How Painful Are Penis Plugs?

How Painful Are Penis Plugs Really?

Everyone has that moment when you first hear about penis plugs. That little sense of dread and confusion.

Why on earth would you want to put something in there? Surely that’s gotta hurt!

Like nearly everything sexual though, penis plugs really are a case of not knowing until you’ve tried it.

I’m sure we all remember the way a child reacts the first time they learn about sex and everyone ends up enjoying that after all!

It’s fairly safe to say though that one of the main things that hold people back from even trying penis plugs is the thought of pain.

To try and ease the minds of some of you out there who haven’t quite taken the plunge yet, we spent some time investigating to bring you a realistic idea of how much pain (if any) you’ll feel while using a penis plug.

What is Pain?

In order to talk about pain, we first need to discuss what pain even is.

At its core, a feeling of pain is a message from one part of the body to the brain. This message is sent from specialised nerves designed to let the brain know that something isn’t right, and the message travels incredibly quickly.

There isn’t just one type of pain though. When discussing different conditions, you might come across Acute Pain, Chronic Pain, and Intermittent Pain.

All of these serve different purposes, but for this discussion we’ll be focusing mainly on Acute Pain.

This type of pain is very short term, and it works like an alarm system letting our brain know that what we’re doing isn’t good, and we need to stop it as soon as possible.

Measuring Pain

With something as instantaneous as pain, it can be nearly impossible to effectively measure it.

Add to this that each individual person can interpret their brain signals differently to each other, and we end up with a complete mess where we can never really be sure what another person is feeling.

This has been an ongoing challenge for many medical professionals and even now, we don’t have any real answers to the problem.

Preliminary research from the USA found that exposing a subject to a pain source and using brain scans we can see which parts of the brain light up and get some idea of how much pain the subject is feeling.

But it’s going to be a long time before your local GP is scanning your brain when you go in with an ache or pain!

So How Do Doctors Measure Pain?

For those of you (myself included) who haven’t suffered any major pain in their lives, you might be shocked to learn how this is actually done.

Most of the time a doctor will use a simple scale from 1-10 and ask you to place your pain somewhere on the scale. Usually 0 will represent no pain at all and 10 will represent so much pain that you’re likely to pass out.

Once you place your pain on the scale they will have some idea of what you’re feeling and can prescribe appropriate medicine.

What’s The Problem With This?

Letting people decide how much pain they’re in might seem like an admirable thing to do, but it is fraught with problems. Most obviously, we all feel pain differently.

Often this is expressed through the phrase “pain threshold”. Your pain threshold is quite simply the point at which you start to feel pain.

Throughout history it’s been proven that we all have different pain thresholds. There are some trends which can be tracked, like men having higher pain thresholds than women, although even here there are problems.

Most societies expect men to be stronger than women, and if men don’t live up to this they can face a lot of social disapproval.

Any test examining pain thresholds can’t truly take into account how much a man could be suppressing his pain threshold in order to appear stronger to society.

So we can’t measure pain at all? I thought you were going to tell me how much a penis plug will hurt!

Well, yes. At the present time it’s very difficult to give an accurate measurement of how much pain you will feel from any given thing.

While we’ve learned some useful background information, it doesn’t help you a great deal in your own life.

What can help though is using these existing methods and knowledge to draw some (loose) conclusions about penis plugs. That’s a little wordy I know, but stick with me.

How Much Does It Hurt?

I can’t tell you how much something is going to hurt, or how much pain you’ll feel specifically. What we can do though is compare various painful things to each other!

You know how much stubbing your toe hurts you. So if I can tell you a penis plug hurts roughly the same amount as that, you now have an accurate way of telling what you’re going to feel.

Simple!

I collected a small set of painful experiences that a lot of us are likely to experience (and a couple we aren’t) and compared them to get a rough idea of how much something might hurt.

Bear in mind these are the answers a doctor might expect to get from you if they asked you to rate your pain.

These aren’t perfectly accurate ratings (childbirth and backaches are much more subjective, car accidents and burns depend on the damage caused) but they do give us a basic idea.

I wanted something a little more accurate though, so I asked the team here at Lustplugs to rate the same things (minus childbirth, car accident and broken bones) and placed the average result along the same 1-10 scale.

As you can see we had a few variances from the first set of ratings. This tells us that in general, the team here at Lustplugs have a slightly higher than average pain threshold.

Now this information on its own isn’t the most useful, but we can combine this with ratings of penis plugs on the same scale to get a better idea of how much they might hurt.

Are Penis Plugs Painful?

So how do we find information on the pain we might feel when we use a penis plug?

Well, it’s not a simple question. We can’t just say that you’ll feel this much pain when you put one in.

Many factors play a role, such as the amount of lubrication you use, the size and length of the plug, the thickness of the plug, or even how quickly you insert it.

Even a quick google search of the opinions of users can show a massively varied set of responses, and no doctor (that I could find) has ever asked someone to rate a penis plug on the pain scale.

Where Do We Start Then?

Well there’s a couple of medical examples we can use to draw some conclusions; catheters and kidney stones.

Both situations involve something similar in size to a penis plug being passed down your urethra in one direction or another.

If you’ve experienced either of these things, you’ll know that neither are particularly small, and depending on who you ask there are plenty of horror stories that detail the pain a person experienced.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about comparing all these responses is the sheer variety.

You’ll find exactly the same with penis plugs, with some only ever trying them once and being put off for life, and others never even feeling a slight twinge.

Everyone is different. Your level of discomfort may vary. It shouldn’t be agonizing.

One thing that does seem to be commonly accepted by the medical community is that the stress and anxiety of being in a hospital contributes massively to the amount of pain you feel.

The exact same thing is mirrored with penis plugs (and most sexual practises for that matter). The more relaxed and confident you are with what you’re doing, the less pain you’ll feel and your overall enjoyment level will rise.

But how much does it actually hurt!

I know we’ve taken a lot of tangents.

We know that the way you use your penis plugs will affect the amount of pain you feel.

We know that your pain threshold will affect the amount of pain you feel.

We even know that how relaxed you are will affect the amount of pain you will feel.

How can we possibly put an accurate measurement on any of this? Well, we can’t.

What we can do though is give a rough approximation.

At the lower end of the scale, we have people who are completely relaxed and using all the necessary time and lubrication to gently insert their plugs.

At the other end, we have someone rushing, anxious, and using no lube.

We’ve also added a few other stages of use along the scale. This is how it shapes up:

Now I know that these are still somewhat useless numbers to you, but this very clearly shows that for most people if they take their time and care when using a penis plug, they won’t actually feel any pain!

We aren’t all perfect though so getting to that zero pain point might take a little work.

Here’s the clever part though. We can pull together all the information we’ve explored throughout this little investigation to create one, final scale showing how much all of these things might hurt.

So there you have it!

A direct pain comparison of using a penis plug to many other things you might have experienced during your life.

This isn’t 100% accurate, but you can draw some conclusions by thinking about where you might rate various things and comparing our results.

One thing is for sure though. If you stub your toe or get a paper cut, and are perfectly willing to get on with your day without any real pain, then you have literally no excuse not to try a penis plug! It shouldn’t hurt any more than those!