THE G-SPOT
(G SPOT, GSPOT, G_SPOT)

Here is additional background information on
The G-Spot as it relates to Female Ejaculation

The question of the sexual phenomenon known as female ejaculation and whether there exists a female erogenous zone popularly known as the "G-Spot" have been major areas of continued controversy and debate among sex researchers, gynecologists and sex educators. Perhaps no two sexual issues, including the question of clitoral vs. vaginal orgasms, have created so much public interest.

These subjects are continuing to attract the attention of the public, particularly of women, as well as the so-called experts in human sexuality, because they are biological issues that have significant social ramifications. What would be the potential impact on our collective sexual belief systems (and actual behaviors/activities) if female ejaculation and the existence of the G-Spot achieved widespread legitimacy?

Since the 1920's the conventional medical establishment has dismissed "female ejaculation" as actually being a condition known as urinary stress incontinence. This condition is considered to be an undesirable bodily dysfunction in which urine is involuntarily expelled from the urethras of women due to physical straining such as might also occur with coughing or sneezing as well as sexual arousal or orgasm. Women have generally considered such expulsions to be a source of personal shame or embarrassment that also frequently elicited disapproval from their sexual partners. Physicians usually attempt to correct the condition, either by the use of Kegel exercises or by surgery.

Furthermore, noted experts in the field of human sexuality such as Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson dismissed female ejaculation as being an "erroneous but widespread concept."1 Masters and Johnson also argued against the existence of the erogenous zone known as the "G-spot" and stood steadfastly for the premise that the clitoris alone was responsible for triggering female orgasm.

However, if it should turn out that these experts had underestimated the sexual capabilities of women's bodies by portraying pleasurable sexual activities like female ejaculation as abnormal and/or imagined, it could have a significant effect on women's views of their sexuality. If the new evidence about these expulsions demonstrated that they are natural sexual bodily functions then many women could be free of guilt and shame about expelling fluid during sex.

Other benefits of a public recognition of female ejaculation as a natural event (and the so-called G-Spot as an erogenous zone, capable of producing orgasm in a woman) could be the creation of additional sexual activities that might not just be a prelude to intercourse but an end unto themselves. It could lead to a broadening of peoples' sensual experiences and their sexual repertoire. New pleasurable behaviors, with no goal other than pleasure from those activities, could be learned with the added benefits that they have very low risk in terms of AIDS, STDs and unwanted pregnancy.

All of these social issues become a backdrop for new evidence I discovered during my doctoral research project that, as a result of advanced and heightened states of sensual/sexual arousal, some women do expel fluid. In the past, the assumption has been that the expulsions originated either in the bladder or from the urethral glands and ducts. My study indicated that both may be the case in that a small amount of fluid may be released from the urethral glands and ducts in some instances and mixed in the urethra with a clear fluid that originates in the bladder.

The Nature of Female Orgasm

For the last 50 years, modern science has generally accepted first Kinsey's and then Masters and Johnson's premise that the clitoris alone was responsible for triggering female orgasm. They saw the creation of an "orgasmic platform" that underwent a build-up of muscle tension and sexual energy that was then released during orgasm."²

However, in 1981, Perry and Whipple, two of the co-authors of the book, "The G-Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality," presented a theory of a second form of orgasm. This "uterine" orgasm "included the Grafenberg G-Spot (presumed to be the female prostate) as its major source of stimulation ..."³

Singer and Singer then went on, in 1978, to describe a blended orgasm which "combines elements of the previous two kinds ... characterized by contractions of the orgasmic platform, but the orgasm is subjectively regarded as deeper than a vulval orgasm."⁴

Now there is new evidence from urology textbooks that heightened stimulation during sensual arousal can indeed create an involuntary opening of the bladder sphincter. This involuntary opening can occur from stimulation of either the clitoris, or from stimulation of the pelvic nerve through the upper wall of the vagina, or from both simultaneously.⁵ Stimulation of the urethral glands can be accomplished either by manual stimulation or intercourse, utilizing a correct angle of penetration. Stimulation of the G Crest of some women can also be produced by pressing downward from the outside of the body, slightly above the pubic bone. Other studies indicated that "stimulation of the anterior vaginal wall is clearly not a prerequisite to ejaculation, although the data suggest it may be facilitated by this type of stimulation."⁶

All of this highlights how subjective and personal a woman's experience of orgasm can be. There is much yet to learn about the intricacies of female orgasm, including the emotional and intellectual components. The experience of orgasm for many women is a continuum of experience, not one way or another, correct or incorrect. There can be a blending of different types of orgasmic experiences that are unique to the individual.⁷ This point was made over and over in the comments of the female subjects in my study. One woman participant indicated that she had categorized and kept notes on 126 different types of orgasm to date and she is constantly finding new and more subtle variations.

