When the magazine that popularized the so-called G-Spot retracts is reporting, you know it is time to move on. Scientists and researchers has known from the early 2000s that it is a myth, that there was no physical structure, or special collection of nerves there. The consensus today is that it was just the deep structures of the clitoris, and that all women have sensitive spots inside their vaginas, but the placement is unique to every woman. So YOU have to take your time and explore and map YOUR sensitive spots.

Here is the most public retraction

The G-spot doesn’t exist

(Published in Cosmopolitan Magazine, May 2020)

There is no magic button. We’re here to correct the record—and to apologize.

Once upon a time, that time being 1982, there was sex. And then, suddenly, there was sex.

The difference? A teensy half-inch ribbed nub on the upper front wall of your vagina. Scientists—and magazines (hi) and books and sex-toy companies and movies and TV shows and your roommates and your sex-ed teacher—reported that it was a universal key to The Mysterious Female Orgasm. And thus began the era when you were supposed to be able to say “it blew my mind” to your girlfriends at brunch.

Or was it three inches wide? Farther down, near your vulva? Slick instead of ribbed? Kinda springy to the touch?

Whatever, it was it. And fuck if we all didn’t work hard to find our own. Back in 1982, Cosmo told women to get there by “squatting” so it would be easier “to stick one or two fingers inside the vagina” and make the necessary “come-hither motion.” A 2020 Google search turns up thousands of road maps (“where is the G-spot?” has been searched more times than Michaels Jordan and Jackson). That cute-adjacent guy you slept with in college tried the classic pile-drive maneuver, to middling success.

But it must not matter, because the G-spot economy is booming: G-spot vibrators, G-spot condoms, G-spot lube, G-spot workshops, and, for the particularly daring and/or Goop-inspired, $1,800 G-spot shots meant to plump yours for extra pleasure.

Hell, even Merriam-Webster is in on it: The G-spot is a “highly erogenous mass of tissue” in every dictionary it prints.

So then why, when we talked to the woman who helped “discover” it, did she tell us we’ve all been obsessed with the wrong thing?

THE G-SPOT IS ALLEGEDLY…  “One inch in.”   “Three inches in.”  “Barely in.”  “Near my cervix.”  “The roof of my uterus.”  “The back right of my vagina.”  “In a little pocket of space up near my belly button.”

THAT WOMAN IS BEVERLY WHIPPLE, PHD. SHE AND A TEAM of researchers officially coined the term “G-spot” in the early ’80s. They named the thing, which they described as a “sensitive” “small bean,” for German researcher Ernst Gräfenberg (yeah, a dude). And just like that, your most frustrating fake body part was born.

Honestly, it all got out of hand from there, says Whipple. Her team wasn’t saying that each and every woman has a G-spot. (“Women are capable of experiencing sexual pleasure many different ways,” she insists to Cosmo now. “Everyone is unique.”) And despite that bean analogy, they didn’t mean it was a spot spot. They were talking about an “area” that could simply make some women feel good. But the media (hi again!) preferred the neat and tidy version and ran with it like a sexual cure-all.

Researchers did too. In 2012, a study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine proclaimed that of course the G-spot was real. It just wasn’t a bean. It was actually an 8.1- by 3.6-millimeter “rope-like” piece of anatomy, a “blue” and “grape-like” sac. This revelation came from gynecologic surgeon Adam Ostrzenski, MD, PhD, after his study of an 83-year-old woman’s cadaver. (He went on to sell “G-spotplasty” treatments to women.) Over the years, lots of other researchers found the G-spot to be lots of other things: “a thick patch of nerves,” “the urethral sponge,” “a gland,” “a bunch of nerves.”

For the most part, though, the thing that women were supposed to find has remained a mystery to the experts telling them to find it. Dozens of trials used surveys, pathologic specimens, imaging, and biochemical markers to try to pinpoint the elusive G-spot once and for all.

In 2006, a biopsy of women’s vaginas turned up nothing.

In 2012, a group of doctors reviewed every single piece of known data on record and found no proof that the G-spot exists.

In 2017, in the most recent and largest postmortem study to date done on 13 cadavers, researchers looked again: still nothing.

“It’s not like pushing an elevator button or a light switch,” asserts Barry Komisaruk, PhD, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University. “It’s not a single thing.”

“I don’t think we have any evidence that the G-spot is a spot or a structure,” says Nicole Prause, PhD, a neuroscientist who studies orgasms and sexual arousal. “I’ve never understood why it was interpreted as some new sexual organ. You can’t standardize a vagina—there is no consistency across women as to where exactly we experience pleasure.”

Sure, she says, some women might have an area inside their vaginas that contains a bunch of smaller, super-sensitive areas. But some women say that when they follow Cosmo’s old two-finger come-hither advice, they feel discomfort or like they have to pee. Others feel nothing at all. Because for them, there’s nothing there.

THE G-SPOT IS ALLEGEDLY…  “Really deep in there, not close to the opening of my vagina at all.”  “IDK.”  “My clitoris.”  “By my butt.”   “Behind the clitoris.”   “Right inside my vagina and to the left.”  “In different places.”

NOW FOR THE TRICKIEST PART OF this story—and, TBH, the reason this is even a story at all. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, there are still lots of G-spot believers, many of them super-smart, well-meaning sex educators. They’re a pretty heated group (one hung up on us when we called for an interview) and not...entirely...wrong. Their point is: If a woman believes she’s found her G-spot, that should outweigh any lack of science. And specifically, if someone claims to have experienced G-spot pleasure, it seems “bizarre” to shut her down, says Kristen Mark, PhD, a sex educator at the University of Kentucky. “That feels like going backward.”

Fair. It’s just that, as Prause points out, “women deserve accurate information about their bodies.” Can’t we have our pleasure—and the truth too?

As Prause said (and this bears repeating), for some women, there is sexual sensitivity where the G-spot is supposed to be. But for others, there’s none. Or it’s to the left. Or it’s in a few places. And that’s kind of the whole point. It’s all okay. It can all feel good.

What everyone can agree on is that we need more research. Women’s sexual health is vastly understudied, and the scientific hurdles are borderline absurd. In 2015, Prause tried to get a trial going at UCLA that would study orgasms in women who were, you know, actually alive. The board heard her out but wanted a promise that her test subjects “wouldn’t climax” because they didn’t like the optics of women orgasming in their labs. (As you’ve already guessed, the study wasn’t approved.)

So yeah, a new kind of thinking about female pleasure is going to take a minute for certain people to get on board with. Like those brunch friends who go on and on about G-spot rapture. And like men, who might love the idea of the G-spot best of all. A G-spot orgasm requires penetration, which just so happens to be the way most guys prefer to get off. “If you’ve got a penis, it would be super convenient if the way the person with a vagina has pleasure is for you to put your penis in their vagina,” says Emily Nagoski, PhD, author of Come as You Are, a book that explores the science of female sexuality. Related: 80 percent of the men in Cosmo’s survey said they believe every woman has a G-spot; nearly 60 percent called it the “best way” for a female partner to achieve pleasure. (“Once you rally enough experience like myself, you can find it on every girl,” one supremely confident guy told us.)

How to find my G spot

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