Science Vs - The G-spot

Episode Date: September 2, 2016

Join us on a hunt for the elusive G-spot. Our guides: Prof. Beverly Whipple, who introduced America to the G-spot in the 1980s, and Prof. Helen O’Connell, a urologist and expert on female sexual anatomy. CreditsThis episode has been produced by Wendy Zukerman, Heather Rogers, Caitlin Kenney, Austin Mitchell, and Kaitlyn Sawrey. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Fact Checking by Michelle Harris.Production Assistance by Dr Diane Wu & Shruti Ravindran. Extra thanks to Lola Pellegrino, Andres Montoya Castillo, Rose Reid, Radio National’s Science Show -- they make a podcast. It’s great. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll, mixed by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord.And be sure to check out our producer Austin Mitchell’s podcast Profiles:NYC. Selected References1981 study identifying G-spot in 47 women . . . but not confirming that it leads to orgasm Perry and Whipple, “Pelvic Muscle Strength of Female Ejaculators: Evidence in Support of a New Theory of Orgasm,” The Journal of Sex Research, 1981. Note: not freely available. Report of the first modern dissection of the clitoris O’Connell et al, “Anatomical relationship between urethra and clitoris,” Journal of Urology, 1998.Everything besides the clitoris is just a shade of gray in the MRI O’Connell et al, “Clitoral anatomy in nulliparous, healthy, premenopausal volunteers using unenhanced magnetic resonance imaging,” Journal of Urology, 2005. Comprehensive account of clitoris anatomy O’Connell et al, “Anatomy of the clitoris,” Journal of Urology, 2005.Review of research on the G-Spot and cliteralurethrovaginal complex Jannini et al, “Beyond the G-Spot: clitourethrovaginal complex anatomy in female orgasm,” Nature Reviews Urology, 2014. Note: not freely available.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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sunnybrook.ca slash special. Chiara. It means smart in Italian. Too bad your barista can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name. Your cafe name. Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway?

Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this. Because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. What does the AI revolution mean? For jobs. For getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think?

I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Gimlet Media's Science Versus. This is the show where we pit facts against foreplay. On today's show, science versus the G-spot. Does it exist?

Now, before we get started, we are going to be talking really openly about female genital anatomy. Parents, if this will open up a conversation that you're not ready to have right now, you've been warned. And if you're someone who's taking your time with sex or maybe you're not that excited about it right now, maybe it's just a big, scary thing, we just wanted to say that that's absolutely fine. There is a lot of pressure out there to enjoy sex and want it all the time. Don't worry about that.

Just enjoy the episode, learn things, and ladies, always have sex on your own terms. OK, now on with the show. Picture it, 1981. Roger Moore was still James Bond. Sandra Day O'Connor was to become the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court And the Phil Donahue show was broadcasting to the nation for its 11th year running Today on that show, something that would change the way we talk about vaginas

For decades to come What we're about to discuss has to do with sexuality and it has to do with women and it has to do with orgasm. A nurse named Beverly Whipple was about to bravely tell the nation of something exciting inside the vagina. It was a spot that, if pressed, would give you an orgasm. If you stimulate this area, what happens, the orgasm occurs very rapidly, usually within a minute.

And people often report that they have many orgasms, frequently. Many orgasms, frequently. Beverly called the magic button the G-spot. And to find it, she said that someone could insert their finger into your vagina, touching the front wall. But, she told Phil Donahue, and the rest of the United States... The best position is the female on top, where the angle of the penis will hit right into the anterior wall.

Missionary position just doesn't do it. Now, while Phil Donahue had a few stumbling moments... OK, now, where do we go from here? ..the audience was excited. Honestly, I'm thrilled do we go from here? The audience was excited. I want to say I'm thrilled to think I'm here. Did you ever think the television would get to this place? No, I didn't. If my mother was alive, she'd drop dead.