Historical References To Female Ejaculation

Throughout time there have been reports of the expulsion of fluid from the vagina by women during sexual arousal and/or orgasm. There were references to this by historic scientific figures such as Aristotle and Galen, discussing and identifying vaginal expulsions which did not seem to have the appearance or smell of urine and did not stain bed sheets.

There were also many references to vaginal expulsions in classical literature. However, it is impossible to determine whether these passages are simple reporting of what the writer actually saw or a dramatization of popular male sexual fantasies of the times.⁸

The first modern description both of female genitalia and the question of vaginal expulsions came from the 17th century Dutch physician, Regnier De Graaf. He stated: "The urethra is lined internally by a thin membrane. In the lower part, near the outlet of the urinary passage, this membrane is pierced by large ducts, or lacunae, through which pituito-serous matter occasionally discharges in considerable quantities. Between this very thin membrane and the fleshy fibres we have just described there is, along the whole duct of the urethra, a whitish, membranous substance about one finger-breadth thick which completely surrounds the urethral canal ... the substance could be called quite aptly the female prostatae or corpus glandulosum, 'glandulous body."⁹

De Graaf's description of the "prostate" in women in reference to the glands surrounding the female urethra represented conventional medical thought for almost 200 years. In 1880, Dr. Alexander Skene, professor of gynecology in the Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, wrote a paper describing and diagramming various glands and ducts surrounding the female urethra. Modern science then began to refer to them as Skene's glands, a term that is still in use today.

In 1953, Dr. Samuel Berkow, a urologist, came to the conclusion that the tissue of Skene's glands was erectile when stimulated. However, Berkow's primary interest was in urination and he believed that the function of the "erectile tissue" was to pinch off the urethra in order to control urination. He never explored the question of whether it could become erect during sexual activity.¹⁰

In 1950, the German obstetrician, Ernst Gräfenberg, wrote of observing the expulsion of fluid from the urethra during sexual arousal. "If there is the opportunity to observe the orgasm of such women, one can see that large quantities of a clear, transparent fluid (that) are expelled not from the vulva, but out of the urethra in gushes. At first, I thought that the bladder sphincter has become defective by the intensity of the orgasm. Involuntary expulsion of urine is reported in sex literature. In the cases observed by us, the fluid was examined and it had no urinary character. I am inclined to believe that 'urine' reported to be expelled during female orgasm is not urine, but only secretions of the intraurethral glands correlated with the erotogenic zone along the urethra in the anterior vaginal wall. Moreover, the profuse secretions coming out with the orgasm have no lubricating significance, otherwise they would be produced at the beginning of intercourse and not at the peak of orgasm."¹¹

At the same time, the medical and scientific establishment was highly resistant to considering evidence of a cause for female ejaculation other than urinary stress incontinence. Again, they (and presumably their female patients) tended to consider ejaculation as an undesirable bodily dysfunction, generally resulting in the women experiencing guilt and shame. There have also been frequent reports of disapproval and recriminations from sexual partners of women who "ejaculate" that have often led to painful relationship issues and even dissolution of marriages.

At this point, it should be noted that doctors, who may be very knowledgeable in the areas of urology and reproductive biology, have had little training or experience in human sexuality. If a woman patient were to have evidence of an expulsion of fluid during sensual/sexual activity, a doctor would be unlikely to check for sensitivity through the anterior wall of the vagina. Even if the physician were to suspect a possible expulsion from Skene's glands, ethics would prevent most doctors from engaging in an Ob/Gyn exam in which the patients was sexually aroused so as to duplicate the conditions of the expulsions.

In the early 1980's, there were several studies that concluded that what had been called Skene's glands and/or paraurethral ducts and glands were, in fact, not a vestigial homologue of the male prostate but, instead, a "small, functional organ that produces female prostatic secretion and possesses cells with neuroendocrine function, comparable to the male prostate."¹²

The G "Crest"

The so called "G Spot" is perhaps the most misunderstood area of three seemingly interconnected subjects: female ejaculation, the urethral glands and ducts, and the "G spot."

This term was first introduced to the public at large in the book, "The G-Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality." It referred to the previously mentioned 1950 article in the International Journal of Sexology in which Grafenberg also wrote about erotic sensitivity along the anterior vaginal wall. Grafenberg clearly stated that it was his opinion that what he felt through the anterior vaginal wall was erectile tissue.

