So here is the thing: The G-spot doesn’t exist. There, I’ve put it. As blunt as possible. Once upon a time, that point being 1982, there was sex. And then, suddenly, there was sex.
The difference? A weeny half-inch ribbed nub on the higher front wall of your vagina. Scientists—and magazines (hi) and books and sex-toy companies and films and television shows and your roommates and your sex-ed teacher—reported that it had been a universal key to The Mysterious feminine climax. And therefore began the age when you were alleged to be able to say “it blew my mind” to your girlfriends at brunch.
Or was it three inches wide? Farther down, close to your vulva? Slick rather than ribbed? sort of springy to the touch?
Whatever, it was it. And fuck if we all didn’t push to find our own. A 2020 Google search turns up thousands of road maps (“where is that the G-spot?” has been searched a lot of 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 should not matter, because the G spot economy is booming: G spot vibrators, G spot condoms, G-spot lubricate, G-spot workshops, and, for the notably daring and/or Goop-inspired, $1,800 G-spot shots meant to plump yours for additional pleasure.
Hell, even Merriam-Webster is in on it: The G-spot is a “highly sensitive mass of tissue” in each dictionary it prints.
So then why, after we talked to the girl who helped “discover” it, did she tell us we’ve all been enthusiastic about the wrong thing?
That girl is Beverly Whipple, PhD. She and a team of researchers formally coined the term “G-spot” in the early ’80s. They named the thing, which they delineated 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.
11% of women have avoided sex because they can’t find their G-spot
Honestly, it all got out of hand from there, says Whipple. Her team wasn’t saying that every and each girl has a G-spot. (“Women are capable of experiencing sexual pleasure many different ways,”. “Everyone is unique.”) And despite that bean analogy, they didn’t mean it was a spot spot. They were talking regarding an “area” that might merely make some women feel good. but the media (hi again!) preferred the neat and tidy version and ran with it like a sexual remedy.
Researchers did too. In 2012, a study published in the Journal of Sexual medicine announced that of course the G-spot was real. It simply wasn’t a bean. it had been really 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, many different 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 foremost half, though, the thing that women were imagined to find has remained a mystery to the experts telling them to find it. Dozens of trials used surveys, pathological specimens, imaging, and biochemical markers to undertake to pinpoint the elusive G-spot once and for all.
In 2006, a biopsy of women’s vaginas turned up nothing.
A group of doctors reviewed in 2012 each single piece of known data on record and located no proof that the G-spot exists.
In 2017, in the most recent and largest postmortem study so far done on thirteen 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.”
44 % of women have felt frustration, confusion, or anxiety while trying to locate their G-spot
Now for the trickiest part of this story—and, TBH, the reason this is often even a story at all. Despite the lack of scientific proof, there are still many G-spot believers, several of them super-smart, well-meaning sex educators. They’re a fairly heated cluster (one hung up on us when we called for an interview) and not…entirely…wrong. Their purpose is: If a lady believes she’s found her G-spot, that should outweigh any lack of science. And specifically, if somebody claims to have experienced G-spot pleasure, it appears “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 reality too?
As Prause said (and this bears repeating), for some girls, 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 purpose.
It’s all okay. It will all feel good.
What everybody will agree on is that we need a lot of research. Women’s sexual health is immensely understudied, and therefore the scientific hurdles are borderline absurd. In 2015, Prause tried to induce a trial going at UCLA that would study orgasms in girls 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 girls orgasming in their labs. (As you’ve already guessed, the study wasn’t approved.)
So yeah, a brand new quite 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 regarding G-spot rapture. And like men, who may love the concept of the G-spot better of all. A G-spot orgasm needs penetration, which just so happens to be the method most guys prefer to get off. “If you’ve got a penis, it might 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 % of the boys in the survey said they believe each girl 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 woman,” one supremely confident guy told us.)
82% of men believe every woman has the magic button
The couple’s take-home tasks were a checklist of “sexy” moves, designed to help them find Beth’s G-spot so she might 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 % of men say that finding a woman’s G-spot is the number one goal of sex, which helps explain the 31 % of girls who say they’re addressing 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 astonishingly major breakthrough, Ownskin won’t be publishing any more G-spot sex positions or “how to find it” guides.
31% of women say their partner has gotten frustrated while searching for it
“What would actually 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, making an attempt to work 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 start this new era with a 100% G-spot-free piece of smarter, wiser sex advice: “If it feels good, you’re doing it right.” call that whatever you want.
XOXO
