The elusive G-spot doesn’t exist after all
BODY LANGUAGE
Tim Dowling
So farewell then, G-spot. This well-known if poorly charted bit of female geography, first discovered in 1944 and popularised as the seat of sexual pleasure throughout the 1980s and 1990s, is now said to be a complete myth.
A report by Dr Terence Hines, professor of psychology at New York’s Pace University, claims that evidence for the existence of the G-spot is no more than anecdotal, with insufficient scientific proof to back it up.
Tales of the mysterious spot are simply “not supported” by biochemical or anatomical studies.
The message is clear: you can stop looking now. The game’s up. If you can’t find your G-spot, it’s only because you don’t have one. All those women who claim to have G-spots and all those men who claim they know where they can find one, are lying.
The G-spot, or Grafenberg spot, was first described by the German gynaecologist Ernst Grafenberg, who called it “a zone of erogenous feeling” and located it somewhere along the “suburethral surface of the anterior vaginal wall”, surprising lots of people who’d been past that way hundreds of times and never noticed anything. It was, and in some circles still is, thought to be roughly equivalent to the male prostate.
Subsequent research by Masters and Johnson convinced just about everybody that the clitoral orgasm was the only kind of female orgasm there was, but the G-spot was to rise again a few decades later, offering women a choice between good orgasms and better orgasms, and creating additional headaches for men with little or no anatomical training.
In its brief heyday the G-spot encouraged men to adopt a push-button approach to female sexuality, wherein the complex mysteries of desire were reduced to a procedural exercise, a matter of flicking the right switches and twiddling the right knobs in the right order.
Male sexual inadequacy was also given a whole new facet: the G-spot was just another thing we couldn’t find. The ability to locate the clitoris, once the basic benchmark of male sexual stupidity, was in the end a simple matter of turning the lights up for a few minutes.
The G-spot’s exact location was always vague not on, but somewhere behind the vagina’s “front” wall as if it were meant to be a secret. Just to make things more confusing, it was said to be in a slightly different place on every woman.
Men, as everybody knows, are useless at map-reading and extremely reluctant to ask directions, but even women seem confused about where and what the G-spot is exactly.
Sex in the era of the G-spot required tremendous patience, special positions, a lot of free time, even lessons. For anyone who had neither the time nor the inclination to treat the road to the G-spot orgasm as a mutual spiritual journey, there were special, oddly curved vibrators designed to remove some of the guesswork, but that’s just not the sort of thing a fella buys for himself.
None of that matters now, because there’s no such thing as the G-spot. It was all a trick. Those of us who never bothered to look can pat ourselves on the back for having resisted 20 years of sexual orthodoxy. We weren’t lazy, or selfish, or sexually unadventurous; we were just incredibly prescient.
As Hines himself said: “Having a good cuddle is far more important than looking for your G-spot.”
Of course, that’s what you would say if, like Hines, you couldn’t find a woman’s G-spot after spending many years looking. Who is he to say it doesn’t exist? The anecdotal evidence one encounters from women who seem to know exactly where their G-spot is remains pretty overwhelming, if not exactly conclusive.
Although many people men and women alike will be relieved to hear that something they couldn’t quite put their finger on was never really there in the first place, it seems unlikely that G-spot enthusiasts will allow Hines to write their favourite body part out of sexual history.
What does seems certain is that the complex physiology of female sexual response isn’t very well understood by anybody. That there is still some question about the existence of the G-spot, 60 years after somebody first found one, would appear to prove that.
And yet people will continue to enjoy sex or not, as the case may be using techniques based largely on trial and error, remaining largely ignorant of the finer anatomical points that no one can seem to agree on anyway.
Few people are as in touch with their bodies as they should be I myself have only the vaguest awareness that my liver wishes to speak with me on an urgent matter concerning us both so why should we be expected to be better informed about our sexual mechanics, especially when the jury is still out on how they work?
For now, anyway, the G-spot is history. It only remains for scientists to disprove the existence of the clitoris and the penis, and we can all stop fretting and go back to working on the garden the real British G-spot.