Spot the G-spot

April 25, 2012 7:20 PM

G-spot anatomy found in cadaver of 83-year-old. Maybe it's been too long for me, but the accompanying illustration looks more like abstract art than, well, any letter of the sexual alphabet.
posted by anothermug (16 comments total)

I wouldn't have thought about this if they hadn't mentioned the age of the woman, but it's a little poignant to think of her in this context.

Assuming she died in 2010 or so, she was in her sexual prime in about 1960, at the age of 33. If she married, it was probably in the late '40s or early '50s. These were not times in which a woman's sexual enjoyment was widely appreciated. It may be that this doctor found out more about her than she ever had the chance to know.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:27 PM on April 25, 2012 [3 favorites]

"Sex therapists often stress the psychological aspects of female orgasm."

What a conclusion fail. Just throw that sentence out there at the end of the article, no explanation or follow-up. Sure, why not? Who cares about coherent organization. Let's all just write as if the world were collapsing around us at it was one big chaotic orgy.
posted by Saxon Kane at 7:35 PM on April 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

I always saw it as my personal responsibility to find the G-spot, but thank you guy in Poland.
posted by palidor at 7:37 PM on April 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

G-spot anatomy found in cadaver of 83-year-old.

"Worst necrophiliac joke ever!" - Mel Brooks
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:38 PM on April 25, 2012 [3 favorites]

A bit ago we discovered the shape of the clitoris. Anyway, this story seems odd. Had no one tried to do this before?
posted by delmoi at 7:48 PM on April 25, 2012 [1 favorite]

Anatomists must be terrible in bed. Until they get to read the literature on this, that is.
posted by cmoj at 7:49 PM on April 25, 2012

Guardian coverage.
posted by wilful at 7:49 PM on April 25, 2012

Initially I was surprised, but then I suppose not so surprised after all, that this was the first time anyone bothered to formally describe or (I assume) confirm the G-spot in medical literature. It took this long?
posted by flex at 7:50 PM on April 25, 2012

Years ago, when the debate about the g-spot was very high profile, I was shocked to learn just how little some aspects of female sexual anatomy had been investigated by science and medicine — the bits more about sexual pleasure than reproduction, of course. This article demonstrates just how true this has been. Better late than never, I suppose.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:50 PM on April 25, 2012

Am I alone in finding it mind-boggling that it has taken this long? I didn't think there were many mysteries left in gross anatomy.
posted by Wordwoman at 7:50 PM on April 25, 2012

Anyway, this story seems odd. Had no one tried to do this before?

There was a parallel article in the Star yesterday. Here's what they have to say about that:

Researchers aren’t permitted to do this kind of forensic dissections in the U.S. or Canada, but it’s allowed in many European and South American countries, he said. Poland is ideal for Ostrzenski because he has relatives and old friends to visit there while he waits. The research trips are a financial risk, with many factors outside his control; cadavers only become available in cases of sudden death.

posted by saturday_morning at 7:51 PM on April 25, 2012

I see that several people wrote comments on the same subject as I did while I was writing mine. Yes, it's very true and quite astonishing, really, just how little research there's been devote to this sort of thing. It's probably not because of lack of interest among researches so much as it's lack of grant and institutional support.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:52 PM on April 25, 2012

Doctor: The good news is we found her G-spot.
83-year-old Lover: What's the bad news?
Doctor: She's dead.
Lover: Deaf?
Doctor: No. Dead.
Lover: That's no problem. So am I.
Doctor: You're deaf?
Lover: No. I'm dead. I'm a vampire.
Doctor: That would be "undead."
Lover: I don't need you to correct me.
Doctor: It would seem that you do.
Lover: Well, at least I don't have to perform an autopsy to find a woman's G-spot.
posted by etc. at 7:59 PM on April 25, 2012 [9 favorites]

Here is an interesting blog post about this finding from Scientific American.

Quotes:

Dr. O’s motivation to dissect deeper into the tissues of the cadaver’s vaginal wall than had been done before, he told me, stemmed from a 2008 paper describing “the G-spot gene.” It “has already been incorporated into the Affymetrix GeneChip,” he wrote in the article.

When I asked how a gene could specify a body part, he referred me to the paper mentioning Affymetrix, a company that manufactures tiny chips (microarrays) fringed with DNA pieces used to assess gene expression in clinical research samples for diagnosis. “I have no clue what this means, but for me, if it has a genetic component, then I believe everybody should have it,” referring to the mysterious G-spot.

And there it was, published in BMC Genomics: G-spots cause incorrect expression measurement in Affymetrix microarrays.

A G-spot, in genetics, is a stretch of four guanines in DNA: GGGG. Such repeats are well known to disrupt enzymes that replicate DNA, and they also affect the functioning of DNA probes affixed to chips. That’s what the referenced paper is about — not a bump beneath the vaginal wall that swells upon contact, first described by Ernest Grafenberg in 1950 and named the G-spot in a 1982 book The G Spot by Beverly Whipple.

Because both English and genetics are not native languages to Dr. O, his mix-up is perhaps understandable. The failure of peer review, less so.

and

Alas, Dr. O had to return the dissected putative G-spot to the body for burial, so he didn’t have a chance to do the histology that would identify what he’d discovered. The chain of grapes in their bluish sheath, said a friend who is an anatomy authority and would kill me if I used his name here, said it looks like a hematoma, a pooling of blood that happened when the owner of said spot maybe bumped her crotch into something years ago.

posted by gaspode at 8:08 PM on April 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

I can remember many years ago watching Ally McBeal or some such mildly-titillating show with my mother. At a mention of the G-spot, I ventured aloud that it was a myth, only to have her look me square in the eye and say that, no, as a matter of fact it was not. Which was somewhat awkward.
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:08 PM on April 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

Man it seems like the standards of evidence necessary to establish a medical discovery are nothing. A sample size of one? And he has no tissue samples? Im all for documenting the anatomy, but why couldn't this be a random perturbation in the 83-year old woman's body? It seems like simply finding something weird in a place on a cadaver should require at least finding it a few more times before its published. Maybe I'm missing something.
posted by scunning at 8:23 PM on April 25, 2012 [1 favorite]