Beverly Whipple and her talk of the G-spot were immediately shot into the limelight. Later, Cosmopolitan magazine would call Beverly one of ten sexual revolutionaries that you should know. She was right up there with Alfred Charles Kinsey and Sigmund Freud. A lot of fanfare and a stamp of approval from Cosmo. But since that interview, many people have hunted for the G-spot in their bedrooms and in laboratories. And enough of them came up empty-handed that it raised the question,

does the G-spot even exist? When it comes to sex, there's lots of opinions. But then there's science. It's pretty astonishing that in 2016 there's a debate about whether an anatomical feature, any anatomical feature, exists. And yet, here we are. So today on this show, we're going to approach this topic in a very different way to what we usually do. By telling you the story of the G-spot through two scientists who have spent their careers trying to get people to pay attention to the vagina and the anatomy around it.

Let's start with the woman from the Phil Donahue show, Beverly Whipple. Producer Heather Rogers and I recently drove out to Beverly's house in New Jersey. These days, she's an emeritus professor of nursing at Rutgers. And she lives in a gated community. There's cookie-cutter houses and bright white fences. This is not the neighbourhood that I would have expected the G-spot to be born in. No, this is where I would expect June Cleaver to live.

We were pretty giggly. Hello. Welcome in. Thank you so much. Beverly's sitting room is filled with family photos and books about sex. Multiple orgasmic couple, multiple orgasmic man, any man can.

Oh, I don't know. Sexual fitness. Next to the only retirement guide you'll ever need. So how did this woman, living in a gated community amongst bright white fences, end up on daytime television recommending sexual positions? She told us her path to G-Spot fame started in the 1970s. Beverly was teaching nursing when a student asked her, what can a patient do sexually after having a heart attack?

The answer wasn't part of the nursing curriculum, but Beverly thought it should be. She wanted to add it to her course. We really did a real good job and we were all excited. But to get it added into the nursing curriculum, it had to go through the college's board of trustees. And they told us we couldn't implement it because we'd be talking about, now listen to my word,

masturbation and all those awful things. They couldn't even say masturbation correctly. Masturbation. Masturbation. Beverly was proud of what she'd done and when the board said no she realised something. That she didn't want to work for someone who couldn't pronounce Mastibution properly. So she quit. Her next job would introduce her to a group of patients who were suffering from their own kind of anxiety about sex. Women who peed when they were orgasming.

And these women were very bothered by it. They stopped having orgasm because this occurred with orgasm. And they wanted to make sure that they wouldn't have this. They thought they weren't normal and they were embarrassed. That's right. They were very embarrassed. Some women talked about taking towels to bed with them and all these different things. But something else was unusual about these women. You see, Beverly had been taught that women

who couldn't control their bladders properly were supposed to have weak pelvic floor muscles. And these women, who were peened during sex, had strong pelvic floor muscles. Beverly was floored, and she figured something was up. So she started studying these women, looking for why they might be peeing during sex. And while she was looking, she found something else,

something she wasn't expecting. So we had a nurse practitioner, myself who was a nurse practitioner or a physician, examine 400 women, and we found this sensitive area in all of the women. So when you say you examined 400 women, what did you do? Can I have your vagina for a minute? All in the service of journalism.

No. Beverly took our producer Heather's hand for a moment and she curved Heather's fingers and palm into a cylinder to look like a vagina, kind of. You put your fingers into the vagina and you push up with quite a bit of pressure. I think you've described it as a come here motion with your hand. With your fingers, you use a come here motion.

You go all around the vaginal wall, going around the vagina looking for areas of sensitivity. From 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock to 3 o'clock to 6 o'clock, et cetera, saying, how does this feel, how does this feel? And between 11 and 1 o'clock, we got a lot of smiles. Well, that feels good. Beverly says that when her team pressed that spot in the vagina of these women, it swelled.

