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Clitoral and vaginal orgasmThere hasn't been much scientific research done on the concept of clitoral versus vaginal orgasm. Recent reports have suggested that the G spot is definitely an area of tissue distinct from the majority of the vaginal wall; and also that the G spot does not in fact exist at all! It's interesting that the latter report was the result of a British study, because there's something profoundly shadowy in the British culture about sexuality in general, and women's sexuality in particular. An example of this would be the denial that the G spot exists: rather than accept the anecdotal evidence that has accumulated on the Internet - let alone in scientific research - it's easier to start from a place of denial and say that the G spot's existence can only be proven by research. The shadow, in Jungian terms, behind this approach is the denial of female sexuality. When you think about it, it's the cultural context of female sexuality that has led to many women finding difficulty reaching orgasm. After all, if we suppose that the majority of women, indeed almost all, are anatomically equipped with the same sexual organs, nervous system, and potential sexual responsivity, it follows that a woman who has difficulty being orgasmic in adult life is most likely experiencing difficulty as a result of social or cultural influences. These can range from the gross and massive: by which I mean sexual abuse; to the more subtle but still very damaging influences of the media -- which presents women both as sexual objects, and as sexual failures if they do not achieve orgasm on a regular basis. The reality, as most of us are aware, is that the frequency with which women reach orgasm is probably much lower than society as a whole tends to believe. One thing we can state with absolute certainty is that the percentage of women achieving orgasm during sexual intercourse is very low. And we know why this is: it's because the clitoris does not receive much stimulation during the act of penetration and thrusting. Some couples overcome this difficulty by offering extra stimulation to the clitoris from either the man or woman during intercourse, and that's a very satisfactory route for a couple to enjoy the pleasure of orgasm while the man is still inside the woman. The woman who calls herself anorgasmic simply because she cannot have an orgasm during sexual intercourse is being misled by either a patriarchal perception of female sexuality, or by her faulty beliefs. There's nothing unusual about not reaching orgasm during intercourse -- in fact it's the usual outcome for women. So how is it then, that some women claim to be able to reach orgasm during intercourse on a regular basis? The first and obvious answer is that they use additional clitoral stimulation. The second possibility is that they find a position for sexual intercourse where the thrusting of the male partner pulls on the clitoris -- this is likely to happen, or at least more likely to happen, if a woman has long labia. And the third possibility is that they climax through vaginal thrusting because the man's penis is stimulating the woman's G spot. Now, you will see from that statement that I believe the G spot actually exists. It's true there are plenty of women who deny that they have a G spot. But it's also true that there are plenty of women who have gone through a process of awakening their G spot and becoming sexually sensitive in this area. One of the interesting things about the debate about the role of the G spot in giving a woman an orgasm is that so much of it is subjective: we lack scientific evidence. It's clearly a weakness to say that you believe something to be true just because you have personal experience of it, but unfortunately that is what happens in many discussions about sexual issues, and particularly issues around the possibility of orgasm through G spot stimulation. I freely admit that much of what I'm saying here is based on what I've learnt myself with my partner and the impressions that I have gathered from people's reports on the Internet. One thing that does seem very clear to me is that the G spot needs to be "sensitized" before a woman is sexually responsive to it. I've heard so many stories of women who have learnt, through taking Tantric sex courses, or through the loving attention of a partner with whom they felt completely safe, that G spot sensitivity can increase over time. But what does increasing the sensitivity of the G spot actually mean? It means something like becoming more aware of it as a source of sexual pleasure, and it might even mean training the nerves and tissues of the area to become sexually responsive to stimulation of the right kind. But most of all it appears to me to mean a woman opening up psychologically and emotionally to her lover; opening her heart to him and perhaps even exposing the depths of her feminine vulnerability to him. (The same is true of relationships between women of course.) Deborah Sundahl, who more than anybody else has explored the nature and possibility of G spot orgasm in her books, has written eloquently of the nature of G spot orgasm. It seems that when a woman is truly open at all levels to her sexual partner her body behaves in a slightly different way. Deborah has explained how the innervation of the area of the G spot is different to the innervation of the clitoris. This rather counteracts the views of those who deny the possibility of G spot orgasm by saying that the G spot is simply an area where one can access a different part of the clitoris. If stimulating the G spot does indeed stimulate different nerves, then it's likely that a G spot orgasm, or at having an orgasm in which G spot stimulation is involved, is going to be a different experience to an orgasm achieved by stimulation of the clitoris alone. It also takes a particular state of arousal for a woman to respond to G spot stimulation. It isn't even just a matter of being well lubricated, although this is part of the story. It's more about how a woman's emotional responses to her sexual partner can help drive her bodily sexual responses. It's my experience that lubrication follows sexual desire and arousal, but the swelling of the