to help them find Beth’s G-spot so she could have The Orgasm.
“The night we did doggy-style, it felt...god, there was the sound of
skin smacking and my husband asking me if it was working. It was
terrible.” (We fact-checked this with Beth’s husband. Oh yeah, “it
sucked.”) After that, they gave up.
Other couples are still searching: 22 percent of guys say that
finding a woman’s G-spot is the number one goal of sex, which
helps explain the 31 percent of women who say they’re dealing
with exasperated partners. Prause worries about that. She says:
“You’ll hear guys say things like, ‘My last girlfriend wasn’t this
much work,’ or ‘You take a long time to orgasm,’ or ‘This worked
for the last person I slept with.’ That makes women question if
they’re normal. And that, we hate.”
WHICH IS WHY WE’RE CALLING OFF THE SEARCH. WE’RE
done with the damn “spot” and we’re sorry, again, that we ever
brought it up. And actually: Unless sex researchers make a surpris-
ingly major breakthrough, Cosmo won’t be publishing any more
G-spot sex positions or “how to find it” guides.
“What would truly be revolutionary for women’s sex lives is to
engage with what research has found all along: the best predictors
of sexual satisfaction are intimacy and connection,” adds Debby
Herbenick, PhD, a professor at Indiana University School of Public
Health and a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute.
The science world is revolutionizing, too, trying to figure out
how to rebrand the G-spot into something more (and by “more,”
we mean actually) accurate. Whipple stands by her “area.” Italian
researchers have suggested renaming it the somewhat less sexy
“clitoral vaginal urethral complex.” Herbenick has her own ideas:
“First of all, it should not be named after a man. It’s a female body
we’re talking about, and just because a man wrote about it doesn’t
mean he was the first to understand or experience it.” But anyway,
she’d go with “zone.”
As for us, we’re going to kick off this new era with a 100 percent
G-spot-free piece of smarter, wiser sex advice, courtesy of Nagoski:
“If it feels good, you’re doing it right.” Call that whatever you want.
GO AHEAD AND LET THAT SINK
in while we gear up to talk about the
fallout. Not only the sexual frustra-
tion (although that, definitely that)
but also the giant emotional burden
the G-spot unwittingly dropped on
all of us. Turns out, the thing that
was supposed to awaken and equal-
ize our sex lives came with a really
shitty side effect: shame.
More than half of the women in
Cosmo’s survey reported feeling inad-
equate or frustrated knowing that
others are able to orgasm in a way
they can’t. Eleven percent said this
made them avoid sex entirely. “I have
friends who say they always climax
from intercourse alone and they’re
like, ‘You just haven’t found it yet,’”
says Alyssa, a Cosmo reader. “It’s like
they’re the lucky ones.”
That’s why on one recent Tuesday,
another Cosmo reader, Beth, found
herself sitting in a room that looked
oddly like a vagina—low, pink light, a
candle burning softly nearby—get-
ting her first round of G-spot home-
work. She and her husband had hired
a sex therapist to help them feel more
in sync sexually. Basically, he wanted
it a lot more than she did, probably
because she was still waiting for
something...bigger. “I can have a cli-
toral orgasm,” she says. “But knowing
that there’s something better, I
wanted to experience that.”
The couple’s take-home tasks were
a checklist of “sexy” moves, designed
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May 2020 Cosmopolitan 101