And the women, they liked it. What was it like to see the smile on women's faces and no one... Wonderful, but we didn't know it was happening yet. Beverly scoured the literature searching for another scientist who had spotted a similar spot, and she found one article that described what she'd seen. It was published in this pretty obscure journal in 1950 by a Dr Ernst Grafenberg, who, side note, was the inventor of the world's first IUD,

the Grafenberg ring. In his paper, Ernst wrote that by his, quote, own experience of numerous women, end quote, he could always find an erotic zone on the front or anterior wall of the vagina, along the urethra. That's where you pee out of. He wrote that when pressed, this zone would give women an orgasm. He also wrote that occasionally, during their orgasms, these women would produce a fluid that is, quote, so profuse that a large towel has to be spread under the woman

to prevent the bedsheets getting soiled, end quote. His research matched exactly what Beverley had seen. The spot was in the same place, there was fluid produced, and so much fluid that women were bringing towels to bed, just like Beverley's patients. She wrote up the research and presented this discovery at a meeting with her colleague John Perry. At the presentation, there was, understandably,

some excitement in the room. A colleague came up to her with an intriguing suggestion. Said, Bev, you should call that the Whipple Tickle, which is immediately when I said to John, we're going to name this something. Get it? Beverly Whipple, the Whipple Tickle, because it's her last name, and you tickle the spot and then boom, orgasms.

Sadly, she didn't go with it because, historical side note, at the time there was a really popular ad for toilet paper from the Charmin Company and the main character in the ad was a hapless man called Mr Whipple who just couldn't stop squeezing the shaman toilet paper. Mr Whipple, please don't squeeze the shaman. You're probably too young to remember that. But our son would hear that all the time.

Hey, Mr Whipple, don't squeeze the shaman. And that's all I could think of was. So we immediately called it the Grafenberg spot. After Dr Ernst Grafenberg. It soon got shortened to the G-spot. Part of the work was published in the Journal of Sex Research and from there it was picked up by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, Playgirl Forum,

and that's how Beverly ended up on the Phil Donahue Show. A year later, she published her first book called The G-Spot and Other Discoveries of Human Sexuality and from there she was invited by television network after television network to tell the world about the G-Spot. The book says there is a spot inside a woman that when it is stimulated sexually gives a woman tremendous pleasure. Today we'll find out more about it. Won't you please welcome one of the authors of the G-spot, Beverly Whipple. She was introduced to famous people at a conference. She said she rubbed shoulders with President Gerald Ford and his wife Betty. After the conference was over, I'm walking down the beach in Maui in a bathing suit and all of a sudden somebody goes, Beverly, Beverly, can you come here? It was Betty Ford. She wanted to talk to me.

What did she want to talk to you about? Anyway, it's just interesting to me. You brought it up. You brought it up. Yeah, but I don't have to say it. I just said she knew me in a bathing suit. She knew my name was Beverly and she called me. Was she particularly interested in your work? She was interested in a lot of my work, yeah. She says thousands of women wrote to her, grateful for the work that she was doing. People saying, thank you, you're helping me to feel normal. How did it feel to get those

letters? It was wonderful. It was so affirming. It just felt great. But with the growing fame came some controversy. Some people didn't want female orgasms discussed so out in the open. Why do we need this? Why do we need to know there's a G-spot? You're dirty-minded little people working in a back room someplace with weird women. Enough already. I mean, enough talk about what should be a very private, personal matter. The backlash she saw, though, was pretty standard fare for the time. Women's sexuality was, and still is,

a sensitive subject for mainstream America. But amid all the fame and controversy, a scientific question lingered. What exactly is the G-spot? Is it a bundle of nerves, an organ, a gland, something else? Because even Beverly, the G-spot's biggest cheerleader, didn't know. In her appearance on Donahue in 1981, Beverly had a 3D model of the vagina

with all the structures around it, all in anatomical detail. I brought a model here. But the actual G-spot was literally just a green dot stuck on her model. It might as well have been a question mark. What did you think was there? I didn't know. I didn't know. That spot that Beverly had found to reliably and regularly produce orgasms,

she had no idea why it worked or what it even was. But once she announced it, people all around the world were looking for it. First in private, and then in public. Universities. After the break, we're going on the hunt for the G-spot. Chiara. It means smart in Italian.

