There are vagina facts, such as the fact that the vagina is about three to four
inches long, and there are vagina myths, such as the myth that vaginas smell like fish (they don’t, and we’ll get to that later). Then there are vagina controversies.
One of the biggest vagina controversies has to do with the G-spot. The G-spot was given its name in the 1980s, with the “G” referring to Dr. Grafenberg who, decades earlier in the 1950s, described an area on the front wall of the vagina that was full of erotic potential for some women. In 1982, the book The G Spot:
And Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality25 swept through the United States and many other countries with the message that sexual pleasure had to do with far more than the clitoral stimulation described by Kinsey26 in the 1950s and Masters and Johnson27 in the 1960s and 1970s. In The G Spot, readers discovered numerous stories of women who found stimulation of the front wall of the vagina to be particularly pleasurable and, for many, to be a reliable source of orgasm. For some, stimulation of this area— termed the G-spot—could also lead to the expulsion of fluids that came to be called female ejaculation.
So why the controversy? Isn’t it a given that women vary in how they experience sex? After all, we’re all different from each other.
The controversy lies in the fact that the G-spot is not a “thing” that can be seen. The G-spot is generally seen as something on the other side of the front vaginal wall—maybe it’s the inside parts of the clitoris, or maybe it’s the urethral sponge (tissue that surrounds the female urethra, just as spongy erectile tissue surrounds the male urethra in the penis). And when the front wall of the vagina is stimulated, often with firm but gentle pressure rather than a light flicking stimulation that the glans clitoris may respond to, the woman may feel wonderful things. In one study, 65 percent of women ages twenty-two to eighty- two in the United States and Canada felt that they had a particularly sensitive area in the vagina.
But if it can’t be seen, then the G-spot is kind of like the Tooth Fairy to some people. Or to science-y folks, perhaps the G-spot is one big placebo effect that, if we believe it to be true, it becomes true and fun and possibly orgasm-inducing when stimulated.
One might think that with improvements in science the G-spot would become less controversial as more facts are gathered. However, that’s not been the case. In 2008, Italian researchers using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques, claimed they found that women who experienced orgasm from vaginal intercourse all by itself had a thicker urethrovaginal space (the area around the front wall of the vagina) than did women who do not experience orgasm from vaginal intercourse without extra stimulation, such as from a finger or sex toy.28 In interviews, the researchers even suggested that perhaps MRI
could be used as a “test” to find out if a woman had a G-spot or not. Some researchers (Debby included) felt that such statements were going well beyond the limited data they had collected from a very small study of only twenty women. And so this study largely became chalked up as interesting without necessarily telling us anything one way or the other about the G-spot.
Then in 2010, a team of researchers from the UK published a study suggesting that there is no G-spot—or at least no genetic basis for one, in spite of 56 percent of the women in their survey saying they had one.29 They conducted a survey of 1,840 twin, heterosexual women in the UK, asking them,
“Do you believe you have a so-called G-spot?” The fact that agreement among identical twins was no more common than among fraternal (non-identical) twins suggested to the researchers that there must be no physical basis to the G-spot.
However, many researchers criticized this study, too. After all, a woman may believe or not believe in the existence of the “so-called G-spot” for any number of reasons including her own sexual experiences, things she has heard from friends or partners, human sexuality classes, or articles about the G-spot she has read in the media. Again, it was a curious study but it didn’t close the gap in our understanding of the G-spot one way or the other.
To sum up, what we do know about the G-spot is this:
It is clear that there is an area along the front wall of the vagina that some but not all women find to be pleasurable when stimulated with fingers, a penis, or a sex toy.
There are undeniably body parts on the other side of the front vaginal wall (parts such as the internal parts (crura) of the clitoris, the urethral sponge, and their associated nerve endings) that may be stimulated through the front wall of the vagina.
Large studies of women suggest that the majority of women feel they have a G-spot, or an area of erotic sensitivity on the front wall of the vagina.
As such, if you want to explore this area, go ahead! If you are a woman, you can try this on your own with your own fingers or with a sex toy. If you have a female partner, you might ask her if she would like to explore G-spot play, as well, with fingers, a sex toy, or (if you’re a guy) with your penis. If it doesn’t feel all that interesting or exciting to you, then perhaps move on to something else and try again (or not) another time. And if it does feel pleasurable to you, then yay for you! You’ve learned something new about your body that may enhance your sex life.