He stated that during sexual arousal "the female urethra begins to enlarge and can be felt easily. It swells out greatly at the end of orgasm. The most stimulating part is located at the posterior urethra where it arises from the neck of the bladder."¹³ Others have noted that the size and development of these tissues will vary greatly from woman to woman and may change during arousal.

The area on the upper wall of the vagina has been popularly but erroneously called the G-Spot and would be better labeled as the G Crest. It is the popular media that has promulgated the notion of a "spot" on the anterior wall of the vagina itself. The search for a "spot" on the anterior wall of the vagina, as opposed to searching for the urethral glands through the anterior wall may be contributing to the difficulty of finding the "G spot" and the controversy as to whether it exists at all.

There is great potential value in renaming the "G spot" as the "G Crest." In that terminology, the "G" would be retained, as reference to and as credit to the important work of Grafenberg. The word 'Crest' is also more useful as a description than "spot" because the swollen female urethral glands feel more like a protruding ridge than a spot (thus enabling her partner to locate the area more readily with less confusion) thus lessening some of the confusion there seems to be in finding it. Furthermore, the word 'Crest' also invokes an image of rising sensual/sexual pleasure.

There have been studies that have indicated that the stimulation of the 'G Crest' by itself may induce an orgasm that feels very pleasurable, although different than a clitoral orgasm. As Grafenberg previously observed, this may induce an expulsion of fluid through the urethra at orgasm. In 1988, Milan Zaviacic, M. D., Ph.D., head of the Institute of Pathology of the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, examined and stimulated the 'G Crests' of 27 women patients who volunteered for his study. Ten of the 27 women (37%) were induced to have urethral expulsions, with a wide variation in the amount of stimulation required before the expulsion."¹⁴

The Experiment

I became interested in the controversy about the source and cause of female ejaculation during the course of my doctoral studies. My doctoral research project was an exploratory experiment designed to provide information about some of the key issues in this controversy by collecting precise data during a medical procedure. The procedure I chose involved placing a Foley catheter through the urethra and into the bladder of seven women who reported that they regularly expelled fluid during sensual and/or sexual arousal. The purpose of the catheter was to effectively segregate the bladder from the urethra and collect vaginal expulsions in a controlled, medically supervised environment.

It was an interesting experiment that had been conceived previously by researchers but never actually performed. I was moved to do this research mainly because I was intrigued by the fact that it had never been done before and fortunately I was acquainted with women ejaculators who were potential and willing subjects. Following a considerable amount of time screening and preparing the applicants, I assembled and managed the necessary research team, including medical personnel, and we created a relaxed and comfortable environment that was conducive to the experiment.

After urine specimens were collected from each of the female subjects, they were aroused for a period of at least an hour in whatever manner was preferable to them before the actual insertion of the catheter. The stimulation choices that were utilized were manual self-stimulation, manual stimulation by a partner and/or use of a non-mechanical acrylic device known as a Crystal or G-Spot wand.

After the subjects indicated that they felt properly stimulated and ready for the ejaculatory demonstration part of the experiment, the catheter was inserted. Their bladders were drained and the collection bag was changed. The bag with the drained fluid was saved for later analysis (of levels of urea and creatinine, the two main ingredients of urine).

Then, with the catheter in place, the subjects were asked to resume their stimulation of choice and achieved what they (and the medical team) considered to be an ejaculatory orgasm. Any method that the woman preferred was acceptable, although intercourse was not possible, due to the presence of the catheter tube. The primary conclusion from the experiment was that, at least for these seven women, all knowledgeable and experienced ejaculators, the vast majority of the fluid expelled unquestionably came from their bladders. Even though their bladders were drained by the catheter, they still expelled from 50 ml to 900 ml of fluid post-drained through the tube and into the catheter bag, the only reasonable conclusion for which seemed to be that the liquid came from a combination of fluid from the walls of the bladder and from new kidney output.

We also noted a consistency of results between our study and the earlier studies that also showed a greatly reduced concentration of urea and creatinine (the primary components of urine). The clear inference was that the expelled fluid is an altered form of urine, meaning that there appears to be a process that goes on during sensual or sexual stimulation and excitement that effects the chemical composition of urine.

A New Possibility For Mutual Pleasure in Orgasm

Despite the fact that scientists and sexologists have underestimated the capabilities of women's bodies to experience pleasure, female ejaculation is now beginning to be accepted as a natural and very pleasurable activity. With stimulation of the G-Crest, there is another source of pleasure and orgasm available for women. In light of this potentiality, what current sexual activities may need to be reconsidered? Sensual activities such as oral or manual stimulation of the genitals and/or simple caressing (which are now regarded as pleasurable but are relegated to being just "foreplay" or a prelude to intercourse or "real" sex) may provide an orgasm that is easier to facilitate, more intense and more gratifying than is possible with intercourse itself.

