According to our survey 11 % have avoided sex because they
can’t find their G-Spot.
44 % of women have felt frustration confusion or anxiety
were trying to located their G-Spot.
31% of women said their partner has gotten frustrated while
searching for it.
82% of men think woman has the magic button.
So here’s the thing: You believe a total
lie about your own body. And we’re...partly to
blame. We’re sorry. And we want you to know:
ONCE UPON A TIME, that time being 1982, there was sex.
And then, suddenly, there was sex.
The difference? A teensy half-inch ribbed nub on the upper
front wall of your vagina. Scientists—and magazines (hi) and books and sex-toy
companies and movies and TV shows and your roommates and your sex-ed
teacher—reported that it was a universal key to The Mysterious Female Orgasm.
And thus began the era when you were supposed to be able to say “it blew my
mind” to your girlfriends at brunch.
Or was it three inches wide? Farther down, near your vulva?
Slick instead of ribbed? Kinda springy to the touch?
Whatever, it was it. And fuck if we all didn’t work hard to
find our own. Back in 1982, Cosmo told women to get there by “squatting” so it
would be easier “to stick one or two fingers inside the vagina” and make the
necessary “come-hither motion.” A 2020 Google search turns up thousands of road
maps (“where is the G-spot?” has been searched more times than Michaels Jordan
and Jackson). That cute-adjacent guy you slept with in college tried the
classic pile-drive maneuver, to middling success.
But it must not matter, because the G-spot economy is
booming: G-spot vibrators, G-spot condoms, G-spot lube, G-spot workshops, and,
for the particularly daring and/or Goop-inspired, $1,800 G-spot shots meant to
plump yours for extra pleasure.
Hell, even Merriam-Webster is in on it: The G-spot is a
“highly erogenous mass of tissue” in every dictionary it prints. So then why,
when we talked to the woman who helped “discover” it, did she tell us we’ve all
been obsessed with the wrong thing?
THAT WOMAN IS Beverly Whipple, PhD. She and a team of
researchers officially coined the term “G-spot” in the early ’80s. They named
the thing, which they described as a “sensitive” “small bean,” for German
researcher Ernst Gräfenberg (yeah, a dude). And just like that, your most
frustrating fake body part was born.
Honestly, it all got out of hand from there, says Whipple.
Her team wasn’t saying that each and every woman has a G-spot. (“Women are
capable of experiencing sexual pleasure many different ways,” she insists to
Cosmo now. “Everyone is unique.”) And despite that bean analogy, they didn’t
mean it was a spot spot. They were talking about an “area” that could simply
make some women feel good. But the media (hi again!) preferred the neat and
tidy version and ran with it like a sexual cure-all.
Researchers did too. In 2012, a study published in The
Journal of Sexual Medicine proclaimed that of course the G-spot was real. It
just wasn’t a bean. It was actually an 8.1- by 3.6-millimeter “rope-like” piece
of anatomy, a “blue” and “grape-like” sac. This revelation came from
gynecologic surgeon Adam Ostrzenski, MD, PhD, after his study of an 83-year-old
woman’s cadaver. (He went on to sell “G-spotplasty” treatments to women.) Over
the years, lots of other researchers found the G-spot to be lots of other
things: “a thick patch of nerves,” “the urethral sponge,” “a gland,” “a bunch
of nerves.”
For the most part, though, the thing that women were
supposed to find has remained a mystery to the experts telling them to find it.
Dozens of trials used surveys, pathologic specimens, imaging, and biochemical
markers to try to pinpoint the elusive G-spot once and for all.
In 2006, a biopsy of women’s vaginas turned up nothing.
In 2012, a group of doctors reviewed every single piece of
known data on record and found no proof that the G-spot exists.
In 2017, in the most recent and largest postmortem study to
date done on 13 cadavers, researchers looked again: still nothing.
“It’s not like pushing an elevator button or a light
switch,” asserts Barry Komisaruk, PhD, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University.
“It’s not a single thing.”
“I don’t think we have any evidence that the G-spot is a
spot or a structure,” says Nicole Prause, PhD, a neuroscientist who studies
orgasms and sexual arousal. “I’ve never understood why it was interpreted as
some new sexual organ. You can’t standardize a vagina—there is no consistency
across women as to where exactly we experience pleasure.”
Sure, she says, some women might have an area inside their
vaginas that contains a bunch of smaller, super-sensitive areas. But some women
say that when they follow Cosmo’s old two-finger come-hither advice, they feel
discomfort or like they have to pee. Others feel nothing at all. Because for
them, there’s nothing there.
NOW FOR THE TRICKIEST PART of this story—and, TBH, the
reason this is even a story at all. Despite the lack of scientific evidence,
there are still lots of G-spot believers, many of them super-smart,
well-meaning sex educators. They’re a pretty heated group (one hung up on us
when we called for an interview) and not...entirely...wrong. Their point is: If
a woman believes she’s found her G-spot, that should outweigh any lack of
science. And specifically, if someone claims to have experienced G-spot pleasure,
it seems “bizarre” to shut her down, says Kristen Mark, PhD, a sex educator at
the University of Kentucky. “That feels like going backward.”
Fair. It’s just that, as Prause points out, “women deserve
accurate information about their bodies.” Can’t we have our pleasure—and the
truth too?