G spot from its usual, slightly ribbed feeling into a tumescent, smooth, engorged area of tissue only takes place when a woman is freely feeling very loving towards her partner and her motivation for sex is possibly primarily emotional rather than physical. When she's achieved this state of arousal, a finger on her G spot provides very different sensations to those on her clitoris alone. It's much more of a whole body sensation, which won't surprise anybody who's studied Tantric sex: where the G spot is the gateway to allowing sexual energy to flow all round the body. And if it does require awakening, whatever form that awakening takes, then it's no wonder that those who haven't experienced it will deny its existence, whether that be denial of the existence of G spot orgasm or denial of the existence of the G spot itself. I see it as a process of evolution of female sexuality within each individual. Discovering the G spot, responding to it, and finding the effects that it has a woman's emotional state, her sexual energy, and her overall sense of well-being is part of the journey of developing sexuality that every woman and takes during her life: it's just that some women don't get past the starting gate. Now, some readers will perhaps be thinking this all has overtones of the discredited Freudian notion that a vaginal (for which I read G spot) orgasm is somehow more psychologically or emotionally "immature" than a clitoral orgasm. That's simply not true: it's more about whether or not a woman has developed responsivity to the stimulation her G spot can provide; it's not an issue with maturity in the conventional sense. So, you know where I stand on the issue of the G spot: I believe that it exists, and I believe that it can provide a different kind of orgasmic experience. Certainly, if you trawl the further reaches of the Internet, particularly if you have an interest in female ejaculation, you'll come across many video clips which have a compelling quality -- compelling, that is, in the overwhelming sense one gets when watching them that a woman is able to achieve some kind of orgasmic state simply through stimulation of the G spot (although, very often aided by stimulation of the clitoris). But what also seems to be very clear from watching these clips is that the level of stimulation required to take a woman into an ecstatic orgasmic state through stimulating the G spot inside her vagina alone is extremely high: there's little doubt from watching these video clips that the women are receiving massive pleasure, but the level of stimulation, usually delivered with a finger or two, or sometimes by means of a machine like the Sybian orgasm machine for women, is so vigorous both in terms of pressure and rhythm that it looks slightly unnerving. However, there has been some research done on the subject of vaginal orgasm which I'm going to report here. It was conducted by Stuart Brody and Petr Weiss and reported in the International Society Of Sexual Medicine's Journal of Sexual Medicine. The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which a woman's ability to have an orgasm through vaginal stimulation was related to factors in her emotional and psychological development such as sexual education during childhood, awareness of vaginal sensations during intercourse, the duration of intercourse, and the size of her partner's penis. I want to emphasize that I don't necessarily support everything that the researchers claim, but it is an interesting piece of research for those who want to explore vaginal orgasms as a reality that can provide a much more profound orgasmic experience for woman. The authors start by asserting that women who have experienced vaginal orgasm express greater satisfaction with not only their sex life, but their emotional health, and their relationships - with sexual partners, friends and indeed life in general. They apparently also experience more frequent sexual desire and also display a physiologically more normal gait than women who have not experienced vaginal orgasm. (That indicates a lower level of musculoskeletal blockage, tension and neurotic disturbance.) Indeed when you read this piece of research, you wonder why all women are not striving madly for vaginal orgasms because the authors claim that the more vaginal orgasms a woman has had in the previous month, the more positive she is about her relationship quality, intimacy, love and passion, and the less she uses psychological defense mechanisms. (I've written many times that an orgasmic woman is a "happy" woman; so I'm interested to read that the authors of this study have apparently established such a close connection between emotional satisfaction and vaginal orgasms.) Mind you, everything that follows, based on the research paper in question, is my interpretation and mine alone. Any errors of interpretation are entirely mine also. The vaginal orgasm does involve different neural pathways to clitoral orgasm. One of the possible reasons why vaginal orgasm has not received more acceptance is that women are simply not as well educated about the possibility of vaginal orgasm as they are about the clitoral orgasm. Part of that education process might well be the level to which a woman is able to pay attention to the stimulation she receives from her vagina during sex -- in other words, are women actually aware of the possibility of reaching orgasm through vaginal stimulation, and if they are not, how will this impact on their ability to reach orgasm through vagina stimulation? Secondly, the vagina has a lot of nerve endings throughout its length -- a fact which contradicts the commonly quoted statement that the vagina is comparatively insensitive -- so it may well be that a larger penis is able to stimulate it more than a smaller one. The study investigated whether or not a woman's ability to reach orgasm through penile-vaginal intercourse was related in any way to the size of the penis of her partner. Thirdly, the study investigated how age is related to a woman's ability to achieve vaginal orgasm. The research was conducted in 2008 with a sample of women representative of the Czech population over the age of 15. The researchers provided a written survey to all women who agreed to take part asking