Too bad your barista can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name. Your cafe name. Giulia. barista can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name. Your cafe name. Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late

to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this. Because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. Welcome back. So, Beverly Whipple has just unleashed the G-spot on the world,

inspiring untold numbers of books, magazine articles, blogs, vlogs, all telling you how to find your G-spot. How do you hit a girl's G-spot? Magic. Good practice. You gotta find it. You gotta find it. You gotta work for it.

Every woman has a G-spot. Every woman does. God bless them. Even today, people have this sense that the G-spot is a magic orgasm button, sort of like another clitoris but on the inside of the vagina. And all sorts of people are poking around looking for it, including our second scientist. Helen O'Connell is a professor of urology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Testing, testing.

Do you want to tell me what you had for breakfast? Some really exciting kiwi fruit, Wendy. Helen is an important part of this story, but she didn't start out looking for the G-spot. Around the time that all the news about the G-spot was breaking, Helen was a medical student on the other side of the world, in Australia, and she was studying anatomy. And, like Beverly, she was frustrated

that there wasn't good information out there about the female body. And Helen saw the problem really clearly every time she looked at her anatomy textbook. We had to use this book called Last's Anatomy. It did actually completely omit anatomy of the clitoris. So as a young woman... When you say completely, like there was just like a blank spot? Pretty much a blank spot.

For four years running, she was using the same anatomy textbook. I had to immerse myself in this hideous book and so I'm a little bit probably even angry that it's so bad. And then a colleague of Helen's gave her a very different kind of book about women's bodies. She said, you won't believe this book I've got. Oh, what is it? Anyway, she said this bunch of feminists

had created this set of diagrams and descriptions called A New View of a Woman's Body. The book was filled with drawings of the female body. It showed fingers pulling back the lips of the vagina to reveal details that Helen hadn't seen in her anatomy textbook. The women had made these drawings by observing each other, sometimes during sexual arousal. But they wrote in their book that they didn't have access

to dissection rooms, so they had no way to dissect cadavers and see what the vagina and clitoris looked like from the inside. They did acknowledge that they didn't have access to that and that that would have been preferable. So I remember tucking away at that age, wow, that's something we could do. After all, Helen was in medical school. She had access to cadavers. And so once she finished her training as a urologist, Helen convinced her university to let her use their cadavers so that she could finish the work that the feminist collective had started and dissect the clitoris once and for all. This was the final frontier. So, Helen put on her gloves and went to work.

And then I could see what the anatomy of the clitoris was like and thought, well... What Helen found is probably not what comes to mind when you think of the clitoris. That bit that you see is only a small part of this organ. It's literally the clit of the iceberg. What Helen found was a large, complicated organ with two arms that extend down, they're called the bulbs, and two legs that go back for up to nine centimetres. That's three and a half inches. And they're called the krura. You want to see a photograph? I do want to see a photograph.

It is a hell of a photograph. So this is a fresh cadaver. So look at the amazing colour. Isn't that incredible? The sort of blue-purple. You know, you could imagine that when aroused that they would really engorge. It is a huge structure.

It's pretty big. Yeah. The shape of the entire super clitoris is actually quite hard to describe. Helen gave it a go. So there's kind of long, you know, that's a sort of wishbone shape, the crura coming forward and meeting. Okay, let me have a crack. All right, so you're lying on your back,

so imagine that the opening of the vagina is a mouth, kind of like a pursed little mouth. Okay, flanked around that mouth is a thick moustache, like a Burt Reynolds moustache, you know, handlebars. So that's the bulbs. And then draped along the top of the handlebar moustache is this longer kind of like a ninja moustache. Yeah, so those are the crura. Right, two moustaches on top of each other, vagina is the mouth.

