Geez Spot

Lately, the media has given the g-spot the Bigfoot treatment, with crackpots coming out of the woodwork to discuss the likelihood of its existence. If you’ve looked at the British “study” that sparked this latest round of media attention, you’d notice that the “research” involved no physiological study at all. The research was merely a survey--and not a particularly well-crafted one at that. The questions, the lead researcher admits, might be problematic.

In that case, shouldn’t the researchers--and members of the media--frame the conclusions as, well, inconclusive?

As if women’s sexuality weren't schizophrenic enough in our culture, we have another pseudo-scientific study to muddy those waters. Regardless of how one interprets the results, the study seems designed to make women feel bad about their sexuality. Women who do have g-spots are now told that, like the Tooth Fairy, this source of pleasure may not actually exist. Women who don’t experience pleasure from their g-spots now have no reason, in theory, to explore themselves in that way or to encourage their partners to do so. Guys who have fumbled for but never found it are off the hook now.

One discouraging response I’ve seen in the media to this study was on The View, when Barbara Walters said that women should be relieved by this research because now the g-spot is “one less thing to worry about”:

Wouldn't it be more of a relief to be fulfilled sexually, whether that involved g-spot stimulation, or being bound in leather restraints, or dressing in a chipmunk outfit? Wouldn't it be more of a relief to speak honestly and intelligently about sex, rather than tittering like embarrassed schoolboys when the subject comes up (pun intended)? Wouldn't it be more of a relief to have a media that focused on facts, rather than faux science? Or perhaps those are simply the things that would be a relief to me. Except for the chipmunk suit thing... no offense to the furries.

In our culture that simultaneously demands the sexualization of women while tacitly condemning most healthy and informed expressions of their sexuality, it’s not surprising that women feel pressure to conform to a certain (unachievable) sexual ideal. However, I’m not sure that having a g-spot—or finding it, or enjoying it, or even believing in it—is an integral part of that ideal.

Misleading "research" and the misguided media attention it engenders should not be part of the ongoing conversation/shouting match about sexuality.