Study: Learned masculinity encourages stoicism and withstanding pain. Femininity associated with greater sensitivity to painful stimuli - contributes to a greater proportion of women rating their pain more severely than men

aetheralloy · 2012-04-11T17:48:37+00:00

Two possibilities here:

Women tend to actually tolerate pain better

or

Women tend to overstate the pain they are in

UninformedDownVoter · 2012-04-11T14:43:47+00:00

If I ever have kids and one of them is female I will not baby them like most people. I can see it in my family members in how if a 2 year old boy falls everyone says, "Get up, you are ok," if anything at all. If the same happens to a 2 year old girl, everyone is instantly all over her asking if she is ok. It's bullshit and breeds weakness.

AryoBarzan · 2012-04-11T23:17:30+00:00

I've always attributed this "greater sensitivity to pain" to feminism as a whole. Feminists seem to always think women are in more pain in general and that women's sufferring is far greater than men. This is evident when ANYTHING happens to a man is seen as 'less severe' as when it happens to a woman. Even things like genital mutilation are seen as things to be allowed to joke about when a male is inflicted, but when a woman is inflicted it's suddenly a horrible, cruel crime.

neurorex · 2012-04-12T00:10:15+00:00

Couldn't access the actual article, but here's the abstract.

jbuk1 · 2012-04-12T17:55:15+00:00

I'll be sure to keep this link at hand next time I'm told I have "man-flu."

DoctorStorm · 2012-04-11T21:14:04+00:00

I try to avoid these types of studies because they rely heavily on amorphous psychological and sociological constructs that, while harboring some truth, cannot quantitatively determine any concrete conclusions.

I could write a similar study to show that men in the southern hemisphere feel more pain than men in the northern hemisphere, but if my conclusions are based on subjective evidence, such as asking a million men from both hemispheres to rate their pain with a smiley face scale, then I cannot tell you how much more pain we're talking about. Nor can I tell you if it's actually true, as I have no measure or metric to properly classify pain and thus allow for others to recreate my conclusions.

I have absolutely no doubt that there's some truth to how each gender experiences pain, but it's not going to be found in some anthropological perspective. It's going to be found at the genetic level with how the body physically reacts to different types of pain.

To say that men are tempered to not feel pain does not mean they don't. To say that women are tempered to feel more pain does not mean they do. To ask either gender to rate their pain in order to draw conclusions as to how painful a thing is based on their feminine or masculine upbringing is pointless.

I'm more interested in whether girls physiologically mitigate pain differently than boys because it may lead to creating more effective gender-specific medications and procedures.

DoctorStorm · 2012-04-11T13:14:30+00:00

Women have more pain receptors.

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