My girlfriend and friends have been arguing over the question: Which
hurts more, getting kicked in the Vagina, or getting kicked in the
nuts?  Please, give us an answer!  Unbiased, Please!  We want an
answer from both man and woman, and make it MEDICAL!  Thanks!

Since pain is a highly subjective thing that is extremely difficult to
measure, I would expect that the only way this could be answered would
be to find a person who has both male and female sexual organs. There
are a few such people, but I doubt that anyone has subjected them to
experiments in which each of their tender parts were kicked, and the
results were charted.

Note also that the vagina is an internal organ. If you're doing your
own searches on this, you may want to use the word 'vulva', which
refers to the external female genitalia.

Here, for instance, is a search string that may help:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22kicked+in+the+vulva%22+%22in+the+testicles%22

Testicles, but it's a biased answer. Sorry.

Given the nature of the organs this is a poor comparison, the vulva
closely resembles the lips on both males and females, in fact it is
argued that our lips developed it?s current shape reflecting that of
the vulva when walking upright hid the vulva from view, making the
lips a sexual organ. So for a male to get a good idea of what it would
feel to get kicked on the vulva you could get kicked on the lips.

The testicles would be better compared in sensitivity to the breasts
of a woman, however due to the size and consistency the breasts of a
woman are much less sensitive to impacts.

Though Pink is right that pain is subjective, something I read in a
journal years ago--decades ago, really, I cannot give you the source,
sorry--might give you the answer.

The short answer is that a man getting kicked in the testicles would
experience more pain than a woman getting kicked in the equivalent
groin spot, all other things being equal. (As was mentioned, it'd be
the vulva receiving the kick, not the vagina, since the vagina is
internal.)

As many men can affirm, receiving even a minor hit to a testicle hit
can produce excruciating pain. Is there a female equivalent to
testicular pain? Yes, and it's not the vagina and it's not the vulva.
It's pain produced by hitting an ovary, which is, after all, the
woman's corresponding reproductive organ to the testicle. (I'm a man,
and I never would have known this if I hadn't read that journal
article so long ago.)

Why hasn't more been written about ovarian-inflicted pain? Why don't
movies and TV shows give it the same frequent and often slapstick
treatment as testicular injury? Because the ovaries are protected by
the abdomen, so it would take an extreme, focused blow to inflict the
same amount of pain that a testicle can get much more easily.

Hope this helps,
dtc

Interesting comparison, but I rather expect that internal organs don't
have (as sensitive) pain nerves as the testes, which need them as a
signal to protect them from damage.

Hi, myoarin,

I'm neither a physiologist nor a medial doctor, so I can't say for
sure. But if I remember correctly--and I admit that it's possible that
I'm wrong--the article I read long ago said that sensations were the
same for testicles and ovaries.

You make a good point that since ovaries are enclosed in the abdomen,
that they don't have to have the same pain sensitivity at a male's
testicles, which are external.

But one thing to consider--and I say this in support of what I read
many years ago--is that when a fetus is formed, it is sexually
ambiguous. Except for a small percentage of babies born with sexually
ambiguous genitalia, sex is determined in utero. Testes, a penis, and
a scrotum are formed for a male; ovaries, a vagina, and a vulva are
formed for a female. (There are associated formations with each sex,
of course.) So it makes sense that if a normal female child is born,
her formerly ambiguous gamete-reproducing organs would have many of
the same traits as the same organs that she would have developed had
she become a male--for example, sensitivity to pain stimuli.

My long-time girlfriend is a science professor at a big university. We
had a casual friend years ago--back in the mid-1990s--who was a
physiology expert, but she moved to another university long ago, and
we've lost touch. Now we have no physiologist friends, unfortunately.
So all I can do is fall back on my memory of the article I read so
long ago, written by a medical expert. Given the fact that all normal
human genitalia start off exactly the same in utero, I don't have a
problem thinking that an ovary is as sensitive as a testicle.

dtc

Hi,

I just revisited this thread to see if there had been any follow-ups
since my last comment. While rereading everything, I noticed a glaring
typo that I made.

Correction for the first line of the body of comment 02 Oct 2006 19:16
PDT: I'm neither a physiologist nor a MEDICAL doctor...

I had written "medial doctor." Mea typo culpa. I don't know what a
medial doctor is, but I doubt that I'm one.  ;-)

dtc