G-spot found in 83-year-old Warsaw woman!

All this time we’ve been looking in the wrong place! American women? Don’t waste your time. It’s been in Poland for decades, hiding inside the soft tissues of an 83-year-old Warsaw woman! Unfortunately, she’s now deceased, and her G-spot has been carved up by a “cosmetic gynecologist.”

No, you have not stumbled on to The Onion or The Daily Show. Here it is from Melissa Healy in the Los Angeles Times:

Like so many explorers before him, Dr. Adam Ostrzenski has long dreamed of finding a piece of elusive territory with a reputation for near-mythic powers. Ostrzenski’s quarry is the G spot, the long-conjectured trigger for enhancing female orgasm. And in an article published Wednesday by the Journal of Sexual Medicine, the semi-retired Florida gynecologist declared that he had found it.

This is Tina Hesman Saey in Science News:

Despite what’s written in sex advice books, the scientific search for the female erogenous zone known as the G-spot has proved surprisingly elusive. But now one physician claims to have found the first anatomical evidence of the fabled structure.

She gets to the skeptics in her third paragraph, which is roughly two paragraphs below where the skepticism should have been.

Helen Thomson at The New Scientist properly gets the skepticism into the first graf:

G marks the spot. Or does it? One researcher claims to have pinpointed and described the anatomy of the elusive G spot, an area of the vagina reputed to produce intense orgasms when stimulated. Many others are not so sure, saying that the G spot is unlikely to be a single structure.

If you want to know what the study claims, you can read the press release, or look at the study itself if you have access to The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Science bloggers were clearly the rational voices in this story. The blogger Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science) alerted me to a post by a British blogger I didn’t know, Dr. Petra Boynton. Dr. Petra, as she calls herself on her blog, recounts the long, depressing history of news stories saying the G-spot does exist, or it doesn’t, or that it is the most important thing in sex research, or other silly things, most of which are described as coming from “groundbreaking studies.” An excerpt from her lengthy criticism of the coverage:

Each time studies on the g-spot have been published the media has reacted as though
– these are groundbreaking studies
– the do they/don’t they have g-spots issue is the most pressing topic in sex research
– these studies require no critical attention

And in all these cases journalists – including health and science correspondents – have responded to these studies in one simple way. To frame their stories with the question ‘does the g-spot exist?’

This hides a whole heap of bad science and poor journalism and misinformation on sex, arousal and orgasm.

Bora Zivkovic, editor of the blog network at Scientific American, alerted the Tracker to other blog posts critiquing the coverage, including one by Debby Herbenick (of the Kinsey Institute) at The Daily Beast, another by Ricki Lewis at Scientific American, and a few others.

My criticism of the study is simpler and lazier. Did we ever learn much of anything from a study with a sample size of one? Yes, there are exceptions, I know. But an autopsy of one subject should never lead to broad conclusions about women everywhere, especially when we’re dealing with something as prone to misinformation as the G-spot.

It’s probably the case that the traditional requirements of objectivity in the legacy media prevented reporters from saying what the bloggers said–that the emperor has no clothes. It’s another example of how we benefit from the diverse menu of journalistic offerings we have at our fingertips. Science blogs, as we’ve known for a long time now, are clearly enriching our world.

In the interests of decorum, I’ve decided not to add a picture to this post.

– Paul Raeburn