From the archive: 2010
Instead, a landmark date in sex history has slipped by all but unnoticed.
This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the "discovery" of that controversial pleasure zone, the G spot (not to mention the associated phenomenon of female ejaculation).
Before anybody starts with the usual breast-beating, though, let's get a couple of things straight:
1) yes, the G spot exists;If anything, you should be thankful they didn't call it "the Whipple Tickle." (More about that later…)
but
2) no, you shouldn't get your knickers in a twist about it.
First, here's the lowdown on der G-Punkt, as it's known in German.
In 1950, a gynecologist who'd been ransomed to America from the Nazis wrote a short article for the International Journal of Sexology called "The Role of the Urethra in Female Orgasm."
At the time, Dr. Ernst Gräfenberg was nearly seventy years old but still treating women on New York's Upper East Side.
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| Outside Dr. Graefenberg's New York office |
However, his path to Park Avenue had been anything but easy.
Gräfenberg had started out in the working-class districts of Berlin, where he'd been shocked by the suffering he encountered, including victims of botched abortions who died in his arms and women who lost their lives trying to give birth to yet more children, in addition to the ten, fifteen, and even twenty they already had.
Experiences like that inspired the young doctor to invent one of the first ovulation tests, as well as the first "safe" intrauterine device, or IUD.
By the time Hitler came to power, Gräfenberg was at the top of his profession, and like many sex researchers (and German Jews), he hoped he would be safe, not least because some of his patients were the wives of Nazi officials.
However, he was eventually thrown into prison on a dubious charge—he'd supposedly smuggled a valuable stamp out of Germany—inspiring his colleagues in the small world of sexology to band together to get him out.
According to the surprisingly little information we have about his personal life, the person who ransomed him was none other than the mother of American birth control clinics, Margaret Sanger, who sprung the inventor of the IUD from jail in 1940.
Once freed, Gräfenberg embarked on what must have been a fascinating odyssey, emigrating to New York via Siberia, Japan, and Hollywood, where he met up with former patients, presumably members of the German film industry who'd also escaped the Nazis.
Gräfenberg worked in Chicago for a while before settling in Manhattan, where he treated rich and poor around the clock—he opened on Saturdays to treat professional women—and wrote the article that would posthumously make him synonymous with female ecstasy.
DOCTOR, YOU ARE RIGHT!
Despite its decidedly unsexy title, "The Role of the Urethra in Female Orgasm" reads like notes from a man who'd seen it all, mixing dry scientific research with juicy anecdotes from Gräfenberg's remarkable (and remarkably obscure) career.
One of his patients had married a much older man for money and kept "pestering" the doctor about her inability to climax.
"Bored by the repeated discussions with her," Gräfenberg wrote, "I finally asked her if she had tried sex relations with another male partner."
"'No,' was the answer, and reflectively she left my office. The next day in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a telephone call and a familiar voice who did not give her name asked: 'Doctor, are you there? You are right,' and hung up the receiver with a bang!"
"I never had to answer any further sexual questions from her."
Then there were the two girls who masturbated with hairpins, and the male patient who did the same with a rifle bullet and wound up lodging it in his bladder: "He had played with it while he was lonesome on duty on New Year's Eve."
Most importantly, though, Gräfenberg mentioned a sensitive area on the front wall of the vagina (as well as the expulsion of a mystery fluid during orgasm), making him one of the first modern doctors to describe these ancient phenomena.
"An erotic zone always could be demonstrated on the anterior wall of the vagina," he noted. "This particular area was more easily stimulated by the finger than the other areas of the vagina."
THE WHIPPLE TICKLE?
Nearly three decades later, when a new generation of sex researchers received similar feedback, they dug up Gräfenberg's article.
With the publication of their global bestseller, The G Spot, in 1982, Dr. Beverly Whipple and her colleagues sparked a controversy that's continued to this day.
"Before we published, a colleague of mine said, 'Bev, you should call that the Whipple Tickle.' I said, 'No way!'" Dr. Whipple tells me. "We thought it was very appropriate to name it after Gräfenberg. It was really nice to know that someone else had found something similar to what we'd found."
As for female ejaculation, given the current plethora of porn devoted to the subject, it's hard to believe that many sexologists (and feminists like Germaine Greer) didn't believe in the phenomenon until Whipple and her colleagues produced footage of it.
After one screening, a newly converted gynecologist predicted: "Years from now, I am sure that a medical school lecturer will joke about how it wasn't until 1980 that the medical community finally accepted the fact that women really do ejaculate."
Funnily enough, though, the G spot is still controversial after all these years.
In January 2010, a team of "scientists" in London trumpeted the results of the biggest study ever on the subject: after surveying 1,804 twins, they concluded that "there is no physiological or physical basis for the G spot."
"It is rather irresponsible to claim the existence of an entity that has never really been proven and pressurize women—and men, too," sniffed Andrea Burri, the 29-year-old female "scientist" who led the research.
Incredibly, though, Burri and her colleagues hadn't physically examined any of the twins; instead, they simply gave the women questionnaires asking whether they thought they had a G spot or not.
Among the many flaws in their methodology, Whipple notes dryly, is the fact that most twins don't have the same sexual partner.
And modern researchers are subject to stricter patient-doctor boundaries than Gräfenberg, who clearly took a hands-on approach to his patients.
Ultrasounds, brainscans, and autopsies have indicated a slight thickness in the tissue where the G spot is thought to be, but it's nearly impossible to prove the existence of something that may be more of a physiological change than an anatomical feature.
"It has to be sexually stimulated," Dr. Whipple says. 'And it's very hard to do surgeries or autopsies and ask, 'Tell me, does this feel good?'"
Ironically, like Burri and Co., many women—and self-styled sexperts—complain that the discovery of the G spot has put pressure on them to perform sexually. But anyone who argues that clearly hasn't read The G Spot—or Gräfenberg's original article, for that matter.
"My whole point has been to validate women's experience—not to set new goals," Dr. Whipple says.
And you can't help but think Dr. Gräfenberg would be bemused by all the fuss about the spot that bears his name. As he noted sixty years ago, there's a lot more to sex with a woman than any single pleasure zone.
"There is no spot in the female body from which sexual desire could not be aroused," he wrote. "The partner has only to find the erotogenic zones."
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