about their age, how often they experienced orgasm during penile-vaginal intercourse (making sure that it was clearly specified that this related simply to orgasm produced by thrusting of the penis and vagina without additional stimulation from fingers or sex toys), the estimated length of foreplay and sexual intercourse in minutes; they also asked questions about what the women were taught during sex education in childhood about the method of reaching orgasm; and their preference for penile length, which took the form of asking them whether they were more likely to have an orgasm with a man who had a longer or shorter than average penis (the measuring device being a 200 Crown Czech banknote - which is 14.5 cm long - and was assumed to represent the length of the average erect male penis. In fact, that is about right, give or take a smidgen). The women had a variety of answers open to them for all these questions on a four or five point scale. Analysis of the answers to this survey were used to calculate any correlation between a woman's ability to have a vaginal orgasm and her age, duration of foreplay, the length of intercourse, her ability to focus on the sensations she was receiving from her vagina, and on the length of her partner's penis. Obviously some of these women did not have enough partners, or indeed enough responsivity, to be able to make comparisons between partners, a factor that was taken into account in the analysis. The researchers also applied multiple regression analysis to these factors to work out relationships between vaginal orgasm and one or more of the potential sources of stimulation. The researchers used 1000 women - a response rate of 53% - and of these 1000 women 917 provide information about vaginal orgasm; the remainder either had never had a vaginal orgasm or they chose not to answer that question. Now here's the first problem for me: even allowing for the 50% response rate, the questionnaire suggests that 50% of women reach orgasm during intercourse and that's a figure that does not in any way correspond with more widely quoted figures available on the Internet. This may mean that the women were actually not clear about what question the survey was asking them: unfortunately, there's no way of establishing whether that's true or not. Indeed the researchers are quite clear on this point: they state that only 21.9% of the women had never had a vaginal orgasm. This figure is actually more in line with the percentage of women who have had a vaginal orgasm presented in other studies. Anyway, pressing on, of 416 women, 142 reported that they were more likely to experience vaginal orgasm with a longer than average penis, while 242 claimed that they reached orgasm equally well with both long and short penises, and the final 32 said that they reached orgasm more easily when the penis was short. (The implication being the bigger the penis, the more nerve endings it can stimulate in the vagina.) A woman's ability to reach orgasm during intercourse from stimulation of her vagina alone was, unsurprisingly, associated with the sexual education information she had received in childhood -- in other words, women who were taught the vagina was capable of providing female orgasm had significantly greater vaginal orgasmic consistency than women who were not given this information. It sounds likely, does it not: that women who were informed that the clitoris was the only important way of reaching orgasm would not know about vaginal orgasms. See what Deborah has to say on the subject. But the problem with this conclusion is that it's almost self determining: for one thing, you've no proof that women will remember what they were told during sex education classes correctly, possibly distorting their memory to fit the facts as they now experience them. Secondly, one would have to know whether those women who did experience vaginal orgasm were more likely to say that they had received sex education about the role of the vagina in having an orgasm than those who said they had never reached a vaginal orgasm. Relying on people's memory is a very unreliable methodological tool. In view of my comments to start with it will be no surprise to you to learn that the researchers also demonstrated that a woman's ability to reach a vaginal orgasm correlated very closely with her ability to focus her attention on the sensations she was receiving from her vagina during penile-vaginal intercourse. In their discussion the researchers make the observation that previous work has suggested that "investment" in the clitoris is a barrier to the development of adult female sexual responsivity -- which they, in a rather Freudian manner, label as mature psychosexual development, referring even to "intractable difficulties" in educating and assisting vaginally anorgasmic women to experience orgasm during intercourse. Kestenberg suggested that a woman's resistance to the concept of vaginal orgasm evolved in a two-stage process: first, a woman relies on clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm, and secondly defends against feeling, mechanisms which both impair her ability to reach vaginal orgasm. The researchers observed that women who have been given a view of female sexuality based on the clitoris as the centre of orgasmic response have impaired ability to have a vaginal orgasm. The discoverer of the G spot, Perry, said as long ago as 1984 that for the past 30 years most gynecologists have been telling women that the vaginal orgasm does not exist, and the consequence of that is that fewer and fewer of them were actually having vaginal orgasms. Perry called this one of the most heinous iatrogenic illnesses ever perpetrated on Western civilization. It was his observation that learning to masturbate by using only the clitoris as a means of sexual stimulation, which he claimed had been basically the way women had been taught to masturbate for 30 years, was in fact preventing women from developing normal vaginal sensitivity. Needless to say the researchers in the current paper used this to support their conclusions. It's a startling thought when you stop to consider whether or not this may be true: that women are being deprived of vaginal orgasm just because of the way society has culturally