X MARKS THE SPOTS
Do women really have pleasure points that can trigger the ultimate orgasm? The old debate takes a brand new turn.
Tough luck, women, anatomy is destiny for you. Or so we have been told. Women have little testosterone, those raging hormones that drive men toward sex, violence, status and power. Instead, women ooze the emotional estrogen that makes them moody at best and whiny at worst. Women’s crucial sex organ is in their brain, scientists claim, stimulated by a network of emotional and relationship- based factors during sex, rather than the simple physical cues that men require. Hence, women want love, while men want sex.
For the last 62 years, a debate has been raging: Do women have erogenous zones that have got nothing to do with the mind? In 1950, Dr Ernst Grafenberg, a German gynaecologist, claimed to have discovered one such pleasure spot— a tiny area hidden within the vagina that could deliver a powerful female orgasm.
But even 14 years after the pharma love- pill, Viagra, was designed to help men get a grip over their flagging libido, the route to female sexual satisfaction remains paved with denial. The pleasure spot remained notoriously elusive. Scientists and doctors doubted its existence as some kind of a media hype. It took 31 years even to get a name for it: The G- spot, after Grafenberg. Two years ago, researchers at King’s College London concluded that the G- spot was a figment of imagination. Last year, Yale scientists asserted that there was no scientific evidence for such a thing as a G- spot.
Yet, female erogenous zones refused to disappear from collective imagination or scientific curiosity. In April this year, US gynaecologist Dr Adam Ostrzenski wrote in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that he had found the G- spot. The possible reason behind its ambiguous presence could be that it’s tiny, just half the size of a fingernail.
What’s more, G- spot is not the only one. More erogenous spots are being discovered in the female anatomy. Scientists are now talking about the “A- spot” and the “U- spot”. Given that the pharma industry has not come up with a Viagra- like chemical fix for women, it’s timely, too. As more and more women go public about their need for sexual pleasure, the inability to achieve orgasm is the most common complaint doctors get to hear now.
A word or warning: The key to female orgasm will have to be earned. Scientists caution that men and women need coaching to find the spots to enjoy what, it now seems, nature has granted women, too.