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don’t recommend putting most foreign objects inside the vagina). This, of course, also goes for tampons (more in chapter 5) and Ben Wa balls, which some women use for sexual pleasure or as part of pelvic-floor exercises (more in chapter 2).
YOU LIKE, YOU LOVE?
Activity
Get out a piece of paper and a pen. Ready? Set? Okay, go—
Taking a stream-of-conscious approach to this activity, write down all the things that you like about your genitals. Think about smell, taste, sexy feelings, how you look. If you get stuck, write down some of the nice things that past or present partners have said about your genitals. Maybe they said that they liked how you smell or that you taste delicious. Maybe they liked how wet you get or how you squeezed their fingers or their penis with your pelvic-floor muscles. There are numerous reasons to appreciate one’s own vulva and vagina, and all the parts within these parts (the clitoris, labia, etc.)—what are your reasons? What do you hope to change?
    VAGINA CONTROVERSY
    There are vagina facts, such as the fact that the vagina is about three to four inches long, and there are vagina myths, such as the myth that vaginas smell like fish (they don’t, and we’ll get to that later). Then there are vagina controversies. One of the biggest vagina controversies has to do with the G-spot. The G-spot was given its name in the 1980s, with the “G” referring to Dr. Grafenberg who, decades earlier in the 1950s, described an area on the front wall of the vagina that was full of erotic potential for some women. In 1982, the book The G Spot: And Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality 25 swept through the United States and many other countries with the message that sexual pleasure had to do with far more than the clitoral stimulation described by Kinsey 26 in the 1950s and Masters and Johnson 27 in the 1960s and 1970s. In The G Spot , readers discovered numerous stories of women who found stimulation of the front wall of the vagina to be particularly pleasurable and, for many, to be a reliable source of orgasm. For some, stimulation of this area— termed the G-spot—could also lead to the expulsion of fluids that came to be called female ejaculation.
    So why the controversy? Isn’t it a given that women vary in how they experience sex? After all, we’re all different from each other.
    The controversy lies in the fact that the G-spot is not a “thing” that can be seen. The G-spot is generally seen as something on the other side of the front vaginal wall—maybe it’s the inside parts of the clitoris, or maybe it’s the urethral sponge (tissue that surrounds the female urethra, just as spongy erectile tissue surrounds the male urethra in the penis). And when the front wall of the vagina is stimulated, often with firm but gentle pressure rather than a light flicking stimulation that the glans clitoris may respond to, the woman may feel wonderful things. In one study, 65 percent of women ages twenty-two to eighty-two in the United States and Canada felt that they had a particularly sensitive area in the vagina.
    But if it can’t be seen, then the G-spot is kind of like the Tooth Fairy to some people. Or to science-y folks, perhaps the G-spot is one big placebo effect that, if we believe it to be true, it becomes true and fun and possibly orgasm-inducing when stimulated.
    One might think that with improvements in science the G-spot would become less controversial as more facts are gathered. However, that’s not been the case. In 2008, Italian researchers using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques, claimed they found that women who experienced orgasm from vaginal intercourse all by itself had a thicker urethrovaginal space (the area around the front wall of the vagina) than did women who do not experience orgasm from vaginal intercourse without extra stimulation, such as from a finger or sex toy. 28 In interviews, the researchers even suggested that perhaps MRI could be used as a “test” to