A new study published in the International Journal of Sexual Health has found that surprising number of men experience pain during sexual activity, and the majority of them stay completely silent about it.
The research, led by Terri D. Fisher, a professor at The University of the South and professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, surveyed 263 college students about their experiences with physical discomfort during sex.
While women reported higher rates of pain overall, 49 percent of men who had engaged in vaginal intercourse said they had experienced pain during that activity at some point.
For anal sex, more than 44 percent of men reported the same.
And yet, compared to their female counterparts, these men were far less likely to tell their partners about the pain, and far less likely to stop what they were doing.
The study’s core message is clear: pain during sex is not just a women’s problem, and the silence surrounding male sexual discomfort is doing real harm.
How the study was conducted
The research team recruited participants from a small, private liberal arts university in the southeastern United States.
The sample included 179 cisgender women, 71 cisgender men, and 13 individuals who identified as non-cisgender or did not specify a gender.
All participants completed an anonymous online survey between October 2022 and March 2023.
The survey first asked participants to estimate how common they believed sexual pain was among men and women generally.
It then asked each person about their own experiences across three distinct types of sexual activity: penile-vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, and non-penetrative sexual activity such as manual stimulation or oral sex.
For each type of activity, participants were asked whether they had ever felt pain, how often it occurred, whether they told their partner, and whether they stopped the activity.
A separate section invited participants to answer open-ended questions about why people might experience pain during sex, and why they might continue despite it.
Finally, everyone completed the Hypergender Ideology scale, a validated measure that assesses how strongly someone adheres to extreme traditional gender role beliefs.
The approach was deliberately broad, examining pain that had ever occurred rather than limiting responses to a specific time window.
This design choice, according to the researchers, captured a more complete picture of how common sexual discomfort really is.
Findings from the study
The numbers coming out of the study surprised even the researchers themselves.
More than 90 percent of women who had engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse reported having experienced pain at some point.
For men, that figure sat just below 50 percent, which is considerably higher than most people would expect.
Participants had guessed, before sharing their own experiences, that only about 18 percent of men would ever experience pain during sex.
The reality was nearly three times higher.
Of the women who experienced pain during vaginal intercourse, 72 percent told their partner about it.
Among men who experienced the same, only 34 percent said anything.
The gap was even wider for anal sex.
Women were more than three times as likely to inform their partner about pain during anal intercourse as men were.
Women were also four times more likely to stop the activity entirely when anal sex became painful.
For non-penetrative activity, the picture shifted.
More than half of men reported experiencing pain during non-penetrative sex, slightly more than the proportion of women who reported the same.
Crucially, there was no significant gender difference in how either group handled that discomfort.
Both men and women were roughly equally likely to speak up or stop when pain occurred during activities like oral sex or manual stimulation.
The surprising truth most people get wrong
Here is where the story takes a turn most people do not expect.
The widespread assumption is that women bear the burden of sexual pain and that men essentially coast through sexual activity without physical discomfort.
The data says otherwise.
Men experience sexual pain at rates nobody is talking about, and the silence is not about the pain being mild or trivial.
It is about what men believe they are supposed to do with that information.
Research on sex differences in pain perception has long established that masculine gender norms are strongly associated with stoicism and pain tolerance.
Stanford’s Gendered Innovations project notes that boys are frequently socialised from childhood to be tough and to avoid expressing pain, while girls are more often encouraged to articulate discomfort.
Those childhood lessons do not disappear in the bedroom.
In this study, participants who scored higher on the Hypergender Ideology scale were significantly less likely to report painful sex to their partners.
This held true across genders.
Traditional gender role beliefs were not just shaping men’s behaviour; they were shaping everyone’s.
Women with more traditional views may feel their role is to absorb discomfort and keep their partner satisfied.
Men with more traditional views may see admitting pain as a sign of weakness, something fundamentally incompatible with how they understand masculinity.
The researchers found, through open-ended responses, that many participants identified stereotyped expectations as a core reason why people of any gender continue painful sexual activity.
One participant noted that men often push through pain because of what they called an unspoken social rule: that it is less acceptable for masculine individuals to express pain.
Another described it plainly as a pride issue.
Why people keep going when it hurts
The qualitative section of the study produced nine distinct themes explaining why people experience pain during sex, and six themes explaining why they continue despite it.
