Society no longer shies away from talking about sex. But while frank conversations about sexual pleasure are commonplace, sexual pain can still go unmentioned. Take, for example, a study published in December 2019 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which found that about 50 percent of women age 14 to 49 didn’t tell their partner that they were in pain during sex. Other research, including an earlier study published in October 2017 in the journal BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, showed similar findings, namely that women who found sex painful also had trouble talking about it with their partners.