Excellent. So now we know what the clitoris looks like. Ugh, anatomy's hard to describe on the radio. We'll put a picture up on our website. Bottom line, the clitoris is big and much more complex than most people, even researchers and doctors, had thought. And once Helen saw the clitoris and all its various parts up close, her personal experience and scientific understanding

at last came together. To her, the idea that all the amazing sensations that you can get during an orgasm could come anatomically from a little spot just seemed wrong. If all you see is that external view, so all you see is kind of the tip of the clitoris, but you know from the inside that there's much more happening in your experience, you know, the pleasurable feelings come from more than the glance. It was taking the focus from a kind of illogical place

to a more logical place, so it sort of married with people's experience much more. Helen published her detailed descriptions of the clitoris in 1998 and at the time, oh boy, did it get people's attention. Both in Australia... What's the difference between a clitoris and a pub? Well, the answer is an Australian bloke can always find the pub. Dr Helen O'Connell is a urological surgeon...

And around the world. Headlines on Helen's seminal work on the clitoris included The Purr Factor, Sexist Science Misses a Mountain, and the very classy Men's health magazine went with, guess what she has? But guess what she didn't have? There was something that Helen didn't find.

The G-spot. As part of researching the anatomy of the clitoris, I had a good opportunity to look at vaginal anatomy and our studies, these early studies particularly, did not seem to show anything in the vaginal wall that would be a direct anatomical structure leading to that experience. So, nothing special in the vagina where the G-spot should be.

And Helen, she should know. She's looked at a lot of vaginas in her time. How many cadavers, how many vaginas do you think you've looked at in a cadaver in your career? I think we're probably, in terms of these dissections, probably getting close to 50. That's not that many, right? Yeah, that's, I would have thought that's a reasonably big experience.

No disrespect, of course. You're not impressed. There's years of work in that, Wendy. So, 50 dead vaginas. No G-spot. But Helen has also looked at alive vaginas too. Vaginas that have been scanned with an MRI. And it's this work in particular that makes Helen very sceptical of a G-spot inside the wall

of the vagina. Helen says that if you were looking for something that could give you an orgasm, a good candidate would be an area with a lot of blood vessels, something that would swell. It's not known exactly why that is, but swelling might help to activate nerve endings, making an area more sensitive. What we do know is that for both men and women, a sure sign of sexual arousal is increased blood flow to the genitals. And you can see this on an MRI. You can set up the scanner so that white on an area means lots of blood vessels and black means not a lot of blood vessels.

The clitoris would become white. That's got a lot of blood vessels. The clitoris would become white. That's got a lot of blood flow. So where the G-spot is doesn't have the look of it, of that really sort of uniformly white structure. Now, if there was a G-spot or a second hidden clitoris on the inside of the vagina, you'd expect it to show up as white too. But it didn't.

In one paper, Helen wrote that the clitoris looked white compared to the urethra and vagina, which looked like a, quote, shade of grey, end quote. Yes, very good. Enter, shade of grey, end quote. Yes, very good. Enter a shade of grey joke. Any shade of grey joke will do. Other scientists looking for the G-spot weren't having much luck. One review of a bunch of studies on the G-spot published in 2001

called it, quote, a sort of gynecological UFO, much searched for, much discussed, but unverified by objective means, end quote. A decade later, another review of the work, looking at dozens of trials, concluded that the studies, quote, still fail to provide irrefutable evidence for the G-spot's existence, end quote.

And when we take a close look at Beverly's original research, it's very far from irrefutable. In fact, it's somewhat contradictory. One of her first studies into this, published in 1981, was on just one woman. A second study of 47 women found that they all had this sensitive spot, but pressing it in the lab did not produce orgasms for any of them. A year later, she wrote a book and described 400 women who had this spot.