In many modern relationships both partners work at full time jobs. By the time they get home from work and take care of family needs, it is often unrealistic to expect that they will have the time or energy for mutually satisfying intercourse. However, their emotional and physical needs might be served by sensual and/or sexual contact that is not simply a precursor to intercourse but is rather a pleasurable end unto itself.

It's a cliche in our society that men are primarily focused on sexual intimacy, while women principally seek emotional intimacy. My experience is that both men and women find sex and sensuality to be pleasurable physical, emotional and even spiritual expressions of their love and caring for each other. Because of male conditioning in our society and the hypersensitivity of the adolescent penis, it has been easier for men to give themselves permission to be sexually aroused. However, for a woman to feel safe enough to become fully aroused, she must feel that she is emotionally as well as physically safe. Once she feels that safety -- along with emotional closeness -- she is more willing to explore sexual expressions of intimacy.

So where is the common ground? How can men and women be together in ways where men can enjoy physical contact and women can feel safe and comfortable? One new sexual activity that couples could experience might be referred to as a focalized pleasure ceremony. This ritual could be pleasurable and, at the same time, an expression of love and caring between loving partners. It would not necessarily have to be enormously time consuming, nor terribly strenuous, so it can be done even when one or both parties are somewhat tired. The activity would not necessarily be a prelude to intercourse, but it is possible that intercourse might follow if that were a mutual decision. This is how the ceremony might proceed ...

The male partner could learn to gently explore different areas of the vagina to see where the woman has a strong response. He could then make short excursions away from that area to give it a chance to rest, then return to it for further stimulation. The woman could give him positive feedback on what makes her feel the best as they proceed slowly from one degree of pressure to the next, from one area to another. In this way, the man would know where the woman is most sensitive and discover how best to pleasure her.

Each time the partners engage in a pleasure ceremony, it's important to discover what is really appealing to the woman at that moment. Women are all different in wondrously unique and varied ways. The same woman may even have different sensitivities within the same lovemaking session. It is important to know how her sensitivities are changing and shifting in small and subtle ways during a period of time.

Men, being achievement and results-oriented, tend to want to find a formula that works and then stay with it. They feel good when they achieve results. Thus, equipped with the knowledge about the G-Crest, men will achieve far better results in lovemaking and sex play if they realize that there are times when women want direct hands-on stimulation more than they want intercourse, just as men themselves sometimes prefer to be orally or manually stimulated to orgasm.

If the man is familiar with several methods of stimulation and several areas in the woman's body where she often feels pleasure then he can go to one of those areas, manually stimulate it and see if it's sensitive at the moment. If it is not, he can go to each of the other areas that were really pleasurable or orgasmic for her in the past until he finds the one that is pleasurable today, right now. Or he can ask her to let him know what area she wants touched and in what way. That way a man can always feel that he has several alternatives to stimulate a woman and to make her feel wonderful. The woman feels appreciated because the man is not focused on only one spot or method while ignoring the others, thinking that exactly the same thing is going to work all the time, based on the erroneous assumption that she always "feels" in the same way.

A full understanding of the potential of female ejaculation and the nature of the G Crest can create a wide range of sensual opportunities, as long as there is no pressure on the woman to perform in any particular way. Not all women ejaculate and even women who are capable of it will not ejaculate every time. The best perspective for a man to hold is "it's all right if you do or don't ... I just want to give you whatever pleasure you desire." Most of all, it is valuable for the male, as her lover, to look for the different approaches to pleasuring her and the different ways to excite her, so as to express love and caring.

Conclusions

The evidence of this experiment is clear and groundbreaking that the vast majority of the fluid expelled by women during sexual arousal originates in the bladder. Furthermore, that fluid, which passes through the urethra, may be "deurinized" liquid from the bladder. Additionally, in some women and at some times, a small discharge may be added from the female equivalent of the prostate gland, medically known as Skene's glands and long thought to be dormant and no longer functional, and which may be neither.

It has not yet been proven for certain whether women can expel at least a small amount of fluid from their urethral (prostate) glands, during a very deep and intense orgasm, but I sense that it is very close to being proven. Past research has indicated that most women have urethral glands and ducts about a third the size of the prostate gland of the average man, so the amount of fluid that might be emitted would naturally be likely to be less.

