Women's sexuality needs further scientific study, says one researcher

SECURING research funding was once a nightmare for Dr Beverly Whipple. Which is hardly surprising, since her projects involved female ejaculation and the hunt for the 'G Spot' - not topics guaranteed to dislodge an avalanche of largesse from the male-dominated boards who decide such matters.

'All my early research was self-funded,' says the renowned researcher and bestselling author, one of the keynote speakers at the 14th World Congress of Sexology, which ended on Friday. 'Now I have government funding. But in the beginning it was very difficult. People were pretty uncomfortable. We were even accused of undermining the feminist perspective.' Her ground-breaking research in the early 1980s, which culminated in her book The G Spot And Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality, launched her into the eye of a storm of controversy.

Her detractors claimed the G Spot did not exist and she was instilling in women unreasonable expectations about sex, launching them on frustrating quests for some mythical apotheosis of pleasure.

'I feel badly about that,' she says. 'When I wrote The G Spot, we had a whole chapter on 'the best is the enemy of the good', in terms of not striving for a goal.' Dr Whipple's research took up where the German obstetrician Ernst Grafenberg left off in the 1950s. 'Grafenberg developed the first IUD [intra-uterine device],' she says. 'He wrote an article about a sensitive area in the front or anterior wall of the vagina.' When stimulated, this spot led to intense orgasms and in some cases the expulsion of fluid from the urethra of a different chemical composition than urine.

'My attitude is, here's information, use it how you want, but don't go striving to do this. I'm not trying to set up goals, I'm just trying to validate women's experiences. I mean, some women have had surgery to correct female ejaculation, when it's perfectly normal.' Dr Whipple, who has a doctorate in neurophysiology and is based at Rutgers University in the United States, named the G Spot in honour of Grafenberg's work. Her original paper was published in the Journal Of Sex Research in 1981.

'Since that work, I then wondered what was the adaptive significance of the G Spot, is it just there for pleasure or is there some reason for it? And we found that, based on animal studies across many species, stimulation of that area produces a very strong pain-blocking effect, an analgesic effect, that is also activated during labour and childbirth.