The Best You'll Ever Have (7 page)

Chapter 3

I found my G-spot in my senior year of college.
I didn’t celebrate the discovery (I would have thrown a party) because almost immediately after having found it, I lost it, for seven years. I sort of hoped it would turn up buried in the couch cushions or deep in a closet somewhere. No sign of it though, no matter how hard I looked. And believe me, I looked.

In the years I’ve been doing the Safina Salons, I’ve learned that my story is not unique. What’s even more common, women who have never found their G-spot, despite years of feverish hunting. Just as often, women haven’t bothered to look, assuming, since they’d never felt it, it must not exist. Once I start talking about the elusive spot, and assuring women that every female has one, they all want to know the same thing: so where the hell is it?

Of course they want to know. Who wouldn’t want to access yet another source of pleasure? Despite the G-spot’s media coverage and how the phrase is bandied about as a universal truth, the area remains, sadly, mysterious. If everyone who has ever said “G-spot” knew where to find it, the world would be a very different place, a happier place. I can tell you, since I’ve rediscovered my G-spot and can find it as easily as the back of my knee, life has gotten a whole lot brighter. I am duty-bound to spread the joy.

Is that it? I think that might be it. Or not.

The first time I tapped into my G-spot, I was uninformed and clueless. I didn’t have a name for the sensation, but I sure knew something different was going on. I was seeing John. He was one of my study partners’ roommates. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a silly laugh, and he was so hot-blooded he wore shorts in the winter and a light short jacket and really was warm enough. He always convinced me to get on top, which hadn’t been my favorite position. But from my perch, I saw that John was having a great time and was in no rush. I relaxed and started to enjoy myself. I slid around and explored how it felt to move this way and that. John had all the time in the world for me to enjoy myself. He wasn’t the kind of guy who drove relentlessly, unswervingly, to orgasm. Sex was a journey for him.

I was a happy passenger. While I was on top, John would do this thing where he arched his back and held my legs in place. We’d stay like that for a long time. Sensations would surface, like none I’d felt before. Sex with him was a welcomed new experience. I had whole-body orgasms with him, ones that started somewhere deep inside me and could clear my sinuses. I wasn’t really sure where they came from, nor did I care. I just wanted more of them. I believed that the amazing fresh feelings were because of John, the shape of his penis, his technique. I didn’t realize that sex with him was so great because together we were stimulating a place in me that hadn’t been reached before.

Well, John and I broke up. If only relationships could be based solely on fantastic sex and last. Sigh. The worst part was that when he walked out the door and disappeared from my life, so did my G-spot. It lay dormant, waiting impatiently, with excruciating frustration, until I met Paul. He was prematurely gray, five years my senior, smart with a quick wit and the kind of confidence that makes women swoon. That confidence came to bed with us. He was always in charge sexually, even if it was to put me in charge of him. He also liked me to get on top. And then—hello!—I had that same overwhelming feeling, the one I never thought I’d have again. Just like with John, I didn’t know where it was coming from exactly. I just wanted the feeling to continue, for a few minutes, or into next week. He shifted, and the feeling ebbed. I yelled, “Don’t move!” I may have scared him a little, but he listened. I wiggled around, finding the feeling again. For fear of losing it, I decided to study it, right then. I rocked, moving him against me to hit the epicenter of the feeling. I tested it, investigating the boundaries of it, and realized that the sensation was radiating from a particular area. And then it hit me hard: this feeling is not from him, it’s from me. Sure, his penis was hitting the right place in me. But the spot itself, that wonderful spot, was all mine.

In the seven years since my introduction to this spot, I’d read about the G-spot and was left wondering if that was what I’d felt so long ago. As I sat on Paul, shifting and rolling against him, I thought to myself, “G-spot, my old friend, we meet again.” I was so glad to hit the jackpot that I stayed there for what seemed like hours, getting to know the feeling intimately, in vivid detail. Poor Paul couldn’t hold back anymore and that was that.

I was so thrilled, I didn’t care it had ended. I’d taken the time and had the presence of mind (barely) to get a good handle on where to find my G-spot. Nowadays, with all the practice I’ve had, I could be a tour guide to my G-spot. I could (do) find it in the dark and I’ve still never seen it. I have a mental signpost with big arrows pointing directly at it. As well I should.

As well you should too. You too can get to know your own body and all the ways you can feel great. Isn’t that better than drifting about aimlessly, hoping to stumble across something powerful by luck or accident? Just think of the relief—for both you and your partner—if you can describe explicitly how to hit the spot. He’ll be so happy, you’ll be surprised. It doesn’t matter that you had to tell him where to go; he’ll glow with pride at having arrived there. There are, of course, times in life when we find ourselves between partners. With or without partners, it’s wise to know yourself and how to feel good on your own.

So Where the Hell Is It?

Patience, patience. Before I get into the nitty-gritty of finding your G-spot (I’ll practically draw a map, a really good one, better than the ones you’ve seen elsewhere that use anatomically incorrect drawings—just bear with me for one tiny bit), I want to touch on why the G-spot is still so shrouded in mystery for most women.

REASON NUMBER ONE that the G-spot is the holy grail of sex:
Women don’t talk about it with each other.