That's what she talked about on The Phil Donahue Show. OK, I've examined about 400 women. I've found it in every single one. But this sample of 400 women was never published in a peer-reviewed journal. A later experiment in 1983 tested 11 women and found a spot in only four of them. As for that fluid that Beverly talked about when some women orgasmed, studies have found that this is perfectly normal and that the fluid is essentially urine with a little bit of secretions from glands around the urethra. So what we can see from all this is that this so-called G-spot does nothing for some women,

but for others, it does give smiles. How come? The consensus that Helen and other researchers have now arrived at is that what Beverly Whipple had identified as the G-spot isn't really a spot at all. It's not some second magical clitoris on the inside of the vagina. It's actually the clitoris, which is just much bigger than we had thought. So it goes all the way down from that bit you can touch to the inside of the vaginal wall. And important to note, this newly discovered super clitoris might not be acting alone. It could be responding along with other parts around it, like the urethra and vagina. And it's kind of, it's like a core to a pyramid, yeah?

It's sort of wrapped around the urethra and vagina. So what Helen also discovered was that the urethra and the walls of the vagina share some of the same nerve supply. And preliminary work, often using very small studies, so I do want to emphasise this is preliminary work, but it does suggest that during sex, the clitoris, urethra and vagina may push, prod and excite each other, kind of like wrestlers on a mat or puppies in a basket.

Eh, anatomy's hard to describe. So interconnected are all these parts that Helen and others now argue that they should get their own name. Spot is out. Complex is the new word. Helen called it a clitoral complex. Others call it a clitoral urethral vaginal complex or CUV. Catchy, huh? As catchy as it is, Helen says that we really should start using this anatomically correct term because it's anatomically correct. But also because when you use the term the G-spot,

it makes it sound like all you have to do is press a button and whammo, multiple orgasms. It's just not as easy as the mother of the G-spot, Beverly Whipple, first made it sound. I don't have any doubt that Beverly Whipple's intentions were honourable and her findings faithful, but, you know, the upshot, if you're not enjoying this full range of experience,

you should be, rather than just enjoying what you're enjoying, particularly if you do enjoy your sexual activity and that's not good enough somehow. You've got to go for some other level or something. And when you call it a spot, it's like really, you just feel like you've got to find that spot. Yeah, that somehow if you, you know, touch it enough

or thrust it harder that somehow magic's, you know, touch it enough or thrust it harder, that somehow magic's going to occur. Well, that's just a really bad paradigm. And this obsession with finding the G-spot is something that Beverly Whipple regrets unleashing on the world. Looking back at her legacy, she says she wishes she hadn't used the word spot because ultimately it made the vagina, clitoris and orgasms seem less complex than they are.

Science Versus producer Heather Rogers and I asked her about what she would have done differently. I guess we've misled people because it's more than one little spot, it's a whole area. But at that point, you know, that's what we called it. So why not, like, officially change the name? How do you do that? How would you officially change the name?

If you have a way of doing it, it's fine with me. But this was way back. Nobody was doing anything. I don't know why we said Spot. I really don't. You know, John and I were talking about it. We've got to name this after Grafenberg because look at what he did back in 1950.

And it just happened, yeah. Right now, yes, I'd like to call it a sensitive area. And the thing is, Beverly says that from the beginning she never wanted people to go searching for a spot or hunting for magical orgasms. It's true that as far back as the early 1980s, Beverly was saying that people shouldn't be obsessed with getting an orgasm, but instead, she's always wanted people to focus on all the fun stuff around it.

