What Do Women Want

working as a nurse with patients having bladder trouble. The zone could be elusive, she cautioned, and could be trickier to locate in some women than others. Sometimes G-spot climaxes produced ejaculations—not urine, she clarified, but a fluid that “resembles fat-free milk and has a sweet taste.” She named the magical bit of anatomy after a German gynecologist, Ernst Grafenberg, whose forgotten writing from decades earlier, she discovered, had noted the same territory.
    Grafenberg wasn’t the first to have found it. A seventeenth-century Dutch scientist had documented the same region. But it was Whipple who brought it to prominence. Her book was translated into nineteen languages and set off an international firestorm. Critics railed that her research was anecdotal, flimsy, that she was sending women on an impossible hunt within the vaginal canal, a quixotic journey in search of superior, grail-like pleasure, that she was reviving oppressive Freudian ideals, that she was elevating patriarchal sex. The G-spot, her opposition insisted, was a fraud.
    And nowadays, despite all the powers of contemporary science, the seemingly straightforward anatomical question, is there a G-spot? remains unanswered. The doubters view the phenomenon as a kind of psychosomatic bliss. They raise evidence like a study done recently by British researchers who sent out a questionnaire to thousands of pairs of female twins, identical and fraternal. If the G-spot exists, the scientists proposed, if it is a zone of actual flesh rather than an article of trumped-up faith, then identical twins, whose anatomies are nearly perfect copies of each other, will be far more likely than fraternal pairs to agree that they have one. The twin experiment had a classic structure, one that’s been used repeatedly to separate the genetic from the learned, the objective from the subjective, in domains other than sex. And when the responses came back, the rate of positive answers was the same among the two groups. “What an Anti-Climax: G-spot Is a Myth,” the Sunday Times of London declaimed. Women were now saved, one of the researchers said, from reaching for an orgasmic fiction and gaining only feelings of inadequacy.
    But Whipple and Komisaruk, meanwhile, together and on their own, have accumulated data that leads to a different conclusion, with some of their evidence arriving through the orgasms of paraplegic women. In female rats and female humans, they’ve established that four nerve paths carry signals from the genitals to the brain. Two of these channels course straight up the spinal cord. But a third, the hypogastric tract, does an end-around; it doesn’t join the spine till well above the pelvis, at about the level of a person’s belly button. And a fourth, the vagus, whose name in Latin means “wandering,” makes its wending way to the brain without relying on the spine at all.
    Komisaruk and Whipple have shown the orgasmic importance of this multipronged map by working with women with severe spinal cord injuries, who, theoretically, shouldn’t be able to feel what’s going on below their waists. Their genitals should be insensate. And under examination in the lab, the paraplegics’ clitoral glans have indeed proven dead. But the interior front wall of their vaginas and their cervixes have been plenty sensitive. As they masturbated by stimulating the wall or the cervix, the subjects reported having orgasms. The scientists validated their claims by gauging their sense of pain, taking their pulse, and measuring the dilation of their pupils. Sexology had already verified such readings as markers of climax: pain vanishes, pulse races, pupils widen. Whipple, sitting beside the masturbating women, collected the data, using a calibrated finger pricker and a pupillometer. And she and Komisaruk published papers arguing that the vagus and, in some cases, the hypogastric tracts were escorting the vagina’s ecstatic messages around the point of spinal damage, while the signals of the clitoral exterior, by contrast, depended on the lower spine and were cut off. This, they reasoned, demonstrated that vaginal orgasms were real and distinct, that they weren’t merely due to oblique pulling and pressing on the external clitoris. And, they explained, the two circuitous tracts, the hypogastric and the vagus, were why healthy women described vaginal climaxes as feeling different from the external, the clitoral, as feeling “deeper,” more