What the G-Spot Is

Plainly put, the G-spot is an area just inside your vagina, which, when you’re turned on, may feel really good to rub or massage. It may even feel so good you have an orgasm from that type of stimulation alone. About one to two inches inside and on the front (belly button side) of your vaginal canal is the route through which urine leaves your body—your urethra. The urethra is a little channel between your bladder and the outside world, and it’s surrounded with erectile tissue (like that in a penis) and about forty glands and ducts that all respond pleasurably to stimulation. This is the urethral sponge. In some women, stimulation of the G-spot to orgasm is accompanied by an expulsion of fluid from the glands and ducts in the sponge, in a powerfully pleasurable (and sometimes very wet) female ejaculation. In many women, it’s the urethra, or the area right around it, that responds best to stimulation.

What the G-Spot Isn’t

First of all, it’s not a magic button, which, once you find and press it, delivers unending waves of instant orgasms. Over the past few decades, magazine articles, online sex commerce sites, and even porn have all made the G-spot seem like the pot of gold at the end of the female orgasmic rainbow—as if you could just find it and one touch would send your eyes rolling skyward and make you come like a crazed banshee. Like most end-of-the-rainbow fables, the G- spot-as-instant-orgasm-trigger story simply isn’t true. The problem is that people like to shorthand anything sexual in our culture, and it’s a much better sound bite to liken its activation to flipping a switch than it is to explain the plain truths about G-spot orgasms. The truth is, G-spot stimulation to orgasm can be shown and explained pretty easily, but the details are often too explicitly sexual for the producers of most entertainment and sales outlets—in their minds, it’s way more palatable to advertisers and nervous shoppers for someone to say “press it and orgasm,” than “put something hard in your vagina, find the spot, jack off, and come.”

Another thing the G-spot isn’t: inaccessible. It’s not high up in some unreachable place, in your deep dark mysterious cave. The vagina ceased to be a mystery about forty years ago, and I find it ridiculous that some people (especially online) still say that the G-spot might be hard to find. Let’s oversimplify for a moment with a hands-on tutorial that requires no hands at all. To get an idea where to find the spot, go to the toilet, pee, and see where it comes from. Ding! There’s the map to your buried treasure; this is the urethral opening, the outside indicator of your G- spot’s underground hideout. Don’t pay attention to anyone who says that it might be difficult to find. (Or that you may lose track of it; hilariously, some pundits have suggested that it travels, or can get “lost,” not unlike Hippocrates’ not-so-adorable decrees that the uterus wandered freely about a woman’s body should it become discontented or angry. It makes my uterus angry enough to take a walk just thinking about such misinformation.) You don’t need a flashlight, a hand mirror or familiarity with self-examination to find it. But if you want to use any of those tools, great; otherwise you can locate and stimulate it with your fingers, a sex toy or a lover’s penis (or strap-on). Again, having a G-spot (or not) is not a roll of the dice—everyone has a urethra, otherwise they’d never be able to pee.

You don’t have to be on an inner journey to play with it. The G-spot is for every woman, not just ones who seek transcendent wisdom through personal sexual exploration. It’s not a spiritual gateway (though some women say that sometimes G-spot orgasms can be cosmic in scale), nor do you need to be enlightened to find it. As with anything sexual, you’ll be interested in the G-spot for any number of reasons, and how you play with it and experiment with it will change and evolve over time. Your attitude and techniques, preferred toys and states of mind when you have G-spot orgasms will be ever-changing, so don’t think that you need to fit into any particular mindset to check this all out, enjoy it, or even have it be something significant for you. And if G-spot play doesn’t turn out to be for you, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t enlightened or in touch with your sexuality (or spirituality) as a woman. You will be, more than ever, even if you think the result sucks and you hate it. But chances are good that won’t be the case.

Any other orgasms are inferior to a G–spot orgasm.

There's no such thing as a bad orgasm. Mostly it's people who love G–spot play who make this claim; the problem is that they tend to make us think that our incredible clitoral, vaginal or anal orgasms somehow don't stack up. Of course they do. But G–spot orgasms are pretty intense; it's just that the women for whom G–spot orgasms are best tend to forget that other women might prefer clitoral orgasms. Or they may enjoy a variety of ways of reaching orgasm, with G–spot orgasms being only one of them. Orgasms of all kinds can range in intensity and pleasure from blah to "Holy shit—I think my head just exploded, is my head still attached?" When you find a great way to come and it's reliably intense and wonderful, it's easy to think that's the ultimate. But it doesn't mean that other orgasms are inferior, or that your experiences won't change over time. So don't ever think you're less than, or missing out if you don't have a G–spot orgasm, or you find that you don't particularly like G–spot stimulation.

Why It's a G

The G–spot is named after Dr. Ernest Grafenberg, a German gynecologist and researcher who primarily focused his studies on contraceptive research in the 1920s and '30s; unfortunately his work in the field of contraception became illegal in Nazi Germany, and the doctor spent time in prison before eventually being smuggled out of the country to safety. American sexologists, most notably Margaret Sanger of New York, negotiated his release.* In the United States he continued his contraception research, eventually publishing a paper about the role of the urethra in female orgasm in 1950. It was this groundbreaking paper that led to more research and numerous studies about the urethra and orgasm, and female ejaculation—as well as leading Dr. Beverly Whipple and her colleague Dr. John D. Perry to name the area after Grafenberg.

Hence, the G. It's not a random letter, nor was it named by some guy who wanted to plant his name in the female body like some astronaut landing on an exotic planet and claiming it for his home country. Nope, the spot was named by a woman for a colleague who risked a lot to develop IUDs and cervical caps at a time when people were being killed for homosexuality in Germany and actually dared to talk about female orgasm when the United States was checking out the Kinsey reports and flailing about madly for smelling salts like an uptight schoolmarm who pretends that no one exists below the waist.

But now we can say, "What's up, G?" The name might not have much meaning for us by contemporary standards, but it's got some cool history. Call it what you want. Just don't forget the lube.

* This information comes from "Ernest Grafenberg: From Berlin to New York," a paper presented by Beverly Whipple at the 5th Congress of the European Federation of Sexology in Berlin, June 29–July 2, 2000, and later published in the Scandinavian Journal of Sexology, Vol.3, No.2: August 2000, pp. 43–49.