Hell, even Merriam-Webster is in on it: The G-spot is a “highly
erogenous mass of tissue” in every dictionary it prints.
So then why, when we talked to the woman who helped “discover”
it, did she tell us we’ve all been obsessed with the wrong thing?
THAT WOMAN IS BEVERLY WHIPPLE, PHD. SHE AND A TEAM
of researchers officially coined the term “G-spot” in the early
’80s. They named the thing, which they described 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.
Honestly, it all got out of hand from there, says Whipple. Her
team wasn’t saying that each and every woman has a G-spot.
(“Women are capable of experiencing sexual pleasure many differ-
ent ways,” she insists to Cosmo now. “Everyone is unique.”) And
despite that bean analogy, they didn’t mean it was a spot spot.
They were talking about an “area” that could simply make some
women feel good. But the media (hi again!) preferred the neat and
tidy version and ran with it like a sexual cure-all.
Researchers did too. In 2012, a study published in The Journal
of Sexual Medicine proclaimed that of course the G-spot was real.
It just wasn’t a bean. It was actually 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,
lots of other 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 most part, though, the thing that women were supposed
to find has remained a mystery to the experts telling them to find
it. Dozens of trials used surveys, pathologic specimens, imaging,
and biochemical markers to try to pinpoint the elusive G-spot once
and for all.
In 2006, a biopsy of women’s vaginas turned up nothing.
In 2012, a group of doctors reviewed every single piece of known
data on record and found no proof that the G-spot exists.
In 2017, in the most recent and largest postmortem study to date
done on 13 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.”
that time being 1982, there
was sex. And then, suddenly,
there was sex.
The difference? A teensy half-inch
ribbed nub on the upper front wall of
your vagina. Scientists—and maga-
zines (hi) and books and sex-toy com-
panies and movies and TV shows and
your roommates and your sex-ed
teacher—reported that it was a uni-
versal key to The Mysterious Female
Orgasm. And thus began the era
when you were supposed to be able to
say “it blew my mind” to your girl-
friends at brunch.
Or was it three inches wide?
Farther down, near your vulva? Slick
instead of ribbed? Kinda springy to
the touch?
Whatever, it was it. And fuck if
we all didn’t work hard to find
our own. Back in 1982, Cosmo told
women to get there by “squatting”
so it would be easier “to stick one or
two fingers inside the vagina” and
make the necessary “come-hither
motion.” A 2020 Google search turns
up thousands of road maps (“where
is the G-spot?” has been searched
more times than Michaels Jordan
and Jackson). That cute-adjacent guy
you slept with in college tried the
classic pile-drive maneuver, to mid-
dling success.
But it must not matter, because the
G-spot economy is booming: G-spot
vibrators, G-spot condoms, G-spot
lube, G-spot workshops, and, for the
particularly daring and/or Goop-
inspired, $1,800 G-spot shots meant
to plump yours for extra pleasure.
96 Cosmopolitan May 2020
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