As Prause said (and this bears repeating), for some women,
there is sexual sensitivity where the G-spot is supposed to be. But for others,
there’s none. Or it’s to the left. Or it’s in a few places. And that’s kind of
the whole point. It’s all okay. It can all feel good.
What everyone can agree on is that we need more research.
Women’s sexual health is vastly understudied, and the scientific hurdles are
borderline absurd. In 2015, Prause tried to get a trial going at UCLA that
would study orgasms in women who were, you know, actually alive. The board
heard her out but wanted a promise that her test subjects “wouldn’t climax”
because they didn’t like the optics of women orgasming in their labs. (As
you’ve already guessed, the study wasn’t approved.)
So yeah, a new kind of thinking about female pleasure is
going to take a minute for certain people to get on board with. Like those
brunch friends who go on and on about G-spot rapture. And like men, who might
love the idea of the G-spot best of all. A G-spot orgasm requires penetration,
which just so happens to be the way most guys prefer to get off. “If you’ve got
a penis, it would be super convenient if the way the person with a vagina has
pleasure is for you to put your penis in their vagina,” says Emily Nagoski,
PhD, author of Come as You Are, a book that explores the science of female
sexuality. Related: 80 percent of the men in Cosmo’s survey said they believe
every woman has a G-spot; nearly 60 percent called it the “best way” for a
female partner to achieve pleasure. (“Once you rally enough experience like
myself, you can find it on every girl,” one supremely confident guy told us.)
Just like it did for women, the G-spot gave men a universal
performance metric and the “cultural message that pleasure for women happens by
pounding on their vaginas with your penis,” says Nagoski.
Things were this close to going in a much better direction.
“In the early ’80s, there was research that was really putting the clitoris
front and center,” explains Nagoski. “Then along came the G-spot research,
creating this pressure for women to be orgasmic from vaginal stimulation even
though most women’s bodies just aren’t wired that way. And if you really think
about why vaginal stimulation matters so much, it’s because it puts the focus
on male pleasure.”
GO AHEAD AND let that sink in while we gear up to talk about
the fallout. Not only the sexual frustration (although that, definitely that)
but also the giant emotional burden the G-spot unwittingly dropped on all of
us. Turns out, the thing that was supposed to awaken and equalize our sex lives
came with a really shitty side effect: shame.
More than half of the women in Cosmo’s survey reported
feeling inadequate or frustrated knowing that others are able to orgasm in a
way they can’t. Eleven percent said this made them avoid sex entirely. “I have
friends who say they always climax from intercourse alone and they’re like,
‘You just haven’t found it yet,’” says Alyssa, a Cosmo reader. “It’s like
they’re the lucky ones.”
That’s why on one recent Tuesday, another Cosmo reader,
Beth, found herself sitting in a room that looked oddly like a vagina—low, pink
light, a candle burning softly nearby—getting her first round of G-spot
homework. She and her husband had hired a sex therapist to help them feel more
in sync sexually. Basically, he wanted it a lot more than she did, probably
because she was still waiting for something...bigger. “I can have a clitoral
orgasm,” she says. “But knowing that there’s something better, I wanted to
experience that.”
The couple’s take-home tasks were a checklist of “sexy”
moves, designed to help them find Beth’s G-spot so she could have The Orgasm.
“The night we did doggy-style, it felt...god, there was the sound of skin
smacking and my husband asking me if it was working. It was terrible.” (We
fact-checked this with Beth’s husband. Oh yeah, “it sucked.”) After that, they
gave up.
Other couples are still searching: 22 percent of guys say
that finding a woman’s G-spot is the number one goal of sex, which helps
explain the 31 percent of women who say they’re dealing with exasperated
partners. Prause worries about that. She says: “You’ll hear guys say things
like, ‘My last girlfriend wasn’t this much work,’ or ‘You take a long time to
orgasm,’ or ‘This worked for the last person I slept with.’ That makes women
question if they’re normal. And that, we hate.”
WHICH IS WHY we’re calling off the search. We’re done with
the damn “spot” and we’re sorry, again, that we ever brought it up. And
actually: Unless sex researchers make a surprisingly major breakthrough, Cosmo
won’t be publishing any more G-spot sex positions or “how to find it” guides.
“What would truly be revolutionary for women’s sex lives is
to engage with what research has found all along: the best predictors of sexual
satisfaction are intimacy and connection,” adds Debby Herbenick, PhD, a
professor at Indiana University School of Public Health and a research fellow
at the Kinsey Institute.
The science world is revolutionizing, too, trying to figure
out how to rebrand the G-spot into something more (and by “more,” we mean
actually) accurate. Whipple stands by her “area.” Italian researchers have
suggested renaming it the somewhat less sexy “clitoral vaginal urethral
complex.” Herbenick has her own ideas: “First of all, it should not be named
after a man. It’s a female body we’re talking about, and just because a man
wrote about it doesn’t mean he was the first to understand or experience it.”
But anyway, she’d go with “zone.”
As for us, we’re going to kick off this new era with a 100
percent G-spot-free piece of smarter, wiser sex advice, courtesy of Nagoski:
“If it feels good, you’re doing it right.” Call that whatever you want.
By ELIZABETH KIEFER
For Cosmopolitan
