Pain tolerance has been a battle that opposite genders have been facing for a long time. Many times references to childbirth and being kicked in the balls have been mentioned, but nobody seems to question the tolerance of other types of pain as well. Recently I did an article on whether heavy backpacks cause damage to youth, and I discovered that girls experience more back pain than boys. This led me to question why that is, and is it because girls have a weaker pain tolerance?
Since the pain was reported, not recorded, it could be that the boys simply did not want to say they were in pain because their tolerance was higher, or they wanted to seem more “masculine”. A study that could be done is to measure brain signals when the body is in pain for both genders, however there would be no way to make it a blind trial, and the ethics are questionable.
When I dug deeper I found that certain chemicals in each genders brain could have something to do with tolerance. There are more Kappa-Opioids (Produces Pain) created in women than men, so that study shows that women have the lower pain tolerance.
Another study showed an experiment regarding pain on the achilles tendon. It also showed that men had the higher tolerance, and that the older the person, the higher the tolerance. This could however be contributed to where the pain was, and how women treat their legs. The constant pressure from high heels and way their bodies are built could have weakened the results.
Yet another experiment on pain, this time soaking a hand in cold nitrate, showed that men have a higher pain tolerance when inspected by a professional, but also a higher pain threshold. If men can hold more pain, that may enable them to tolerate it more. These facts can not be reverse causation because pain does not choose who is a boy or girl.
So nothing can be certain, there are certain factors that could also play into pain tolerance, like the stigma that a boy needs to “act like a man” and “suck it up”, but based on data it can be concluded that men have the higher pain tolerance. This allows me to believe that part of the backpack issue was because of each genders ability to react to pain.
I like your post. I agree in your thinking that there isn’t a specific answer to who can tolerate more pain as a whole. I think that that type of pain is what may vary. Girls experience much more sensitivity in the breast area than men. Men, like you mentioned, also have the factor of getting kicked in the balls. You had another good point with the whole “suck it up and be a man” ethos. The results could have been altered due to the men’s need to feel macho. Overall, good post.
I am not sure if one gender has more pain tolerance over the other. I think that it depends on the person. Boys are brought up with the pressure to act tough and not show much emotion, some boys try harder to fit these expectations more than others. Some people may just be better at hiding pain or others may show different levels of pain tolerance depending on who is watching them. If they are alone or with a couple of close friends they may show their actual feelings. But if they are around people they want to impress, they may act like they can tolerate more pain.
I recently searched the web for more information on strength, comparing guys to girls. It stated that both genders’ muscles grow at the same rate when being tested at the same rate of difficulty. To answer the question of who feels more pain it may be connected to the amount of muscle on the person, and men usually have more muscle compared to women. However, if you chose a women who is very muscular and compared her pain tolerance to a very thin man I am sure the women would have a higher pain tolerance than the guy. In conclusion, the question should not be which gender can handle more pain, but how does pain scale with the amount of muscle on a person.
The idea that it is pain reported, not recorded is interesting, but I don’t feel it is fair to assign that idea to a certain gender. What pain is reported I feel depends on the person and doesn’t have to do with gender. Different people may just have different pain tolerances whether they are male or female.
I also agree with you that boys have the incentive to “suck it up, and be man” so that could’ve been the reason why to more girls reported back pain rather then boys. This post was very interesting to me and so I decided to look into why women report pain more than men do. I found this article that discusses different studies and their findings and it suggests that “men’s and women’s nervous systems process pain information differently and act on it differently”. You should look into this more and maybe do another post about it.