and socially framed their sexuality. ... It is possible of course there are genetic factors involved in the ease with which a woman have an orgasm during intercourse; psychological and even anatomical factors may also play a part. It is also equally possible that differences in vaginal anatomy between non-vaginally orgasmic women and vaginally orgasmic women are in fact due to the former having vaginal orgasms in the first place! It is therefore no surprise to learn that women who were taught, or claimed that they had been taught, that the vagina was an important region for female orgasm claimed a higher level of vaginal orgasm than those who were taught that the clitoris is the region that needs to be stimulated before a woman reaches orgasm. (Knowing the state of sex education in Britain I have to say that I find this frankness of education somewhat surprising, although it may be that the Czech Republic handles these things differently to other countries.) The researchers observed that a woman whose view of female orgasm centers on the clitoris has an impaired ability to achieve orgasm during partnered sex, but her general orgasmic function is not affected. We should deal with the objection to the idea that women can come through vaginal orgasm during intercourse due to indirect clitoral stimulation. Circumstantial evidence against this idea is the fact that penile stimulation of the vagina, and especially of the cervix, stimulates not only the pudendal nerve activated by the clitoris, but also the pelvic, hypogastric, and vagus nerves, which do not show significant stimulation from the region of the clitoris. Indeed, stimulation of both the cervix and the vagina in woman with complete spinal cord injury (which means that the brain has no connection to the clitoris, but receives stimulation apparently from the vagus nerve which is induced by the penis buffeting the woman's cervix) can lead to orgasm. The researchers observed that the vagus nerve has also got an association with processes of attention, emotional regulation, and possibly even pair bonding. And because the vagus nerve has parasympathetic cardiovascular effects, it isn't too surprising that people who had had penile vagina intercourse in the two weeks before a laboratory stress test showed lower blood pressure reactivity and faster blood-pressure recovery than those who had not have sexual activity. It's not hard to see a physiological basis to explain how a woman who regularly has vaginal orgasms will be more relaxed and happy, and able to enter more fully into relationship and partnership with a man. The researchers make the rather cynical observation that post-Kinsey doctrinaire attempts to inculcate a belief in the general population that penile length has no significance during intercourse are refuted by the widespread acceptance that penis size (length) is important. (Although how they reached the conclusion that there is such a "widespread" acceptance is not stated). Using this implicit acceptance -- the origin of which is not specified -- as the base for that argument they then go on to say that even if a particular penis is not long enough to stimulate the cervix and uterus, a woman can still have a vaginal orgasm from stimulation of those parts of the vagina nearer the opening. They baldly state that the evidence of their research shows that women who are qualified to make the comparison (that is to say by virtue of the number of sexual partners they have had) state that they are more likely to have an orgasm during penile-vaginal intercourse with a long penis with a short one. (They also speculate that men with a long penis might be better lovers, which a statement that takes this research from the realms of science into fantasy.) Even more fantastical, they conclude that the orgasmic consistency of a woman is in fact associated with the duration of penile-vaginal intercourse but not with the duration of foreplay. That runs counter to every woman's experience that I've ever heard about, which leads me to believe that while some parts of this study may be accurate, others are definitely speculative. In general however their conclusions are sound: that sex education, sexual medicine, and social policy need not only to be supportive of women's health, but also to be supportive of the concept of vaginal orgasm. I would go further: even if vaginal orgasm does not exist (although I believe very firmly that it does), it is inappropriate to educate women to believe that the clitoris is the only source of sexual stimulation. For one thing, both the routine experience of women during sex and ample scientific research demonstrate that a woman has a more powerful orgasm when clitoral stimulation is supplemented by stimulation on the area of the G spot. It's obvious to any man who has sex with a woman that this is true! And it's also true that some sexual positions will be more effective than others at stimulating the G spot - though of course it also depends to some extent on the shape and size of the man's penis. The Kama Sutra recognized this centuries ago - by observing that a man with small genitals needs to have sex with a similar woman, and that matches between men and women with very different sized genitals would not provide pleasure. However, having said that, the researchers' intentions are in the right place (propagating the view that the G spot exists), for they make the observation that many North American university courses -- even women's studies courses -- include as standard, texts that falsely claim that vaginal orgasm doesn't exist or is very rare. (Because the vaginal orgasm is considered to be a myth created by a patriarchal view of female sexuality - thanks to Freud.) There is certainly a wide range of empirical evidence, and anecdotal evidence, that demonstrates those anti-vaginal orgasm statements are false. More importantly, if the conclusions about the benefits of vaginal orgasm stated in their study are true, these assumptions are also damaging to women's health in general and sexual health and well-being in particular. Assertions that vaginal orgasms are a myth alienate women from men and from their own sexual well-being and sexual enjoyment.
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