In my study, having segregated the urethra from the bladder, we observed, at least for our seven subjects, that more than 95% of the fluid expelled during sexual arousal originated I n the bladder. However, that fluid contained an average of only 25% of the amounts of urea and creatinine found in the subjects' baseline urine samples. We theorized that it may lose the appearance and smell of urine due to the secretion of the hormone aldosterone during sensual/sexual arousal, causing the re-absorption of sodium and the excretion of potassium by the kidneys.¹⁵ Furthermore, I found research material indicating that an involuntary opening of the bladder sphincter can be triggered with stimulation of either the G Crest or the clitoris or both simultaneously."¹⁶

Moreover, on five occasions we observed a small milky discharge from the urethra which may mix in the urethra with the fluid from the bladder. So it is possible that the ejaculatory fluid originates not from either the bladder or the urethral glands, but from both.

For the scientific community to keep saying that the fluid originating in the bladder is solely the result of urinary stress incontinence is a vast oversimplification. The same muscles, nerves, sphincters and reflexes may be involved in female ejaculation as in urinary stress incontinence but this is not urination and we do not want to leave women nor their partners with the impression that they are inappropriately urinating during sexual arousal. It should also be noted that, at least in American culture, there are strong negative associations with urination and defecation even though urine, of course, is sterile and not all cultures have the same biases regarding it.

However, if female ejaculation is viewed as natural and pleasurable, then a woman can feel good about her body as well as all fluids that come out of it. She can then experience these expulsions during sexual arousal more positively than in a situation in which these expulsions are considered "dirty," or a malfunction of the bladder, urogenital system or any of its components.

Desmond Heath, a New York psychiatrist, offered an interesting hypothesis on the question of whether all women can ejaculate and, if so, why don't they? Basically, it is his premise that little girls often become excited in their lives and this may result in their dribbling a few drops of urine. He theorizes that this is probably followed by some form of displeasure by their parents or other adults, along with an admonition that this is bad and wrong, possibly accompanied by feelings of shame on the part of the child. Often punishment follows. Subsequently, women learn to keep their pubococcygeal muscles contracted and don't allow the pelvic floor to relax. Later on, when they become sexually active, it is natural that most women find it difficult to feel emotionally safe enough to allow themselves to become aroused sufficiently to ejaculate."¹⁷

For women, relaxation and emotional safety are crucial in order to become aroused and stimulated enough so that at orgasm they can ejaculate. At such moments a woman might expel voluminous amounts of fluid from a nearly empty bladder, the fluid having only a tinge of the odor, smell or appearance of normal urine. However, for this to happen to women naturally and normally, our society will have to abandon its puritanical ancestry and celebrate this event as a symbol of a woman fully enjoying bodily pleasure.

KINSEY REPORTS: WHAT DID THEY MEAN AND HOW ARE THEY RELEVANT TODAY?

Most people would find reading Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female to be a formidable task in any era. In it, there are over 1,700 pages of material complete with numerous charts, graphs and tables. Understanding the meaning of this material, with today's knowledge and philosophical and religious perspectives about sex, would be completely different from reading this material in 1948 or 1953.

The world has changed quite a bit in the last fifty years. Fifty years ago, it was impossible to find educational material about human sexuality in the public library, let alone, in radio, television or print media. What little material that had been published over the course of time was highly restricted and only available to members of the scientific community. Today, information about human sexuality is available in every library, most bookstores, over the internet, and in the mass media. It could be argued that a lot of that change has come as a direct or indirect result of the two Kinsey books.

To get an understanding of the significance of these works, it is necessary to understand the perspectives that were in place at the time these books were written. To judge them by what we know today does not give us a clear picture of the true value of these works.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Alfred Kinsey was a University of Indiana zoology professor whose previous work had been studying gall wasps, about which he was considered to be the leading authority in the world. From examination and classification of 150,000 specimens, he had discovered approximately 144 different types of gall wasps. Some of the differences between one type of gall wasp and another were really minute. Kinsey had to observe carefully and appreciate the fine differences in order to see all the variations. Kinsey came from a background in the physical sciences and didn't make moral judgments on the gall wasps, that one was better than another. Instead, he just observed what was and reported it . This perspective made him uniquely prepared to objectively study and do research on human sexuality.

Kinsey was asked or he asked, depending on whose version you believe, in 1937, to teach Indiana University's first class in sex education and marriage. Upon assuming this position, he immediately decided that the existing body of knowledge on this subject was inadequate and that it would be necessary to begin research into what human sexual behavior truly was. At the time, there was very little written information or research data in the area of human sexuality available to the public or to academia. With a few small exceptions, the previous research was done by doctors who kept case histories on patients or on college students who were the subjects of university research studies. The Male volume lists nineteen studies that Kinsey felt were worthy of comment, but overall, Kinsey felt that there was insufficient data so as to understand what people actually did sexually, and that original research would have to be undertaken.

