What Do Women Want

“throbbing,” “stronger.” Somehow the less linear, more sinuous and imbedded nerve paths created these sensations.
    But even for those who dismiss evidence like the twin study and who trust the lessons of the paralyzed and the truth of the internal orgasm, a primary mystery clouds everything. What is the exact anatomical origin, or blend of physiological sources, for this variety of bliss? Is the G-spot a spot or a diffuse and even slightly morphing province? Is it an entity of the vaginal wall itself or is it more about what lies behind the wall, the nerve-dense clitoral extensions, the wings, charted in the late nineties? If it’s about those extensions, and the stimulation they might receive through the wall during intercourse, are vaginal orgasms clitoral after all? Or is Komisaruk right in deducing, from his data with paraplegics, that this probably can’t be the case, because in these paralyzed women the nerve tracts from the extensions would be severed just like the paths from the glans?
    And how should anyone grapple with understanding the mechanics and nerve routes of the proposed third type of rapture, the cervical climax, a late addition to the orgasm debate—and one with a possible reproductive relevance? As with rats, stimulation of a woman’s cervix facilitates a hormonal release that can, to an unknown degree, aid the fertilized egg. But finding out, scientifically, whether women can actually have a cervical climax may be impossible. It’s difficult to imagine how the experience could be isolated, difficult to imagine the dildo, kitchen-made or otherwise molded, that could completely bypass stimulation of the walls and touch only the back of the canal.
    Setting themselves to unclouding the G-spot if not the cervical uncertainties, two French doctors lately positioned a woman, who said that she had vaginal orgasms, in gynecological stirrups. They had her lover slide himself inside her, and they put a sonogram’s scanner on her pelvis. This vision of intercourse revealed that a pair of the clitoris’ underlying projections might be the solution to the G-spot puzzle. These projections embrace the spongy, nerve-lush lining of the urethra. And on the sonogram, when the penis struck a particular zone on the front wall, the extensions were stirred into a scissoring motion, massaging the urethral lining. This, one new theory went, stoked the lining into an overload of neural activity—and the woman into climax. So the spot was the source of the scissoring, and the ultimate origin of the orgasm was the urethra’s cushiony outer layer.
    Komisaruk and Whipple have released a guide for the general reader: “If one or two fingers are inserted into the vagina, with the palm up, using a come here motion,” the zone can be found. “Women have reported that they have difficulty locating and stimulating their G-spot by themselves (except with a dildo, a G-spot vibrator, or similar device), but they have no difficulty identifying the erotic sensation when the area is stimulated by a partner. To stimulate the G-spot during vaginal intercourse, the best positions are the woman on top or rear entry. The orgasm resulting from stimulation of the G-spot is felt deep inside the body.”
    None of the efforts on either side has put an end to the vaginal versus external disputes. Nothing seems likely to. About half of all women believe they have a G-spot; half think they don’t. But Komisaruk and Whipple, using their finger pricker and pupillometer, have verified something that transcends anatomy, something that hasn’t brought much doubt: there are women who can think themselves to orgasm with no touching whatsoever. For reasons unclear, it’s a capacity much more common in women than in men. In Komisaruk’s and Whipple’s lab, imagining lovers or, for some, passages of music, women have sent themselves into ecstasy.
    One afternoon I watched as Wise, Komisaruk’s associate on the fMRI study, lay back in the cylinder and demonstrated. It was all about breathing, she told me before she went into the machine, and about the strength of the pelvis and about “knowing how to circulate the energy.” She kept her preferred fantasies to herself.
    I asked if it was truly an orgasm.
    “There are all kinds of sneezes,” she said, “but there’s no question it’s a sneeze.”
    Now she was motionless under the sheet. On the screen, the constellations of dots were getting thicker and thicker, more crazed. Five