This past Saturday, I read an interesting article titled "The female price of male pleasure" by Lili Loofbourow. I came across it on a celebrity's Instagram story (hey, Kacey!) and was curious enough to search the piece up and check it out for myself.

Based on the title alone, I thought the article would be addressing the all-too-frequent neglect of the female orgasm in male-female intimate relationships. This is, of course, an important topic to engage with.

Lili does mention that, but she primarily confronts the problematic normalization of pain associated with sex, citing research that shows 30 percent of women in the United States reporting pain during vaginal sex, while a "large proportion" don't communicate with their partners about this pain.

Why would a woman not tell her partner if sex hurts? You might think it might be a hangup she has, not associated with anything that might be going on with the dude, physically or psychologically.

Well, Lili says, it's the normalization of pain during sex that creates this silence and cultivates a society of women who treat pain during sex as either unavoidable or something that must be endured for the man's pleasure.

She spoke to a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health who said, "'When it comes to 'good sex,' she told me, women often mean without pain, men often mean they had orgasms."

Can you see the problematic disconnect here? Why is it that some women put up excruciating pain during sex? Shouldn't intimacy be an equal exchange of pleasure, not a battle of survival for one participant and a visit to Paradise for the other?

We need to communicate with our partners and understand that sex is not a one-way street.

Let them know if something is wrong. Uncomfortable pain should not be a part of the experience for any woman, especially not when she is doing it to try and help her partner achieve orgasm while she "grits her teeth," as Lili puts it.

Let's all be better about checking in with our partners and understand what's working, what isn't, what can be done to please them, and if anything is severely wrong. There needs to be a comfortable environment between the two of you so that you can feel confident to express your emotions and your pain rather than bottle it up and suck it up for the ride.