For this purpose, the University of Indiana and Kinsey assembled a team of scholars, researchers and associates who crossed all of the specialties involved and who were trained in a broad diversity of disciplines, including both the physical and social sciences such as biology, mathematics, psychology, sociology and anthropology. They were all pulled together for the first time to determine what people were doing sexually and how they felt about it, with as little judgment as possible. Their goal was "to accumulate an objectively determined body of fact about sex which strictly avoids moral interpretations of the fact. Each person who reads this report will want to make interpretations in accordance with his understanding of moral values and social significance; but that is not part of the scientific method and, indeed, scientists have no special capacities for making such evaluations." (Male Volume, page 5)

METHODOLOGY

There were some difficulties in the methodology of obtaining the information. The first was the area of questionnaire construction. The Male volume presents the skeleton of the questionnaire, listing the maximum number of subjects covered, which included 521 items. However, since many of the subjects interviewed had no knowledge or experience in some of the areas, the actual number of items that were covered in an average interview was about 300. The interviewers were allowed considerable latitude in framing their questions to elicit factual information.

One of the greatest contributions of Kinsey and his associates was that they raised interviewing to a fine art (with extensive systems for cross-checking each other). Face to face interviews were done in all cases. They would cross-check each other for accuracy with a different researcher retaking a history on the same subject. They then calculated the variations and differences so as to measure the reliability of the interviewers in uniformly asking questions and recording answers. To measure the truthfulness of the answers, they would compare appropriate responses in sets of relationship partners.

There have been a lot of arguments over the years about the validity and meaning of the statistics beyond the groups actually studied. Some people claimed that these studies, particularly in the Male volume, were done using too many prisoners, including sex offenders, because these were the places where people had the time to sit for these histories. Others maintained that they used too many college students and college educated people, predominantly from the Northeast, which was the population center of the U. S. at the time, with very little coverage of the West.

The Kinsey teams' first choice would have been to obtain a statistically random sample. Hoever, Kinsey and his associates decided that that was impossible due to the nature of the material and the sexual climate of the times. They decided that the best substitute was to get as many total histories as they could, focusing on homogeneous groups that came together for non-sexual purposes. They tried to get 100% of the persons in each group that was sampled, assuming that if they had enough of those, they would get a broad enough cross section of the general population.

The Male volume was viewed by the Kinsey team as the beginning installment in a twenty year project that had as its goal the obtaining of 100,000 individual sex histories. Also planned were volumes on: sexual behavior in the human female; sexual factors in marital adjustment; legal aspects of sex behavior; the heterosexual-homosexual balance; sexual adjustment in institutional populations; prostitution; sex education; and other special problems as discovered and identified.

In the Male and Female volumes, statistical calculations and adjustments were made to try to cover the variations between the non-statistical randomness of the sample that they got and the statistical norms of the 1940 census for the Male volume and the 1950 census for the Female volume.

From July of 1938, when the first histories were taken, to 1947, when the Male volume was being written, the Kinsey team took slightly over 12,000 histories. 3,104 of those (26%) came from 62 groups which were 100% sampled. 6,300 of these histories were of men and, of those, 5,300 were utilized in the Male volume. The other male histories involved 1,000 black men, about whom Kinsey and his associates felt they did not yet have a sufficient sample to report in the initial Male volume. It was anticipated that when the sampling of black men was considered sufficient, they would be included in a revised Male volume.

In reality, only the Male and Female volumes were published before Kinsey's death in 1956. 5,940 female histories were used for the Female volume and, in all, 18,216 histories were taken using the interview devised by Kinsey. After Kinsey's death, Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute took a different direction than that envisioned by Kinsey and the additional volumes that he planned were never published. However, the sex histories were utilized in two Institute publications after Kinsey's death: Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion (1958) and Sex Offender: An Analysis of Types (1965).

THE FINDINGS

Principal findings of the Male volume included: that 85% of the American males sampled had experienced pre-marital intercourse; that 59% had some experience in oral-genital contacts; that from 30 to 45% participated in extra-marital intercourse; that 37% had some homosexual experience to orgasm between adolescence and old age; 10% of the men studied had lived at least 3 years of their lives between the ages of 16 and 55 being exclusively sexual with the same sex; and that 17% of farm boys interviewed had experienced intercourse with animals.

A major contribution of Kinsey and of the books, as introduced in the Male volume, was the Kinsey Scale. For Kinsey, the choice between heterosexual or homosexual was much too limiting in classifying behavior. He disliked the use of the term "bisexual" to describe human sexual behavior because of its previous use in biology to indicate the presence of the anatomy or anatomical function of both sexes, similar to meaning as the word "hermaphrodite". He felt that human sexual behavior was really on a continuum with people having varying degrees of same and opposite sex interest. This was quite revolutionary and a lot of it came from his work on the gall wasps. If you look at gall wasps and create two or three distinct categories of gall wasps, then choices would be based on larger common denominators than if there is the potential of 144 different categories. With people, using 7 different categories with variation expressible even between the categories, allowed finer, more precise explanations of behavior than just using 2 or 3 categories.

