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Pain during sex is common, and never something to accept

Three quarters of women experience it. Most causes are treatable.

Pain during sex is common, and never something to accept

Roughly three in four women report pain during intercourse at some point in their lives, and for around 10 to 20 per cent it is persistent. The common causes are specific and identifiable: insufficient arousal, low oestrogen after menopause or while breastfeeding, infections, endometriosis, and vaginismus — an involuntary muscular reflex, not a decision.

Almost all of them respond to treatment. The reason so many go untreated is that persistent pain is widely assumed to be normal, so it is not mentioned; surveys find the average delay between onset and raising it with a clinician runs to years.

Sources

ACOG Practice Bulletin (2017); Mitchell et al., The Lancet (2013)

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General information, not medical advice. Anything persistent or painful belongs with a doctor, who has heard it before.