This is a topic you can find in discussion threads and youtube videos. Which hurts more? The “scientific” conclusion is that there is no way to tell, because we don’t measure pain well. The myriad of reasons we don’t measure pain well, and the history of relevant ideas and attempts, makes the topic adequate for some informational/entertainment videos.

There is a point this particular video makes early that is interesting and maybe tangentially relevant to mga, which is that science on pain has a short history. The first study this video mentions is from the 40s. We will encounter topics that echo or rhyme with this…we aren’t so good at assessing most physical hardships that aren’t death, or that don’t inhibit our ability to work. We are better when it comes to physical hardships that create a new permanent state in the body, like losing a finger. But trauma, the psychological experience of trauma, is a general blind spot for society. There are specific trauma topics where we have more ideas, more research, more solutions of varying degrees of success, and generally more discussion, like rape and sexual assault of women. But generally speaking we have a poor track record with trauma.

More on that in future entries; what is specifically interesting to me here is how these videos talk about the topics of mga and childbirth. I’ll focus on one video

Kicked in the Crotch vs. Childbirth: The Great Debate – YouTube

Olivia Gordon (the narrator) uses a variety of colorful and derogatory expressions throughout for mga…”kicked in the crotch,” “swift kick in the crotch (in the text for the video),” “kicked in the nards,” “kicked in the gonads…” but childbirth is always either “childbirth” or “giving birth.”

Reflecting on this for a moment…”childbirth” is actually euphemistic to begin with, completely the opposite of “kicked in the nards.” Childbirth is…noble, dignified, above baseness or mockery. There is nothing anatomical or even biological in the parts of the word, it’s elegant and vague. “Giving birth,” as the verb version of this, is similarly abstract and circumspect. “Kicked in the nards” is, by contrast, totally explicit, precise, and demeaning. There is nothing noble, tragic, or sacred about the word “nards,” nards must refer to something stupid and grotesquely funny, like a pimple or a wart. It’s laughably pathetic that anyone would have something called nards, and it would sure be hilarious if they got kicked. “Nards” feels like a “kick me” sign on a buffoon.

Imagine for a moment derogatory language about childbirth along the lines of “kicked in the nards.” It’s pretty offensive to imagine; I’m finding it too offensive for me to elaborate on.

She describes an instrument called a dolorimeter, which basically applied varying degrees of heat to the subject’s skin, the high range of which would cause serious burns. For one experiment (this was decades ago) scientists would use this dolorimeter on women giving birth, and ask them to rate the the pain caused by the instrument against the pain they were experiencing from giving birth.

We should pause to marvel at the willful lack of common sense exhibited by these scientists. This is a monumentally stupid idea…take a woman in the middle of giving birth, who is also on pain meds, burn her to varying degrees, and ask her for precise and nuanced feedback on the experience, in real time. I understand that science must disregard common sense at some moments in honor of first principles and in the pursuit of real data, and hopefully deeper understanding…but does that mean you have to try all of the worst ideas you can come up with? I’m not a scientist, but I have to believe that they get to prioritize and make some basic assumptions before they spend money and start burning people in the middle of serious medical events. The stunning idiocy of this experiment bolsters my position that humans just do a bad job with trauma (or modern humans or whatever).

The upshot of this is that scientists stopped running pain experiments on women. In 1977, an FDA guideline banned women of childbearing age from participating in many clinical trials because they were considered a vulnerable population. Even with animals, apparently almost 80 percent of pain studies have been on male mice.

A simple and obvious conclusion would be that these researchers (with the bizarre exception of the dolorimeter incident) don’t like conducting pain experiments on women because they don’t like seeing women in pain; quite likely they also run the risk of catching flak from others if they were to propose or conduct studies where they put women in pain. And this bias is so deep that they don’t even want to conduct those studies on female mice. But this isn’t Gordon’s take; for her, the bias is actually anti-female. She says with exasperation “even rodents can’t catch a break from gender bias!”

Gordon is seeing a misogynist or pro-patriarchy bias in all of this history. For example she also points out that there has been very little study on pain in trans people; we’re meant to come to is that pain studies are biased to benefit men. She also mentions that “pervasive myths about how women handle pain have endured well into the 21st century.” She sites a review of studies that concludes that researchers are biased to believe that women have a greater capacity to endure pain than men because of childbirth and periods; but then also says that women are more likely to be seen as oversensitive, resulting in underdiagnosing pain in women.

Observing that studies focused on men could disadvantage women, asking how trans people might be different from men and/or women, noticing that misconceptions pain and women might bias thinking and research are all insightful, creative, and potentially valuable observations. She shows commitment to thinking through possible ways that the history of pain research and may be biased in a way that disadvantages women, and in that pursuit she exhibits impressive subtlety and critical instinct.

So how does this person with these skills and inclinations for asking questions not ask why it’s OK to conduct pain experiments on men? Why doesn’t she also ask questions about how all of this reflects on the way we see men? How does she not notice the biases in her own language, like “childbirth” versus “kicked in the nards?”

Consider the odd section (8:28 to 8:58) where she presents two seemingly contradictory biases against women in research; one bias that women have a greater endurance to pain than men, and at the same time another bias that women are hysterical about pain, where men are stoic. Her conclusion: “this means women are more likely to be ignored or undertreated for their pain.” Fine and good that she looks for how this might disadvantage women. But what about men? Don’t these myths imply misunderstandings of women AND MEN? And if there are misunderstandings about men, could those not also be harmful to men?

I can’t help but feel somehow that she is very similar to the researchers she’s criticizing. They see men as generic pain receptacles. This bothers her, not because it’s disturbing that we’re cool with seeing men in pain, but because this bias might create research that disadvantages women. The researchers have ideas about WOMEN’S relationship to pain, either that women are more resistant to pain or less; they don’t speculate about men’s relationship to pain, except to mumble that men are “stoic” and that pain isn’t a problem for them. This bothers her, not because we don’t speculate about men and pain, but because our speculations about women and pain aren’t as good as they can be. What all of this means to her is that we need to do a better job understanding women and pain, in order to better serve and protect women.

FInally, I imagine she sees the researchers as blinded by their gender bias, and prides herself on being able to see through all of that; but, besides using words like “nards,” she just made an entire video about childbirth versus getting kicked in the testicles basically without talking about men.