Female Orgasm Mysteries Revealed

As it turns out, Whipple and Perry’s tribute—the “Gräfenberg spot” (shortened by a reporter to the Gee spot and then by a publisher to the G-spot)—is a misnomer. Even Gräfenberg would have thought so, since he used the word only twice in his study, once to say it wasn’t a fixed spot but an area or zone and once to point out that women had innumerable erotically charged spots all over their body. Moreover, the G is more suitable as a tribute to Regnier de Graaf, who beat Gräfenberg to the punch by nearly three centuries, although he’s far from the first: A 12th century Indian love manual notes a sensitive spot “inside and toward the navel.” (Whipple and Perry would later clarify that Gräfenberg was the first modern researcher to describe the area.) Josephine Sevely, who in 1987 published her research in a book she called Eve’s Secrets, objects to the term G-spot. “Don’t call it that,” she says in an interview. “You could educate people if you don’t call it that.” Gary Schubach, a researcher who wrote his doctoral thesis on the source of female ejaculate, proposed the area be renamed the G-crest, since, when swollen with arousal, it feels more like a ridge than a spot. Early on, Whipple and Perry adopted De Graaf’s language, calling the area “the female prostate gland.” But G-spot proved to be an ingenious shorthand (especially, Perry notes, for a name with an umlaut), and a book Whipple, Perry and psychologist Alice Kahn Ladas published in 1982, The G Spot and Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality, has sold more than a million copies in 19 languages.

The G-spot—or the idea of it— commanded attention for the simple reason that it meant the clitoris was not the sole source of female pleasure, as Kinsey and Masters and Johnson insisted but many millions of women knew to be inaccurate. It meant there is no textbook female orgasm; some women come by clit, some by vagina but most apparently by a “blended” response involving as many as five major nerves. Some ejaculate, some don’t. Every variation on the theme is natural and normal. In a 2005 study of blood flow in the brain during climax, Whipple and a Rutgers University colleague, Barry Komisaruk,
found that while most of the same areass of the brain are activated regardless of whether the clitoris, G-spot or cervix is stimulated (or even if nothing at all is stimulated and the woman comes from fantasy alone -- a specialized skill, to be sure), women can distinguish between them. This is probably because the clit, G-spot and cervix are supplied by different nerves, Whipple says. For instance, the clit is innervated mainly by the pudendal nerve, the vagina by the pelvic nerve and the cervix by the hypogastic, pelvic and vagus nerves. Only the vagus bypasses the spinal cord, which may explain how women with complete spinal cord injury can still experience orgasm. The female orgasm will not be denied.

Male scientists have been debating for some time whether women can have vaginal orgasms without the involvement of the clitoris, that amazing organ whose only apparent function is to give pleasure. Women don’t seem to care so much as long as both possibilities aren’t ignored, although many report vaginal orgasms to be more intense, especially with ejaculation. In the early 20th century Sigmund Freud hypothesized that as a woman matures, she abandons her “phallic” masturbatory focus on the clitoris (the female version of the penis, said Freud) and turns to the more feminine, penetrative pleasure. Starting in the 1920s Dr. Karen Horney relentlessly mocked this “clitoral-vaginal transfer theory” until the aggrieved Austrian finally lashed out, claiming his critic had undiagnosed penis envy. Writing in his 1949 Human Sex Anatomy: A Topographical Hand Atlas, Robert Latou Dickinson sided with Horney. “Exalting vaginal orgasm while decrying clitoris satisfaction is found to beget much frustration,” he reported. “Orgasm is orgasm, however achieved.”

John Perry believes Freud has gotten a bum rap. The psychoanalyst recognized both areas as capable of producing climax, Perry notes, but at the time “it would have been as unthinkable for a Victorian to advocate the active use of the vagina before marriage as it was to advocate the continuation of masturbation after marriage.” The clit doesn’t atrophy after a woman begins to have mature vaginal sex, Freud wrote; its function becomes to transmit “the excitation to the adjacent female sexual parts just as pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire.”

Rather than Freud, Perry says, Alfred Kinsey is responsible for the notion of distinct innie and outie orgasms because he so adamantly dismissed the vaginal variety. He based his belief in a single sexual trigger on the fact that it exists in men, i.e., the penis. But Perry notes there is no scientific basis for that conclusion, especially since it’s clear men can also reach climax through prostate stimulation. To validate his view, Kinsey set up an experiment in which three male and two female gynecologists touched more than 800 women at 16 points, including the clit, labia, vagina and cervix, with the equivalent of a cotton swab. Triumphantly, Kinsey reported that while almost all the women felt the light touch to their clits, only 14 percent felt it inside their vaginas. He concluded that it was “impossible” for the vagina to be “a center of sensory stimulation.” Some see evidence in the way women masturbate: Kinsey found that of those he surveyed 84 percent said they manipulated their clits and labia minora, and less than 20 percent inserted a finger or an object and even then usually stimulated their clit at the same time. In other words, women may be fantasizing about intercourse, but they aren’t trying to re-create it.

Despite Kinsey’s confidence in his methods, Perry notes that a swab doesn’t feel much like a thrusting erection or a finger, and there is no evidence that light touching of any area tells you much about a person’s sexual response. In addition, Kinsey found that 91 percent of the women could feel pressure applied to the vaginal wall. So rather than proving vaginal orgasm a “biologic impossibility,” Perry says, Kinsey showed the opposite. Nevertheless, after the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, psychologists began repeating their single-locus mantra to female patients. In the 1960s Masters and Johnson declared the vagina had only two functions: to serve as a place to stimulate an erection to orgasm and as a place to deposit semen. Helen Singer Kaplan, another prominent sexologist, said, “Probably most women are not intended to have orgasm during intercourse.” Yet no one could explain why so many women, including thousands of those interviewed by Kinsey and his researchers, had such good things to say about the vagina. Kinsey concocted a few hypotheses to explain pleasure from penetration, including the “psychological satisfaction” of the act (reflected years later in a comment by sex researcher Shere Hite that clitoral orgasms are “real” while vaginal ones are “emotional”), the grinding of their partner’s pelvis when he doesn’t use his arms to support himself (promoted decades later as the “coital-alignment technique”) or indirect stimulation of the clit when it is tugged by the movement of the muscles in the vagina and pelvic floor.

There’s another factor Kinsey didn’t consider. In 1924, in a French medical journal, an amateur sexologist named Marie Bonaparte (a great-grandniece of Napoleon) reported the results of her examination of 243 women recruited through doctor friends. She interviewed each patient about her sexual response, then measured the distance from the woman’s vagina (more precisely, her urethral opening) to her clitoris. Bonaparte found that the 21 percent of her sample who had the most space—as much as two inches—reported the least frequent orgasms from intercourse. The 69 percent who had less than an inch said they nearly always came from penetration. The 10 percent who had precisely an inch, Bonaparte said, lived on the “threshold of frigidity.” Kim Wallen, a professor of behavioral neuroendocrinology at Emory University who has verified Bonaparte’s math and hopes to repeat her experiment, sums up the findings thus: “If the distance is less than the width of your thumb, you are likely to come.” If true, the maxim raises an intriguing question: Are many, most or all women who regularly climax during penetration simply those whose clits are nearest the thrusting penis? Is the G-spot a pink herring?

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