The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Italian Team Finds the G-Spot on Ultrasound

The big news this week in the sex-and-science universe is that an Italian team has demonstrated that the G-spot can be viewed on ultrasound. Surely, a new round of high-tech porno is sure to come.

But seriously, folks: As reported in New Scientist (ignore the overheated opening paragraph), researchers led by Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L’Aquila in Italy have demonstrated that there are anatomical differences between women who experience G-spot sensitivity and orgasms, and those who don’t.

What’s more, Jannini is quoted by New Scientist as saying “A simple test could tell you if it is time to give up the hunt for your G spot or if your partner just needs to try harder. For the first time it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has a G spot or not.”

New Scientist also says: “Jannini had already found biochemical markers relating to heightened sexual function in tissue between the vagina and urethra, where the G spot is said to be located. The markers include PDES - an enzyme that processes the nitric oxide responsible for triggering male erections.” (as reported in New Scientist in 2002). Those markers have still not been linked to the ability to experience a vaginal orgasm in the absence of clitoral stimulation.

The Italian team recruited twenty women, nine of whom typically experienced vaginal orgasms and eleven of whom didn’t. They reported in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that the women prone to vaginal orgasms had thicker tissue in the urethrovaginal space — the area at the anterior (belly-side) wall of the vagina, kinda on the back side of the urethra. Jannini claims this means that “women without any visible evidence of a G spot cannot have a vaginal orgasm.”

Beverly Whipple, coauthor of the classic book that coined the term G-spot, responded to the study by implying — or maybe I’m just reading this in to her comments, guilty of wishful thinking — that orgasm does not equal sexual pleasure. “It is an intriguing study, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that women who don’t experience orgasm don’t have any tissue there,” said Whipple. Whipple also said that the next step would be to perform the study again, but compare the women’s urethrovaginal area after they were aroused, since the area “is believed to swell in response to physical pleasure.”

I’ll say! As someone who’s had the tips of my fingers on the G-spots of more genetic females than propriety allows me to mention (high five!), I can say that every one of them I spent any serious time fingerfucking had a discernible swell exactly where the G-spot is “supposed” to be. It feels kind of spongey and springey, which is about as unsexy a way to describe it as I can come up with, but it’ll have to do. It varied greatly in size and firmness between women, and also varied depending on how turned on they were. What varied more dramatically is the degree of sensitivity shown by women to stimulation of the G-spot. Some went nuts; some liked it pretty well; some were sort of, like, “eh.” My fragmented memories tell me that the ones with more prominent swelling in their G-spot region tended to experience greater pleasure from it.

On the other hand — and I don’t want to understate the importance of this — I’ve had pleasurable sex with only one woman who didn’t go absolutely bugfuck batshit given the appropriate and enthusiastic attentions paid to her clitoris. That woman found vaginal stimulation much more satisfying, and stimulation applied to her clit kind of “Eh.”

Subjective experience is a crappy mixer and a terrible aperitif for serious scientific research — but it makes a great chaser. And San Francisco sex nerds invariably find a million things to bitch about in any sexual study. Many things about this research are sexy, meaning sex-nerd sexy: Physical proof of the G-spot! Correlation of measurable urethrovaginal tissue with orgasms during intercourse! Italians!

More importantly, research like this represents the attempt of serious science to address the varieties of female sexual pleasure, something there just ain’t enough of.

But I have a lot of questions about how much this study really applies to practical reality. To start with, the sample — 20 women? — is small. I agree strongly with Whipple’s observation that ultrasound measurements should be conducted not just at baseline, but when the subjects are aroused — otherwise, the information’s relationship to actual sexual pleasure is pretty friggin’ limited. What’s more, the comments of the researchers seem to equate G-spot pleasure with pleasure during (heterosexual, vaginal) intercourse, when in fact intercourse can bring pleasure and even orgasm through other mechanisms — for instance, depending on the shape of the woman’s vulva and clitoris, thrusting might bring indirect clitoral stimulation through the labia or even with pressure on the pubic bone.

Oh, and there’s also the women I’ve known who report what appear to be G-spot orgasms from anal sex — that’s beyond the scope of this study and this article, but it’s important enough to mention, as is the fact that some women I know can occasionally come without any genital or anal stimulation at all; human bodies, female or male or other, are riddles wrapped inside enigmas.

I also look with both fascination and discomfort at the idea, mentioned in the New Scientist article, that G-spot development could be encouraged by hormones. I’m all for using hormones for whatever; I’m down with the restructuring of the human body to help it satisfy the owner’s sexual needs. But any potential future pharmaceutical solution to a sexual problem sets off alarm bells in my brain, encouraged by the daily flood of Viagra spam that buries my inbox. And you don’t have to go very far to find sketchy fix-er-ups around the G-spot.

Last, but far from least, I can’t help but say: here we are talking about the G-spot again. Awesome, great, kickass — friends, I dig the G-spot; it rocks as hard as Hendrix at Woodstock. But in all this fascination with the G-spot, not to mention fringe sex culture’s longstanding obsession with female ejaculation, do we tend to forget about the C-word? Yes, that’s right, the clitoris — which has as many if not more flavors than the G-spot, tends to provide plenty of the “waves of pleasure spreading out across the whole body” New Scientist refers to in the G-spot orgasm, and doesn’t have nearly enough research — formal and informal (high five!) — devoted to it.

I’m with Betty Dodson on this one, basically. Dodson spends a lot of her time “explaining to women young and old that the clitoris is their primary sex organ — not the vagina.” I’m not quite as convinced of that as is Dr. Dodson. I think all women have different sex organs, and for any given woman the vagina or the G-spot or some other erogenous zone (tits and ass spring to mind) may be very important to her. But Betty has a good point. To quote an underground comedy that has little if anything to do with sexual liberation: “Vagina, vagina, vagina! Does that do anything for you?”

So many women have so much anxiety wrapped up in whether their sexual response cycle is appropriate and whether their erogenous zones are the correct erogenous zones. It’s dangerous, because trying to find pleasure where you don’t already find it can be both invigorating and crazymaking. How many women take the promise of an undiscovered G-spot as the hope that they’ll be able to experience something they can’t yet find with their partner? If personal experience makes a good chaser for sexual science, then insecurity, shame and desperate expectations make the worst possible one.

The search for the G-spot, both individually and culturally, has all elements of a riveting story — it promises intriguing investigations and an unfolding mystery, not to mention the promise of virtually unlimited power when the mystery is solved, and, of course, the subtext that the hard cock, or its silicone doppelganger, is the bringer of orgasmic pleasure. It’s Agatha Christie crossed with The Matrix crossed with Deep Throat. Certainly the clitoris gets lots of press, but how can it compete?

San Francisco Sex nerds love to turn every piece of sexual research into a springboard to talk about all that is wrong in society, and nobody likes a crankypants. Research like this Italian study is critically important; I believe that modern medicine should tell us everything about the G-spot specifically and about sexuality in general that it can find out.

But like I said, when it comes to scientific sexual research, personal experience makes a crappy aperitif, but a great chaser. In researching pleasure, let’s not let the sexy appeal of new discoveries eclipse what we already know.

Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at www.thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.