Several themes applied equally to men and women.
Embarrassment was a major driver, with many participants citing fear of looking weak, seeming oversensitive, or ruining the moment.
Obligation to a partner emerged consistently, with people continuing because they did not want their partner to feel responsible or to have their enjoyment disrupted.
The belief that pain is normal also featured heavily, suggesting that a widespread resignation to discomfort is actively preventing people from speaking up.
Other themes were more gender-specific.
For women, fear of a partner’s negative reaction was a reason cited for continuing painful sex, reflecting a concern that stopping could lead to anger or emotional withdrawal.
For men, the desire to reach orgasm was identified by participants, primarily female respondents, as a reason men might push through discomfort.
Whether that reflects genuine male experience or a perception held about men requires more research to determine.
Physical causes were also explored.
Lack of lubrication, uncomfortable angles, size mismatches, rough movement, and overexertion all featured as explanations for why pain occurs in the first place.
For women specifically, insufficient arousal and inadequate foreplay were among the most commonly cited reasons for discomfort during penetrative sex.
The International Association for the Study of Pain has noted that gendered pain norms shape not only how individuals respond to their own discomfort but also how their pain is perceived and validated by others, including healthcare providers.
That cycle of underreporting and under-recognition has consequences that extend well beyond the bedroom.
Practical implications of the study
The practical implications of this study are not complicated.
Pain during sex is common, it affects people of all genders, and it is not inevitable.
That last point carries weight.
When pain is normalised, people stop questioning it.
They stop communicating about it.
And they continue experiences that could be made more comfortable, or stopped entirely, with a single honest conversation.
The study’s lead author put it directly: men engaging in uncomfortable sex were far less likely to tell their partners about the pain or to stop, and that reluctance was tied to how strongly they held traditional gender role beliefs.
Research on men and sexual healthcare has consistently found that men are less likely to seek help for sexual health concerns, with many experiencing the healthcare environment as tailored toward women and at odds with how they see themselves.
The silence around male sexual pain is not an isolated habit. It fits into a much broader pattern of men avoiding vulnerability in health contexts.
That pattern has a cost.
For both men and women, the study suggests that communicating about discomfort during sex is not a mood-killer. It is the mechanism through which discomfort actually gets resolved.
Partners cannot adjust what they do not know about.
The researchers are now planning to develop a new standardised questionnaire based on the themes gathered from open-ended responses, with the goal of capturing the specific reasons people experience and conceal sexual pain.
The team also hopes these findings make their way into sex education programmes, particularly at the college level, where students are navigating new relationships and sexual experiences often without the vocabulary to discuss what they are actually feeling.
The bigger picture
One of the most revealing moments in the study was not about pain itself.
It was about perception.
Before participants reported their own experiences, they were asked to estimate how common sexual pain is in men and women generally.
They guessed that only about 18 percent of men experience it.
The real figure, based on their own peer group, was closer to 50 percent.
That gap between assumption and reality is where a lot of unnecessary suffering lives.
Research on gender bias in pain perception has shown that people across cultures carry strong assumptions about who experiences pain and who reports it, and those assumptions shape behaviour in measurable ways.
When men believe their experience is unusual, they are less likely to speak up.
When everyone assumes sex is supposed to hurt women occasionally and never men, the conditions for silence are set before anyone even gets into bed.
The takeaway from this study is not that men are secretly struggling more than women. Women reported higher rates of pain, higher frequency, and higher intensity across nearly every category examined.
But the finding that nearly half of men have felt pain during sex, and that most of them said nothing, challenges a cultural blind spot that matters.
Pain is information.
It is the body asking for something to change.
And whether it is gendered conditioning, embarrassment, or the quiet fear of seeming weak, the decision to ignore that signal is one worth reconsidering.
The bedroom may be an unlikely place to start dismantling gender norms, but the evidence increasingly suggests it is one of the places where those norms do the most quiet, unexamined damage.
The study, “Suffering in Silence: Examining U.S. College Students’ Painful Sexual Experiences and Their Relationship to Gender Roles,” was authored by Terri D. Fisher, Mary Bullard, Sydney Eyster, and Camilla Kalthoff, and was published in the International Journal of Sexual Health in February 2026.