Another major contribution of the Kinsey scale was to "encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual but as individuals who have a certain amount of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives, which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds." (Male volume, page 617)

What they were saying in plain English is that the labels are used as a judgment. They don't really tell us much, to think that a person is a homosexual or a heterosexual, as opposed to saying that a person sometimes engages in same sex behavior, or sometimes that a person engages in opposite sex behavior. In fact, he found in using his 0 - 6 scale that there were a lot of men and women who were 4's and 5's and still identified themselves as homosexual, but had in their behaviors opposite sex contacts when that felt perfect to them. It wasn't all black or white.

Other major findings of the studies were the high accumulated incidence and frequency of masturbation that were going on despite social and religious taboos against it. Both volumes discussed the relative intolerance of lower-class individuals toward masturbation and their relative tolerance of pre-marital intercourse; and that intercourse was clearly the number one sexual outlet among people of the lower classes and of lower educational levels. Other types of non coital sexual activity, particularly oral sex, increased in cumulative incidence and frequency with education.

Furthermore, there was a clear correlation in women between a greater ease of reaching orgasms in heterosexual intercourse after marriage and masturbation, increasing even further by how young they were when they began. In fact, any kind of pre-marital sexual activity, including intercourse, had a definite correlation with post-marital sexual satisfaction levels. It was also Kinsey's theory that people's knowledge about sex and the variety of sexual outlets would increase with their ultimate educational level, and would not be tied to their social class level. So it wouldn't make much difference if someone had started out in a lower class, with little education, and worked his/her way into a lot of money. He or she wouldn't have the sexual history of someone who was born into a wealthier, better educated class. Change would not be noticed until their children's generation stepped up in its educational levels. If correct, it would suggest that the child learns most of his/her sex attitudes and behavior patterns from his/her schoolmates of the same economic and educational level, rather than from his home environment.

WHAT IS "NORMAL"?

Perhaps the most significant underlying issue with the Kinsey Male and Female volumes is the question of whether there is such a thing as "normal" in human sexuality and by what and whose terms and definitions. This is true both in the way they have been interpreted by the public and their perceived impact upon society, both then and now. Many people looked at the median and mean figures and confused those numbers with claims of social normality.

As was noted in the quote on page 3, from the beginning, the authors of the Kinsey Male and Female volumes were clearly committed to a scientific, objective and non judgmental look at the behaviors of the people that were interviewed and to the subject as a whole. They methodically looked at the question of normality from all viewpoints and presented many perspectives including biological, psychological, religious and historical ones. The authors seemed to, matter-of-factly and without judgment, appreciate the diversity of sexual behavior that they found, much as Kinsey had appreciated the variations in the gall wasps. It should be noted that all societies do have patterns which they regard as normal sexual behavior and punish deviations from these norms. Also, all societies show some degree of difference between the ideal and real patterns of behavior within the culture. The ideal patterns represent the society's concepts of how people should behave in various situations. They are conscious and verbalized and, as such, are transmitted from generation to generation on very much the same basis as legends or riddles. They come to constitute the proper verbal responses to particular situations, but only the exceedingly naive take them at their face value.

The rare attempts by individuals in any society to live according to its ideal patterns have been doomed to failure. People learn to express the ideal patterns at the verbal level while modeling their actual behavior on what they find that other members of their society are really doing. What the Kinsey data exposed to the general public was the extraordinary range of individual variation in male and female sexual behavior. No longer was it possible for people to assume that the actual sexual behavior in any society would conform even approximately with the culturally patterned ideal norms.

At the human level, it seems exceedingly doubtful whether there are any instincts, meaning genetically determined patterns of behavior, which are operative after infancy. There may be tendencies toward certain forms of behavior in certain circumstances but such tendencies are always shaped by learning.

CRITICISMS

The books read very dryly and were clearly targeted to academia. They are not popularized types of books, the charts and tables are difficult to read and to follow, and they have never achieved a popular reading. One of the problems that arose from this is that many people who didn't read either book all the way through have made judgments on what the books are saying and what the figures mean.

A lot of the criticism of the Kinsey volumes comes from the conservative religious right who argue that Kinsey was, in fact, an advocate for sexual promiscuity and a more open sexual lifestyle. I think that much of this comes from moral problems they have with some of the data that he reported. These were startling statistics for their time and have also been greatly misinterpreted. People just seized onto the raw numbers without understanding what the questions were.

