sexes isn’t so much the tolerance for pain, but the tolerance for being debilitated?
When my husband is sick, he complains mainly about not being able to do stuff, to handle stuff. I guess a sick lion hides in his lair untill he’s able to chase antilope again, for fear the antilope might gang up on him while he has the flu.
Thouroughly concur on that. The standard “pushing a bowling ball through a golf-ball sized hole” metaphor is really misleading here - I found contractions many times worse than the actual “baby coming out” bit.
Giving birth is really your classic YMMV situation - I’ve so far had one nearly unmedicated and two absolutely unmedicated births, and sure the pain was somewhat sucky but nothing like what, say, bathsheba is reporting here - because I just tend to have short easy labours. As a teenager I used to get very nasty foot and leg cramps on a regular basis, and I’d class them as more painful than labour (though mercifully far shorter).
But people want to talk about “what giving birth is like” without acknowledging that it is really really different for almost everyone who goes through it, so while there might be patterns there’s not really one experience that you can point to and say THAT is what it’s like. So how can we compare “the pain of labour” to anything, really?
Can I tell ya why women don’t understand that? Because 99.9% of our experience with nuts leads to your whapping them on our asses! That obviously doesn’t hurt! It doesn’t hurt when I tickle 'em with my nails, or cup 'em and jiggle or…I think this is getting TMI…
Anyhow, WE see balls getting bumped about pretty vigorously during foreplay and sex, and that doesn’t seem to hurt. And when we get grazed in the crotch, it doesn’t hurt. So we have a hard time internalizing a whole 'nother set of rules for when you have clothes on.
Yes, it does. No always… but trust me, from time to time men just have to work through the pain. On more than one occasion I’ve had to change up and let her on top because its hurt. And… of course… we’re broaching TMI…
They don’t get bumped around as vigorously as you’d think.
It’s kind of like if you put marbles in a rubber balloon, even though there’s a lot of back and forth action, there’s not much impact because the elasticity of it all slows them down.
What does it feel like to get punched in the ovaries? I don’t know if you can actually have that done… because I don’t often (read: Ever) punch women…
I can’t even compare ball-shots to a kidney shot… because a ballshot makes your kidney hurt, and your stomach, and… I’m going to stop now because, well… there really isn’t proper description for it (I’m not saying that it’s the worst pain by saying that, but it certainly is indescribable).
I knew one kid who got kneed in the balls, dropped to the floor and projectile vomited (repeatedly) while he was bucking and curled up in the fetal position.
happen when I’m intimate with a man. Something must change so that contact with the scrotum doesn’t hurt or hurt as much while you’re aroused.* If I “graze” the scrotum with a hand while giving a blowjob, I get excited moans and requests to continue. If I do exactly the same through bluejeans while readjusting my position watching TV on the couch, I get gasps and moans of an entirely different and painful nature.
Well, as described above, pressing on the ovary does blindingly hurt, a lot, in that “indescribable” way. But it pretty much has to be done as a compression, with one hand in the vagina and another on the abdomen. Unlikely to happen outside a gynecological exam. But yeah, it hurts a hell of a lot, and since the ovaries and the testes are made from the same prenatal organs, I expect it’s the closest analogue we have to testicular pain.
*Which makes sense - our bodies do weird things when we’re aroused. If you came up and pinched my nipple when I wasn’t aroused, I’d probably slug you from the pain, even though I loved it the night before under entirely different circumstances. Still, you’d probably be surprised how much nipple pinching hurts a woman who’s not in the right mood for it, the same way we’re sorta surprised that it hurts a guy when we barely touch his nuts when he’s not in the mood for it.
Yeah, something definitely switches over so that your nuts don’t hurt as much in those situations. Not sure if it’s endorphins or what.
Guess it makes sense, biologically - gotta take care of your offspring factory so your body warns you in no uncertain terms they’re being damaged. Whereas in the act of using them - your body isn’t going to do anything to discourage you from going to town.
Not sure, but I suspect it’s due to the muscles being subjected to a lot of tension from the stretch while being held in just the right position for a cramp to start–the muscles are in a relaxed position and they just have the room to cramp up when they decide to. With the ankle flexed and toes pointed up, the leg muscles are stretched out and don’t have the slack to go bonkers on you. Sort of like trying to kink a taut rope–not gonna happen. I can deliberately cause a foot cramp by pointing my toes and tensing the arch muscles just right and sometimes the cramp will spread to my calf–but I’ve never been able to induce a cramp with my toes flexed upward and my ankle bent.
Probably the same difference between bouncing a balloon against the wall and pinching it between the wall and a brick.
I could well ask why if caressing a breast doesn’t hurt, why do women not enjoy mammograms where their breasts are squeezed flat and hard between cold metal plates?
It’s the squeeze-hard-between-two-unyielding-things that hurts, not simple contact.
