Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally: Hitting the G-spot?
Scientists have found the elusive “G-spot”, the erogenous zone in women that many claim exists. Or at least, Dr Adam Ostrzenski, a researcher at the Institute of Gynecology in St Petersburg, Florida, says he’s found it after doing an autopsy on an 83-year old Polish woman, 24 hours after she’d been killed by a blow to the head.
He says that inside the vaginal wall lurks a sac, in which you will find a structure – a membrane, white in colour, that acts as a blanket, and underneath that is a “bluish grape-like cluster” which Ostrzenski claims is the G-spot. His findings are published online. However, another doctor, Amichai Kilchevsky, at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, has reviewed 60 years’ worth of studies into it and concluded that it does not exist. Other scientists remain unconvinced. It was only one dissection, and one body, after all, though Ostrzenski claims to have seen similar structures in living people. The world remains, largely, unconvinced.
The G-spot gets its name from the sexologist Beverly Whipple, who wrote about it in 1982. As The Guardian’s Pass Notes put it: Do say: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!” Don’t say: “Left a bit, right a bit …”
There’s a more serious point. You may have already seen the flaw in Dr Adam Ostrzenski’s research, said a sceptical Joan Smith in The Independent. You see, he used a corpse, and most research into the G-spot has been on women that can actually breath. To Smith, it’s “always seemed … a weird obsession.” Isn’t it rather “tasteless” to do this “research on a murder victim”? Isn’t it “also rather pointless”? Women already have “an organ of sexual pleasure” – it’s “called the clitoris.” Why bother looking for “something else?” Well, men are afraid of the clitoris – look at the mutilation that still goes on in the Middle East (see Mona Eltahaway’s piece about misogyny and Arabs.) “And if it seems a stretch to talk about FGM and the G-spot in the same breath, maybe that’s because we still haven’t acknowledged the power of female pleasure – or the fear it evokes. Forget the G-spot and penis envy. Guys, it’s time to talk about the clitoris.”
At least it isn’t easy to find. Gosh, the terminology of the G-spot is “curiously unarousing,” said Laura Barton in The Guardian. But whether or not it exists, it’s true that we don’t know very much “about women’s sexuality.” If we can only find the G spot, then we can “draw a map, light the route, flag the way.” But isn’t this “a little dispiriting”? Female desire is as powerful as male – but it’s aroused differently. If the G-spot was easy to find, then the world would “be a very drab place indeed.”
Make of it what you willy. Ulrika Jonsson on The Sun suggested that ladies might like to draw out the “tiny sac-structure” on a piece of paper – “it actually looks like a small penis — make of that what you willy…” She suggested that the G spot did not in fact exist. In fact, “as highly unlikely that there is a little area no bigger than the size of half a fingernail downstairs in my undercarriage which could be the key to unleashing the inner erotic beast in me.” Martin Daubney, also on The Sun, suggested that it was now going to be much harder for men, who will have “to slavishly pursue” it “until we all die of exhaustion trying.”
