Dear Carol,

I'd like to share some thoughts on the G-spot. I am undergoing a gradual process of sexual self-exploration (thanks in part to your store's education, guidance and philosophy) and today I touched upon the G-spot. It was at the end of my session when I touched upon it, and I was thinking, "Ooh, I can't wait to explore this more! It's going to feel soooo good!" But interspersed with those thoughts of ecstatic anticipation were thoughts that turned me off. Why? Because if my memory is accurate, the "G" stands for some guy's last name who "discovered" it. Some white clinician guy who is probably sterile in personality and has the faint scent of formaldehyde on his fingertips.

With that thought, I couldn't get into it. I couldn't get into the pleasure of it because I knew this guy, his energy, his legacy that is embodied in his name, was inside of me. I couldn't think, "Ooh, this is the G-spot and it feels awesome" without simultaneously thinking, "the 'G' stands for some dude who has planted himself in my pussy uninvited."

So then I thought, why don't we change this? I know the politics of your store, and you are poised in a position to rewrite the lexicon of sex, pleasure, and individuality that has been written for us without consensus. You are at the epicenter of contemporary sexual liberation, celebration, and self-affirmation, and I'm sure thousands who seek this have come through your doors. Why not use this power and change these things, however subtle yet deep? Why not get rid of that damn "G" and call it something else more empowering, like... I don't know, I leave that up to you and your staff.

Get that damn white man out of our pussies, out of our spirits, out of our search for sexual ecstasy. He doesn't belong there; he's not a part of our pleasure. He has immortalized and inserted himself, however premeditated, into every woman's act of sexual pleasure on this earth who follow the Western model of anatomy and terminology.

Let's remove this guy from where he does not belong. Our Spots do not belong to him; they should not continue to hold his legacy within their names. What is in a name? Everything. Name is identity, which reflects the spirit we embody. He has no right to stake this claim with his name upon the spirit in our bodies, in a place that equates pleasure, erotic arousal, and/or spiritual transcendence.

I ask you to start this revolution, because a name is everything. Because this man is not a part of my sexual and sensual identity. Because you can.
-- D

Dear D,

Wow, what a manifesto (or really, as we used to say in the '70s, a WOmanifesto)! Here are some thoughts in response to your passionate letter.

Plenty of women feel as you do, and in a couple of different contexts the term "G-spot" is hardly ever used. One is within the Tantra community, where this pleasure zone is more frequently called the "sacred spot" or the "goddess spot." If you want to get Dr. Grafenberg out of your head, never mind your pussy, you might like that latter term, since it begins with G and you can just substitute "Goddess" for "Grafenberg" when you hear or read the term "G-spot." (By the way, Tantra's language for female ejaculate is "amrita.")

The feminist health care classic A New View of a Woman's Body stays away from using "G-spot," too. Their term for the spot is "paraurethral sponge," and while that doesn't have a real sexy lilt, it is far more descriptive of the tissue in question than a pop-sex term like "G-spot," which was coined, as far as I am aware, at the time the book The G-Spot was released. We're talking late '70s and early '80s for this language. Before that time nobody really called the paraurethral sponge the G-spot, and in fact they didn't call it much of anything, because it was rarely discussed. Grafenberg's research was written up in the early 1950s. I do not know that he ever tried to name the tissue after himself, although, granted, pretty much every part of us is named after some curious guy with a scalpel. (Most of our diseases, too.) To my knowledge, the group of researchers who gave us The G-Spot introduced the reference to Grafenberg in developing this popular-culture terminology. (One of the most high profile of these was a woman, Beverly Whipple.) They needed a name that would stick in people's heads, because they were doing a pretty remarkable thing -- they were trying to reconfigure peoples' understanding of female sexual anatomy and possibility.

Now, let me see if I can rehabilitate Dr. Grafenberg for you just a bit. I couldn't tell you a thing about his personality. Maybe he did reek of formaldehyde, as would any researcher, male or female, who goes into the dissecting lab to try to find out more about the body. (I have sat in on just this sort of research with a female anatomist, and I'd have to agree that formaldehyde is not the sexiest smell.) Again, I am not aware that Grafenberg himself tried to plant a flag with his name on it. However, he did write up his research, which was pretty much ignored. Female sexual functioning was not exactly the most prestigious sort of research in the mid-20th century. Dr. Alfred Kinsey, whose book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made him a household name in America, was hounded after Sexual Behavior in the Human Female came out. People were just not ready to hear the truth about women as fully sexual beings, with sexual anatomy and attendant erotic possibilities that had nothing to do with bearing children.

The area we call, variously, the paraurethral sponge, the sacred spot, the G-spot, and "the female prostate" is, in fact, prostatic tissue, very comparable to prostatic tissue in men. There's another reason why research about it didn't fly for so many years; our culture has had quite a vested interest in keeping males and females "opposite" and our genitals designed for reproduction. Even little kids who get sex education from their families often learn to think of "the penis and the vagina," not "the penis and the clitoris." Why on earth would females have a prostate? Made no sense in the female-as-child bearer understanding of sexual and gender difference. It is still somewhat threatening to this cultural understanding to discover likenesses between male and female anatomy (not to mention the anatomies of transgender and intersexed persons).

So in a way, Grafenberg was a real hero. That doesn't mean you have to lionize him, just give him a seat at the assembly of people who have given something to the body of knowledge (still woefully incomplete) that we have about female sexuality. In your life, what matters is your sexuality, and it is delightful to hear that you are exploring it. By all means ask Dr. Grafenberg to get out of your head so you can concentrate on your own sensations and your own pleasure. By the way, one of the most common problems in female sexual response is staying in your head, so I hope as you continue to explore that this discussion will fade away and allow you to experience your body and its sensations as primary.

At Good Vibrations we will continue to refer to this pleasurable area in a variety of ways; our first responsibility is to get the information out there, and the G-Spot book made such inroads that most people have heard this term. It is still not well understood, however, and we have work to do there. Perhaps by the time our culture has changed enough that it endorses and sponsors truly thorough research on female sexuality, this term that you find so off-putting will be a relic of history. But I hope you'll agree that the most important thing is our erotic possibility and until the culture truly gets behind that, we definitely have to do it ourselves.