Sometimes holding hands or touching whatever it is that feels good to you is an end in itself. Same as some people like someone to blow on their ears. If my husband comes near my ears, even to whisper or to barf, I mean, don't, don't, don't. I love for him to suck on my big toe. That's like... But we're all different. So when it comes to science versus the G-spot, does it stack up? There is no distinct anatomical feature where the G-spot supposedly is. There is no spot in the vaginal wall

that every woman can press to get an orgasm. Now, if you are pressing an area in the vaginainal wall that every woman can press to get an orgasm. Now, if you are pressing an area in the vagina and it feels great, then great, keep pressing it. But know that it's probably the clitoris you're pressing, maybe Bert's moustache, which wraps around the vaginal wall. And maybe the clitoris is interacting with the urethra and the vaginal wall to give you that great feeling. And yet, despite this new research, the idea of the G-spot persists. Every woman has a G-spot. Every woman does. God bless them.

Why do you think the G-spot has become an icon, a thing, when there's very little scientific evidence behind it. It's just a really lovely idea that his pleasure with vaginal stimulation should be the very secret to her orgasm. So it's such a lovely idea. It just doesn't seem to be that way. And it's not just straight couples that want an easy answer to sexual pleasure. Everyone does. A spot to press to get us going? Great. But the anatomy is a lot more complicated.

And here's the rub. We've known that women had a complex clitoris for centuries. Helen wasn't actually the first person to discover this super clitoris. She herself couldn't believe that no other anatomist before her didn't see this large, complex structure around the vagina. So she dug into the history and found out that there were good dissections from very early on. In 1561, Gabriel Fallopia, who discovered the Fallopian tubes

and was a professor of anatomy at Pisa and Padua, wrote about the clitoris. He noted, quote, modern anatomists have entirely neglected it and do not say a word about it, end quote. Fallopia wrote that almost 500 years ago. Then anatomists in the 17th and 19th centuries, they said similar things.

In 1901, Grey's Anatomy, which is a bible for anatomists, it had a label for the clitoris. But by 1948, that label and the clitoris was gone. By the way, we checked a recent edition. It's back. Helen says these are probably not accidents of history. People were actively deleting the clitoris from anatomy books. And those deletions, they ultimately created a gap that made it possible for ideas like the G-spot to take hold. Why would you start off with a good anatomy? So why wouldn't they become like the mainstay, repeat those images rather than inadequate images.

Why? It's almost as if there's a power structure which throughout history has marginalised women and their experiences. But I just... I guess we'll never know. Maybe it's the lizard people that aren't giving me my diagrams of the clitoris. That's Science vs The G Spot.

We're taking two weeks to work on some new episodes, but when we come back, we're untangling the mysteries of hypnosis. And stick around to hear the reactions that we got from the Gimlet office when we asked them to describe the clitoris. This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, Caitlin Kenney, Austin Mitchell and Caitlin Sori. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Bloomberg. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris.

Production assistance by Dr Diane Wu and Truti Ravindran. An extra big thanks to They make a great podcast. It's called The Science Show. You should check them out. Sound design and music by Matthew Boll, mixed by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. And this week, our intern turned producer Austin Mitchell leaves us. He has been absolutely wonderful and he makes this great podcast called Profiles NYC. Here's a little bit of it.

One little bad thing to make you kind of like go home, go back to South Carolina, but I'm still here. I'm here. I'm going to still fight. To find out more, head to profiles.nyc. You can see photos of all the people he interviews. Science Versus is a production of Gimlet Media. We really struggled for some time to describe what the clitoris looks like. I was going for the praying mantis for some time until I discovered this great moustache analogy. But at some point we did turn to the gimlet hive mind.

Here's what they thought. This looks like a pterodactyl that's been hit by a truck. It's just like flattened. Yeah, I mean pterodactyl's not that crazy. It almost looks like a coat hanger. Very bike rack. Like a fleshy coat hanger. All of that like schoolyard terminology for a vagina like slash dog boot. I'm Wendy

Zuckerman. Back to you next time. It looks like one of those magic eye pictures. Or like the inkblot. Like a cave system. And this section here which is like, looks like one of those magic eye pictures or like the inkblot, like a cave system. And this section here, which is like, it looks like a frozen lava flow.