When it comes to pain, the distribution of men and women, are more similar than might be predicted by their general propensities for dominant and submissive roles.
As we did with dominance and submissive indices in the previous section, we can aggregate all of the data across these groups and calculate a per-person masochist or sadist index for both men and women. Unsurprisingly, women tend to be more masochistic, and men more sadistic, although the distinction is less stark than with dominance and submission indices, probably because a significant number of men and women, while they may enjoy dominant/submissive play, do not extend that generally and explicitly to pain.
This category is further broken down into light and heavy pain. Most women show significant interest in being the recipient of light pain (with much less interest in being the recipient of heavy pain). Men, on the other hand, are generally interested in receiving light pain, and less interested in receiving heavy pain, with both scoring lower than the corresponding desire for women. Across both light and heavy pain, the increased masochistic tendencies among women, perhaps as a subset of their general submissive tendencies, seem to be higher than for men.
A similar pattern holds for giving pain, both light and heavy. Women are generally ambivalent about causing light pain to their partners (and not interested in causing heavy pain). Men, on the other hand, have a significant interest in causing light pain, and are again more ambivalent about causing heavy pain.
Generally speaking, women are slightly more interested in receiving light pain than men are in giving it. The same is true for heavy pain, but the interest in both inflicting heavy pain among men and receiving heavy pain among women is significantly lower.
What types of pain are people interested in receiving or inflicting? For clarity, I’ve separated pain types into two groups.
Nipple Clamps, Clothes Pins, Caning, Flogging, Spanking and Hot Wax;
Beating, Cock/Pussy Slapping, Cock/Pussy Torture, Scratching, Biting, Cutting
Consistent with general trend we observed above, women score higher on receiving all types of pain than giving. However, women tend to have mixed feelings about these pain modalities, with the exception of spanking, which they strongly tend to enjoy receiving (and, to a lesser extent, giving). It may be that in answering the “light pain” question above, women tend to think of spanking, and so score that highly, and classify these other modalities as “heavy pain”, although it is certain that different respondents have different definitions for heavy and light pain.
Men show a similar trend, with a general disinterest in receiving pain (with the exception of spanking for some men). Again, when giving pain, spanking rates more highly, with opinions of other modalities being more mixed.
Generally speaking, across men and women, giving and receiving, people tend to respond more favorably to the abstract concept of giving or receiving pain than they do when asked about a specific pain modality. The one exception is spanking, which tends to hold a place in the erotic landscape that is somewhat detached from it’s simple pain-causing role. Everyone likes spanking. On the flip side, cutting is almost universally disliked among both men and women, both for giving and receiving.
Luckily for men and women both, the interest of women in getting spanked is well matched with the interest of men in spanking them.
We can rank the types of pain people want to receive from their partner from most desired to least, for men and women, where we see a striking similarity in the order in which these activities are ranked.
Likewise, we can rank the types of pain people want to give to their partner, from high to low, and find a very similar ranking.
In fact, the ranking for give and receive is so similar, we can match them up almost perfectly, suggesting that there is a strong preference among both men and women for certain types of pain (spanking, biting), and a strong preference against others (cutting, cock/pussy torture).
We can plot these scores for women wanting to receive on the left and men wanting to give on the right. From this, you can see that, in general, women are more interested in receiving pain than men are in giving it, and that the rankings of each are almost identical (green lines). In fact, only very few are ranked in different order between men and women (red lines), and even those are not widely different in score.
Overall, the pain landscape is decidedly more mixed than the BDSM landscape, which is somewhat surprising. Without more detail about what people consider “light” and “heavy” pain, and how these correspond between men and women, it is difficult to draw to many conclusions. However, the spread between the sadist and masochist indices is far less pronounced for both men and women than the dominant and submissive index we saw in the last section. Part of this is probably connected to pain modalities that are somewhat disconnected from BDSM play (hot wax, nipple clamps, cutting) and more connected to sex in general (biting, scratching, spanking).
