Friday, January 8, 2010

The TGIF Sex Blog [G-Spot Revisited, pt. I]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Recently, researchers at King's College London conducted a study that suggests there is no genetic basis for the G-spot and that environmental or psychological factors may contribute to whether a woman believes that she has a G-spot. The new study is published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

However, the lead study author, Andrea Burri, isn't sure that the question was asked in a way that accurately got the information the researchers were seeking.

Her team did not physically examine the women for the presence of G-spots but instead gave participants a survey asking whether they believed that they had a “so called G-spot, a small area the size of a 20p coin on the front wall of your vagina that is sensitive to deep pressure?” (A 20p coin is about the size of an American nickel.)

I wrote the following a couple of years ago. I will be looking into this issue more closely during the week and post my thoughts here next Friday...

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-=[ The G-Spot & Female Ejaculation ]=-

How Scientific Bias Undermines Female Sexuality


The idea of female ejaculation, though a topic of heated discussion these days, isn’t anything new. That many women experience a spurt, gush, trickle, or dribble of clear non-urine fluid during the sexual response has been known and mentioned in Indian and Chinese sex advice books as early as 500 B.C.E. In addition, physicians and philosophers in ancient Greece were aware of the existence of the glands around the female urethra that emit ejaculatory secretions, and Renaissance anatomists identified such tissue.

It wasn’t until the eighteenth century, at the same time that male and female sexuality began to be seen as radically different, that a debate as to whether women ejaculated began. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female ejaculation was completely erased due to the dominant cultural narrow-mindedness with which women’s sexuality was viewed.

This cultural myopia continued even through the first eighty years of the twentieth century. With the exception of a few isolated journal articles by physicians interested in diseases of the female urethra, information about female ejaculation entirely disappeared from medical discourse, and from our concept of women’s sexuality.

I first developed an interest in female ejaculation when I was involved with a woman who ejaculated during a sexual encounter. My initial thought was that she was peeing on me. Now, I am an intensely sexually curious person, but I am decidedly not into Water (or Blood) Sports! So, I asked my friend what the fuck was going on, in a friendly nothing-big kinda/ sorta manner. She informed me that it wasn’t urine. Fascinated, I turned on the lights and the spot where she was lying on was soaked (she was a gusher, not a dribbler). Now I was convinced that she had peed. Maybe her climax did something to make her pee, I reasoned. However, she showed me the fluid and it was clear and little more viscous than urine would seem. That’s when she explained to me that when she was stimulated in a certain way, she ejaculated.

By now, completely engrossed, I asked her if she could demonstrate it to me and she did! I was like -- damn! How cool! After that experience, I went and studied all I could about female ejaculation. I have met only three or four women that could actually ejaculate regularly.

For the most part, researchers Beverly Whipple and John Perry didn’t faze sexologists when in the 1980s they documented women’s ability to ejaculate. Others, including feminists, responded with outright disbelief and scorn (which shows we are all a product of our culture).

Whatever the case, reliable studies have shown that during intense sexual excitement, or as orgasm approaches, many women produce a clear, alkaline fluid that is not urine. The amount varies from a few drops, to about a spoonful (from which a rock group, The Lovin’ Spoonful, got its name), sometimes much more. Yet many women and their partners believe that this fluid is urine.

Whipple reports that some women find ejaculating this fluid embarrassing and suppress sexual response to avoid producing it. There are doctors who prescribe drugs to suppress the “urine,” while others have performed surgeries to stop it.

Today, despite an impressive body of empirical evidence, several important contemporary studies, a virtual tidal wave of personal testimonies by women who experience ejaculation, as well as a collection of stunning videos produced by feminist activists, most sexologists, and physicians are ignorant about female ejaculation. There is still widespread disagreement as to how many women do ejaculate regularly, why not not all women appear to ejaculate, and whether (as some insist) it can be learned.

However, I submit that the question we should be asking is not if a women ejaculate, but how it differs from male ejaculation. I try not to get too technical, but a male prostrate is created during pregnancy from a female template. In other words, in order for a prostrate to develop, it must exist first in the female template since we all really do start out as females until the testosterone kicks in. I know this is an oversimplification on my part, but I think it stands.

The G-Spot or Urethral Sponge

Initially it was a female friend who suggested I write about the G spot instead of female ejaculation, but the two are connected. The concept of a hypersensitive area inside the vagina, The Grafenburg spot or “G spot,” first came to prominence in 1981 with the publication of The G Spot and Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality, and has so affected the cultural mindset that it has its own spot (pun intended) in the dictionary.

However, in spite of all the hoopla, there is much confusion (as with female ejaculation) regarding the G spot, where it’s located, and many are confused about whether or not they even have one. These confusions came about because the few researchers who have been interested in the issue chose to define it differently.

Josephine Sevely and J.W. Bennett claimed that the tissue surrounding the female urethra was identical to the corpus spongiosum that surrounds the male urethra, and cited a study that showed thirty-one tiny glands embedded in it. Sevely simply referred to this tissue as the corpus spongiosum, as the corresponding tissue in the male is called. This material was published in expanded form in Sevely’s book, Eve’s Secrets: A New Theory of Female Sexuality.

In 1981, Beverly Whipple and John Perry published an article in the Journal of Sex Research, and named it the “Grafenburg Spot,” or the G spot. In A New View of a Woman’s Body, written by a group of feminist activists, they included this structure and called it the urethral sponge. Two illustrations show a woman placing a finger inside her vagina and feeling the sponge. It says, “In addition to ejaculation, some self-helpers have said that stimulation of the urethral sponge can be a focal point for sexual arousal and orgasm.”

So, corpus spongiosum, G spot, and urethral sponge are all the same thing. Sevely’s findings were published first and her research was the most thorough and wide-ranging of the three. However, it was Whipple and Perry who focused on the function of the G spot and its link to female ejaculation, providing a wealth of information from women and their partners who had experienced or witnessed female ejaculation. Prompted by a suggestion that they put their findings in a popular book, they put the concept of the G spot on the map in a way dozens of academic articles could never do.

I realize this post is somewhat long, so I’ll leave it here. Next week, I will attempt to address more recent research that refutes the existence of a “G-spot.”

Love,

Eddie

2 comments:

  1. No G-Spot? Well this is good news for us lil dick mu'fukas! lol

    ReplyDelete
  2. What do you mean "we" black man? LOL!

    ReplyDelete

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