Everything you thought you knew about the G-spot is probably wrong and here’s why

THE G-spot was unleashed upon the world more than three decades ago, when Beverly Whipple announced on US television that by pressing a particular spot in the vagina, women would get orgasms.

Since then we’ve hunted for the G-spot in bedrooms and laboratories. But enough of us came up empty-handed that it raised the question: Does the G-spot exist?

To find out, visited Beverly Whipple, now a professor of nursing at Rutgers University, at her home in New Jersey.

Beverly told us that she found this magical spot while studying women who thought they were peeing during orgasms.

To study the women, her team inserted their fingers into patient’s vaginas to feel around for sensitive areas.

“You go all around the vaginal wall,” she said, from 12 o’clock, to 3 o’clock, to 6 o’clock and so on, "saying, 'How does this feel? How does this feel?’

“Between 11 and 1 o’clock, at the front wall of the vagina, we got a lot of smiles.”

She scoured the literature and found one article that described what she’d seen, an that was published in an obscure journal in 1950 by Dr. Ernst Grafenberg.

And so, Beverly named the spot, the Grafenberg Spot, after Dr Ernst Grafenberg. It soon got shortened to the G-spot.

In 1982, she published her first book called, The G Spot and other discoveries of human sexuality. And from there she was invited by television network after television network, to tell the world about the G-spot.

Amid all the fame, a scientific question lingered: What, exactly, is the G-spot?

Helen O’Connell, now a professor of urology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, has dissected around 50 vaginas throughout her career and studied many more alive vaginas.

She says her work “did not seem to show anything in the vaginal wall that would be a direct anatomical structure leading to that experience.”

That is, nothing special in the vagina, where the G-spot should be.

Other scientists looking for the G-spot, haven’t had much luck either.

One review of many studies on the G-spot published in 2001, called it “a sort of gynaecological UFO: much searched for, much discussed, but unverified by objective means.”

A decade later, another review of the work looking at dozens of trials concluded that the studies “still fail to provide irrefutable evidence for the G-spot’s existence”.

Looking at Beverly’s original research, it’s far from irrefutable. One of her first studies into this, published in 1981, was on just one woman.

A second study of 47 women found that they all had a sensitive spot but pressing it in the lab did not produce orgasms, for any of them.

In her book she described 400 woman who had this spot but this sample was never published in a peer- reviewed journal. A later experiment in 1983 tested 11 women and found a spot in only four of them.

Still, pressing something in the vagina is making at least some women smile. What is it?

The consensus that Helen and other researchers have arrived at is that what Beverly had identified as the G-spot, isn’t a spot at all.

I guess we’ve misled people, because it’s more than one little spot, it’s a whole area

Beverly Whipple

It’s probably the clitoris, working with parts around it, like the urethra and vagina. But the clitoris is a much larger and more complicated organ than many people think. That bit that you can touch, is literally the clit of the iceberg.

In 1998, Helen published research showing that the clitoris has two arms that extend down, called the bulbs, and two legs that go back for up to 9 centimetres, called the crura.

Helen also discovered that clitoris, shares some of the same blood and nerve supply with the urethra and the walls of the vagina share. And later preliminary work, suggest that during sex the clitoris, urethra and vagina may push, prod and excite each other, kind of like puppies in a basket.

So interconnected are all these parts that Helen, and others, now argue that they should get their own name. But, spot is out.

Complex is the new word. This area that women are pressing to get orgasms is now called the Clitoral, Urethral Vaginal Complex, or CUV Complex.

As catchy as the CUV Complex, Helen says that we should start using this anatomically correct term, because using the term “the G-spot”, makes it sound like all you have to do is find a spot, press it and whammo, multiple orgasms!

“That somehow if you touch it enough or thrust it harder, that somehow magic is going to occur. Well that’s just a really bad paradigm,” she says.

This infatuation with “finding the G-spot”, is something that Beverly regrets unleashing.

“I guess we’ve misled people, because it’s more than one little spot, it’s a whole area,” she said.
In fact, Beverly always advocated for focusing on the fun stuff around sex, rather than hunting for magical spots.

“Sometimes holding hands, or touching, whatever it is that feels good to you, is an end in itself,” she said.