That’s why I said earlier that I feel duty bound to describe G-spotting in detail. Women seem to stop short of divulging the most pertinent sexual information to each other. When I’d initially tapped the G-spot in college, I didn’t tell anyone about it. Sure, I gave the nonspecific report to my friends, as in, “John is so hot in bed,” etc. I did not, however, announce that he’d hit a place inside me that I’d never felt and desperately wanted to feel again. When I knew enough to give it a name, I didn’t call my friends and announce that I’d won the jackpot. I kept the news to myself. Until I started Safina, I hadn’t had a single balls-out conversation about finding the G-spot. No one ever asked me, so I never told. The whole subject never came up among my girl friends, even if it was mentioned in the women’s magazines we all read from time to time. The men I dated, meanwhile, wanted to know all about it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell my friends about the G-spot or to hear their stories. It didn’t even cross my mind to do so. Sex talk was always vague and nonspecific. None of my friends told me if or when they found their G-spots; we never debated where it was or talked about the possibility that men have one (they do; see chapter 5 for more information). Now graphic descriptive tendencies differ from woman to woman, from group to group. But, again, not to flaunt the evidence of the Safina Salons, I’ve heard hundreds and hundreds of women, from their early 20s to their late 50s, confirm my belief that women may dish about sex, but they don’t rush to serve up explicit details.

It’s funny that women can go on forever describing protein intake or the syllable-by-syllable tone fluctuations used by a potential love interest on the phone. We can go on and on about food and love, but sex gets the silent treatment. Well, not completely silent. We have Monica Lewinsky and
Sex and the City
to thank for that. Women can certainly talk about the sexual exploits of public and televised people, but they can’t seem to talk about their own. Again, I mean in detail. You can see the cursory throwing around of the words “sex” and “orgasm” on nearly any prime-time TV show. But you sure won’t hear Grace tell Will that she bought herself a keen new vibrator and has finally stimulated the G-spot to the point of female ejaculation. No, no. Our popular culture has come a long way since the frigid-fearing ’60s, but we’re not quite ready to be that frank about vaginas in our lives let alone on prime time.

You may be cringing right now at reading the very word “vagina” and all the explicit detail in this book so far. It’s a “private” part, not for mass discussion, right? Women have told me that discussing the G-spot is still “too personal” or “too much information.” That is one thing I want my Salons to change for women—their comfort level with talking about sex. Men can talk about their penises and not cringe. They can admit to masturbation and show a woman how to please them. We women should have the same freedoms and the same healthy attitude. It’s sad that we don’t. Seems a shame, doesn’t it?

This is why we, in lieu of woman-to-woman discussion, go to magazines for directions to the mystical ganglia. Which brings me to:

REASON NUMBER TWO that the G-spot is the best kept secret of womankind:
Even with a map it’s hard to find, and most
directions are way off.

Let’s start with the most basic illustration of the female reproductive system, one we all know. Many of us could draw it from memory. I’m talking about the diagram that goes with the instructions inside a tampon box. You know, the side view, one leg raised, tampon poised to enter. Most of us saw it for the first time at the age of 12, and it left an indelible impression. Let me make one thing perfectly clear:

THE TAMPON BOX DIAGRAM IS INACCURATE.

It’s misleading. You know this already. Your vagina isn’t the shape of a test tube turned upside down, gaping open and angled straight toward your tailbone. But this is what we believe our bodies would look like if we were sawed in half and became transparent. I think this is why so many women, including myself, struggled with inserting a tampon at first. The diagram didn’t show a big muscle to push past. It didn’t show the hook inward. My early tampon experiences were a misery of agonizing frustration and painful half-insertion. Only when I figured out that you had to push past that initial, undiagrammed partition between the inside and the outside was I able to successfully insert a tampon.

Naturally, when women go looking for the G-spot, they’re surprised to learn that there’s a big bump of muscle that curves inward toward their abdominal-side vaginal wall, instead of the smooth, straight tube pictured in the tampon diagram. Confused? No wonder! You were expecting a straight shot, and the road has a hairpin curve. That curve is about one third of the way in and is the key to finding the G-spot.

When I started the Safina Salons, I wanted to find an anatomically correct illustration to show to women. I went to the biggest textbook store in town and spent an entire day going through every medical textbook I could find. I thought I’d find a few illustrations to choose from that would clearly show the G-spot and the region as I understood it, and then I could just show women where to find the G-spot, and other points of interest.

I ended up buying the three most popular medical textbooks. I took all three books home, scanned the diagrams, enlarged them, and took them to my gynecologist. My doctor couldn’t believe what trouble I’d gone to when I showed them to her. I explained to her that I was determined to find the best illustration possible for the Salons. I expressed my concern, saying that I thought each of the diagrams was inaccurate. She said, “Everyone knows the diagrams are all wrong. The best medical illustrations were done by Frank H. Netter in the 1930s, and could stand updating.”

The main thing that was missing from these diagrams (and the diagram in the tampon instructions) is that the vagina is drawn in the unobstructed test tube style. My gynecologist explained that these illustrations are based on drawings from cross sections of cadavers (which of course don’t have tight muscles). She showed me the three-dimensional clear plastic model of the female pelvis and said, “You think the diagram is bad, look at this.” We stared at the disproportionate model with its pre-pubescent hips and short fat vagina that led to a large solid-colored uterus and big fallopian tubes. “It’s completely disproportionate within itself even if it’s not supposed to be at a 1:1 scale,” she said. The G-spot is unmarked in the textbook illustrations and the plastic model. I theorized to my doctor that “the G-spot is excluded from medical education because it doesn’t get sick.” She considered that and agreed. Most doctors are only interested in parts that cause problems. The only problem with the G-spot, however, is the lack of informational material about it.