Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Farmerbob]

Most believe this is to protect them from going insane during childbirth, but that's irrelevant to this post.

And another study has shown that childbirth is only a fraction as painful as getting kicked in the ☼gold nuggets☼

Generally experiencing pain frequently raises your pain threshold. So whichever experiences more pain, is bothered less by it. Which is how you get loads of argument why x can handle more pain than y. Sometimes, you need to distance yourself, and ask, why the hell does it matter? :p

Some people are just wired differently.  I know that I am an oddball because I don't feel pain from wounds at all after 24 hours or so, unless I actively try to do something stupid, or use the wounded part.  No passive pain at all.  I mangled my hand in an accident years ago, and required three surgeries.  One the night of the accident, and two more after.  In each case, my hand hurt for about 1 day, then no more pain unless I hit or tried to use the hand.  The hand was in various stages of healing or physical therapy for about 14 months total.  I took no medicine for pain except for the first 24 hours after each surgery.

When I had all my wisdom teeth out, three being removed by hammering them to pieces, I never took pain medicine at all, the drugs I took during surgery lasted long enough.

I haven't had to deal with excessive amounts of pain throughout my entire life, so it's not learned behavior.

As for DF - I would bet it's based on stats.  Different stats might be higher on average for different genders, but I can't remember hearing that this was actually the case.

[The Axiom]

Many of the following tags are actually caste-level tags (in this case, male and female), but because there are no differences between the castes for these tags in a dwarf, you can add them earlier.  Any caste-level tag that occurs before castes are explicitly declared is saved up and placed on any caste that is declared later, unless the caste is explicitly derived from another caste.

Just a bit of digging around in the RAWs and I came across this note, leads me to beleive there are no differences as far as DF is concerned in 31.25

Off Topic

I always thought Females were less tolerent of external pain (lacerations and the like) due to more pain receptors in the skin. However Males seem to be less tolerant of internal pain (such as headaches or stomach pains etc)

If the above is the case it would explain where the original myth came from. As it is easier to beleive that a visible cut or similar would be more painfull and therefore assume because a male would deal with that injury better they must be more tolerant of pain in general.


I personally think its more likely to be a individual's willpower? (mental fortitude?) more so than gender specific.

[thegoatgod_pan]

This study http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/content/65/2/284.full makes a great point: it is the original source for the other study I cited, it also says that men have higher pain threshold and tolerances then women but also suggests a valid constructed rather than natural cause: "One possible explanation suggests that men are more motivated to tolerate and suppress expressions of pain because of the masculine sex role, whereas the feminine sex role encourages pain expression and produces lower motivation to tolerate pain among women."

In other words, men taking the study might have consciously or unconsciously reproduced the gender expectations socially demanded of them: acting like it didn't hurt, when it did, thus skewing the results, whereas women would express pain when they felt it (again in accordance with stereotypical gender roles)

All this implies that both sexes actually experience pain more or less the same in terms of intensity, but men feel compelled to pretend to feel otherwise, and women do not.

[the woods]

I don't have any modding or arena experience, and also I'm not a statistician, and I may be a smelly moron, but I hope I can contribute to the analysis meaningfully.

There are two possible ways off the top of my head fortress mode females would show a trend for pain tolerance, and I couldn't tell you for sure without having some source code.

*Females are more likely to spawn with high endurance/willpower/recuperation
*Females with the same endurance/willpower/recuperation stats feel less pain from the same wounds in the same place, due to a gender-based modifier or parameter.

To see if it's the first one, you can wait until your population reaches 200 (or 1000 if you really want to see) and just view every single unit, recording name, gender, skills, attributes. If you use a sql database, you can select the females and count high (willpower or endurance or recuperation) and the low (willpower or endurance or recuperation) and do the same for the males. You can get other reports with a full database of fortress dwarves too, so you could, for example, see if one gender has a high willpower and the other has a high endurance, overall. This might be spoiled by the way you train recruits or assign labor, so you should record migrants and babies as soon as they come in.

For the second case, the best black-box method I could suggest right now would be to have 100 males with the same skills and stats step on a rock trap in the arena (can you do that?) and of the wounded, note how many are in pain, unconscious, or extreme pain. Repeat for females who have the same stat and skill numbers as the males.

[Loud Whispers]

I also don't have any modding or arena experience, and also I'm not a statistician, and I may be a smelly moron, but I hope I can contribute to the analysis meaningfully.

There are two possible ways off the top of my head fortress mode females would show a trend for pain tolerance, and I couldn't tell you for sure without having some source code.

*Females are more likely to spawn with high endurance/willpower/recuperation
*Females with the same endurance/willpower/recuperation stats feel less pain from the same wounds in the same place, due to a gender-based modifier or parameter.

To see if it's the first one, you can wait until your population reaches 200 (or 1000 if you really want to see) and just view every single unit, recording name, gender, skills, attributes. If you use a sql database, you can select the females and count high (willpower or endurance or recuperation) and the low (willpower or endurance or recuperation) and do the same for the males. You can get other reports with a full database of fortress dwarves too, so you could, for example, see if one gender has a high willpower and the other has a high endurance, overall. This might be spoiled by the way you train recruits or assign labor, so you should record migrants and babies as soon as they come in.

