Experts greet claim of finding female sexual
pleasure center with scepticism
Despite
what’s written in sex advice books, the scientific search for the female
erogenous zone known as the G-spot has proved surprisingly elusive. But now one
physician claims to have found the first anatomical evidence of the fabled
structure.
Gynecologist
Adam Ostrzenski of the Institute of Gynecology Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla.,
reports online April 25 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that a surgical
dissection revealed a sac of erectile tissue in the front wall of a woman’s
vagina that Ostrzenski believes is the G-spot. If he’s correct, the discovery
might help pave the way for therapies to treat female sexual dysfunction,
Ostrzenski says.
Yet
several respected sex researchers, including one who helped name the G-spot,
are skeptical of the claim. The new work comes on the heels of a report
concluding that the G-spot is probably not a discrete structure.
In the
new study, Ostrzenski dissected the vaginal wall of an 83-year-old woman who
had died of a head injury less than 24 hours earlier. Previous research
suggested that he’d need to search for the G-spot deep in the vaginal wall. He
found the structure that he claims is the G-spot resting on a membrane in the
front vaginal wall about a dime’s-width below the opening where urine leaves
the body.
“The
entire spot is very tiny,” Ostrzenski says. Within a sac of connective tissue,
he found bluish, grapelike clusters of tissue connected at the lower end to a
ropelike structure. This, the putative G-spot, measures 8.1 millimeters long
and tilts at a 35 degree angle to the urethra — the tube that carries urine
from the bladder out of the body.
When he
saw the grapelike clusters, “immediately I knew this was an erectile type of
tissue,” he says. That is important because stimulation of the G-spot has been
reported to cause swelling of the vaginal wall.
But
Beverly Whipple, one of the researchers who gave the G-spot its moniker in
1982, isn’t so sure that what Ostrzenski found is the G-spot. “I have no idea
what this thing is that he found,” says Whipple, a sex researcher and professor
emerita at Rutgers University. “We don’t even know if this tissue is normal.”
Since
the study was conducted on only one woman, the structure could be unique to
her. Although Ostrzenski calls the structure erectile tissue, he performed no
other analysis to show that the tissue really does what he claims. He also
presented no evidence that nerves run to or from the structure to carry
stimulatory signals.
Whipple
and others doubt that the G-spot is one structure. “We never said it was a
distinct anatomical entity,” she says. Instead, many different structures
stimulated by different types of nerves converge in the area. “It’s a region
that is highly sensitive … a zone of great erotic complexity.”
Along
with Whipple, Emmanuele Jannini of the University of L’Aquila in Italy and sex
researcher Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University have submitted a commentary to
the Journal of Sexual Medicine protesting the publication of Ostrzenski’s
study. “We submit that the author’s claim to have discovered ‘the’ G-spot does
not fulfill the most fundamental scientific criteria,” the researchers write.
Amichai
Kilchevsky, a urologist at Yale University, agrees with the dissenters. “It’s a
pretty problematic paper,” he says. Kilchevsky and colleagues published a study
in the March issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine concluding that the G-spot
is not a discrete anatomical entity.
Finding
erectile tissue in the vaginal wall isn’t surprising, but to claim that any
anatomical structure is what it seems, Ostrzenski would need to locate the
structure in more women and show that stimulation of that structure produces
sexual excitement, the critics say.
Ostrzenski
admits that he needs to gather more evidence and plans to conduct further
studies.
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