In the battle of the sexes, there’s a fight that never seems to end: Who’s in more pain? Childbirth is pretty much the gold standard of pain in everyday conversation, but if you ask anyone with testicles, they’ll tell you that hitting your testicles must be more painful, and that even thinking about it makes you feel sick. So, which set of genitals causes the most pain? Uterus, testicles or a hidden third option?
Hitting the testicles
It may not have happened to you, but you’ve probably seen or at least heard that getting hit in the testicles hurts pretty bad. This can make you feel sick and even throw up, and if it’s too strong, it can send you to the hospital.
As a result of hitting the testicles, not only the testicle area hurts, but the pain is probably felt in the abdominal area as well. By IFL ScienceThe reason is that the testicles first grow in the abdomen and are transferred to the scrotum shortly before or after birth, along with a bunch of nerves and tissues.
But why should such a small area cause so much pain? It’s as if the testicles were designed to inflict the most pain on their owners. They are part of your genitals. In other words, they are used for sex and reproduction, and for this reason, there are many nerve endings in this area.
There are many nerve endings in the testicles
At the most basic level, you feel pain because of receptors and nerves, and from an evolutionary perspective, the reason why hitting the testicles hurts so much is because they are key to sperm production. Simply put, your body must be in pain, or you wouldn’t bother protecting it from a stray soccer ball or an angry person in front of you. You have to protect them because your gonads are naturally defenseless.
An article published in 2009 in the journal Evolutionary Psychology stated: It is almost inconceivable to ask why the ovaries do not descend during embryonic development and appear outside the female body cavity in a thin, unprotected sac. Because of their vulnerability to shock and temperature changes, unprotected ovaries located outside the body cavity are reproductively unfavorable. The same argument applies equally to the testicles. However, for various reasons (mainly the sperm’s need to be kept cool) the testicles insist on being outside the body.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this, for example, the testicles of elephants are located inside their bodies and next to their kidneys. But this is not the case in humans and walking on two legs made them more exposed to danger. So, in short, we have an organ that is naturally sensitive, in a thin pouch outside the body, and not protected by a solid structure. Evolution has really worked against men here, hasn’t it?
It seems silly to try to explain why labor might hurt. Childbirth is a process designed to expel one human from the body of another through a duct whose baseline diameter is just over three centimeters, and historically, it has killed one in every 25 of our past mothers.
The strange thing is that not all species suffer this much. The first birth of humans lasts an average of 9 hours (more than one working day and something like 30 times the time of giving birth to a horse). Even compared to our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the great apes, human births are much more painful and complicated.
Humans are the only animals that need help giving birth, and despite all our advanced technology and modern hygiene, maternal and infant mortality rates are still higher than our wild cousins.
The first birth of humans lasts an average of 9 hours
At equal weight, given the size of the mother, we have the longest gestations among primates, as well as the largest babies and the largest brains. During childbirth, a very large baby is removed from the mother’s body.
Scientists have proposed a hypothesis known as the birth dilemma: the evolutionary trade-off between being able to walk and run well and being smart. Of course, this hypothesis is not fully accepted. The human pelvis could open much wider without impairing our ability to walk, but it doesn’t, and evolution is lazy: evolutionarily speaking, that’s good enough, otherwise the human population wouldn’t have grown to eight billion people on Earth. They did not live.
Result? Hours and hours of painful labor during which your muscles contract uncontrollably, your cervix and vagina are stretched, your bones literally shift to make room for the baby, and there’s even a chance that the wall torn between vagina and anus.
Labor contractions are large muscle spasms during which the entire uterus contracts, and you may feel this discomfort wherever the muscle is contracting. Some people have contractions that make their pain double. There may be a feeling of cramping as well as back pain.
The psychological aspect of pain should not be ignored either. Sure, having your testicles hurt is bad, but it doesn’t last for hours or days, nor does it get worse over time. This is despite the fact that childbirth is disturbing for a person even months in advance: about two-thirds of American women experience a morbid fear of childbirth called tokophobia, and about 33 of every 100,000 of them They will die because of this.
Even after giving birth, the pain does not end. If you have seen those donut shaped cushions and thought to yourself who uses them? The answer is that in many cases those who have recently given birth. Even if the vagina is not torn and stitches are not needed in this very sensitive part of the body, it is still recovering from a terrible experience and pain should be expected. Meanwhile, those contractions are still ongoing and the reason for this is to prevent death due to severe bleeding and to restore the uterus to its normal size, which is 500 times larger by the time of delivery.
Pain is a subjective phenomenon, and what can be torture for one person, may be tickling for another. Owners of testicles may refer to mothers of four children and conclude that childbirth does not hurt so much that they are satisfied to do it several times. But we settle for the easy answer that there is a tie. At least we thank God it is not a kidney stone.