For the second case, the best black-box method I could suggest right now would be to have 100 males with the same skills and stats step on a rock trap in the arena (can you do that?) and of the wounded, note how many are in pain, unconscious, or extreme pain. Repeat for females who have the same stat and skill numbers as the males.

I really debunked this one - In the Eugenics thread I checked the stats of EVERY Dwarf, and even screen capped them for good measure. More male Dwarves had the higher stats, and mental stats were entirely random (amongst the second generation). The males were also the ones with the most Dwarves which had no negative traits. So it's coincidence

[daggaz]

Just to chime in on the whole women giving birth and pain debate...

Its a bit of a stretch to link childbirth to an overall pain tolerance.  The former involves a massive hormonal cascade which drastically alters a womans physiology, including an unbelievable amount of endorphins and stress-related hormones.   These in turn make the woman able to endure massive amounts of pain (tho the majority still ask for, and receive, pain relieving drugs in modern hospitals).  This is during childbirth, not when she is walking around stubbing her toes or what not.  Yes, there might be a permanent physical adaptation in the female nervous system as well, but childbirth alone is not evidence of this by any means. 

To the same effect, men have similiar hormonal reactions when put under extreme trauma and shock.  Release of endorphins, stress-related hormones, etc. etc. 

So beware anecdotal evidence, and demand studies where subjects are exposed to so much pain that they reach physical thresholds, ie inability to perform simple math, or state their name, or retain consciousness.   

[Chilton]

Men = Feel more Pain but more Tolerant to it.
Females = Feel less but less Tolerant to it.
In Reality.

In DF, its Interchangeable.

well, according to both my incorrect info AND the seemingly correct info presented in the study, this is simply not true.

I, and most of the Folks I know, must be exceptions then.

Im not saying that sarcastically, mind You.

[Poindexterity]

Just to chime in on the whole women giving birth and pain debate...

Its a bit of a stretch to link childbirth to an overall pain tolerance.  The former involves a massive hormonal cascade which drastically alters a womans physiology, including an unbelievable amount of endorphins and stress-related hormones.   These in turn make the woman able to endure massive amounts of pain (tho the majority still ask for, and receive, pain relieving drugs in modern hospitals).  This is during childbirth, not when she is walking around stubbing her toes or what not.  Yes, there might be a permanent physical adaptation in the female nervous system as well, but childbirth alone is not evidence of this by any means. 

To the same effect, men have similiar hormonal reactions when put under extreme trauma and shock.  Release of endorphins, stress-related hormones, etc. etc. 

So beware anecdotal evidence, and demand studies where subjects are exposed to so much pain that they reach physical thresholds, ie inability to perform simple math, or state their name, or retain consciousness.

posts like this are the reason this is my favorite board on the whole internet.

[Muttonhawk]

Ooorr...

KICKED IN THE NUTS, FOR ‼SCIENCE‼

The same can't be said for the child labour part though 

Damn...

FORCED PREGNANCY, FOR ‼SCI-

No...no...That one's kinda wrong.

Hmm, another appearance of the anomaly known as !!ETHICS!!

The stories are true after all...

[Oliolli]

FORCED PREGNANCY, FOR ‼SCI-

No...no...That one's kinda wrong.

Eugenics would involve that.

[Chthonic]

Another chime-in . . .

Not only do women have something like double the pain receptors of men, but men have about double the opioid receptors of women.  This means that the natural painkillers a man's body produces are much more effective than those of women.  (It also means that to have the same effect, women require about twice the male dose of artificial painkillers during medical procedures to get the same effect).  This phenomenon has been observed in animals--mice, particularly--so it's probably not so much a socialization thing as an evolutionary thing.

This makes a certain amount of sense when you figure that throughout history, women have a lot less to gain (in terms of reproducing) from engaging in risk-taking acts that might entail pain than men do: 

Evolution disincentives women from doing the stupid crap that men do in order to impress women.

[TeleDwarf]

giving birth vs. groin kick experiment:
You can have a genetic female to give birth and then turn her into a ftm transgender, then kick her/him and ask for a comparition report.
Repeat for 10000-100000 times with females of different race/weight/age for statistically valid results.

[Loud Whispers]

FORCED PREGNANCY, FOR ‼SCI-

No...no...That one's kinda wrong.

Eugenics would involve that.

Eugenics? What kind of sick person would-oh wait.

[Poindexterity]

Men = Feel more Pain but more Tolerant to it.
Females = Feel less but less Tolerant to it.
In Reality.

In DF, its Interchangeable.

well, according to both my incorrect info AND the seemingly correct info presented in the study, this is simply not true.

I, and most of the Folks I know, must be exceptions then.

Im not saying that sarcastically, mind You.

there are always exceptions.

[Loud Whispers]

there are always exceptions.

But are they significant?

Teh wonders of science...