For instance, the high incidence of subjects, up to 50% of the men and up to 25% of the women, who were reported to have had some kind of same sex contact or fantasy or thought after the onset of adolescence was not saying that up to 50% of men and 25% of women had practiced homosexuality. It was saying, that childhood and adolescent same sex play, as well as having same sex fantasies that may or may not have been acted out, were very common.

Also, the Kinsey Male volume came up with the figure of about 10% of men who had lived at least 3 years of their lives between the ages of 16 and 55 being exclusively sexual with the same sex. That was then interpreted by much of the general population and by gay liberation forces as meaning 10% of men were self-defined as homosexual. That wasn't what Kinsey was saying in any of his same sex numbers. He was simply reporting the responses to his questions regarding behavior.

There has also been a fair amount of criticism in recent years about the information regarding adolescent sexuality and how it may have been gathered. A very large proportion of the world's societies permit premarital relations between adolescents, and there is some reason to believe that this is an aid to the individual in making the adjustment to their adult sexuality. In the Male and Female volumes, Kinsey refers to observations of the orgasm cycles of boys and girls at various age levels that were made by people that they had interviewed, some having kept notes of their observations. However, since we are currently in a more repressive period in which the concept of childhood sexuality is under attack, some critics in recent years have accused Kinsey of being a closet pedophile, drawing inference that experiments had been done at the University of Indiana on children, with and without parental consent.

In reality, there is no evidence that the Kinsey Team or the University of Indiana ever conducted these kinds of tests. Where Kinsey got most of this information was from detailed interviews with individuals, mostly adults but some children, regarding their recollections of their experience. A small number of members of groups involved in the support of adult-child sexual relationships, had, in a pseudo-scientific sort of way, kept notes on their observations. They observed these physiological reactions of adolescent and pre-adolescent boys and girls and while, through our current filters, this may not be something we support, nobody else was doing this type of research and it was worthy of consideration.

Recently, there have been new attacks on the validity of Kinsey's work through disparaging stories about Kinsey's personal sex life. Even if these charges are true, and it will be difficult to prove them to any certainty after all these years, it still does not overshadow the fundamental truths, separate from the validity of the statistics, that arose from the Kinsey studies.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

The sexual beliefs, morality, attitudes and laws of Kinsey's time represented a concealed conflict. This conflict was between stern Puritanism, which for economic survival in past times, had felt compelled to deny the congruity of sexual behavior and joy, and evolving religious movements, which at least in theory, tried to tie together the assumed sexual relation within marriage for joy with the duties of procreation.

Freedom of scientific inquiry and the free exchange of information in the area of human sexuality are not unrelated to a profound faith in the right of all people to see, to hear, and to read material that may be essential to their growth, happiness and fulfillment as human beings. In this nation we have taken one fundamental gamble: that in the free marketplace of thought, by the matching of ideas, truth has a better chance of winning than any other method known to man.

Perhaps Kinsey's most valuable accomplishment was that, in an authoritarian age with a rising conflict between the religious and secular segments, he reaffirmed the rational pragmatic values of experimental science in a field of human existence previously given over to dogma and fear. The work which Professor Kinsey and his associates pioneered ultimately led other researchers to a body of comparative data on the sexual behavior of all mankind that was appreciably more realistic and dependable. With enough scientifically gathered facts, American society finally began to approach the subject of human sexuality with something more than shame or feigned self-righteousness.

In today's world, two of our biggest human problems are overpopulation and the spread of AIDS. Solutions in both of these areas would include a broadening of people's sexual activities to activities other than coitus. The clear message from Kinsey and those who followed is that the frequency of non-coital sexual activities increases with education and knowledge about human sexuality. This has never been seriously refuted. Given this fact, it seems obvious how important the encouragement of a more thorough and objective sexual education beginning at the earliest possible age is for the future and survival of humankind. Ultimately, this is the meaning and legacy of the Kinsey volumes and the real reason for the attack on Kinsey by the religious right and other moral conservatives.

REFERENCES

¹ Masters, W. and Johnson, V Human Sexual Response. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. pg. 135.

² Whipple, Beverly, Komisaruk, Barry. "The G-Spot, orgasm and female ejaculation: Are they related?" The First International Conference on Orgasm presentation, February 1991, pg. 230..

³ Perry, John D., and Whipple, Beverly. "Pelvic muscle strength of female ejaculation," Journal of Sex Research, 17," 1981, pg. 32.

⁴ Singer, Josephine and Singer, Irving. "Types of female orgasm," in LoPiccolo, J. & LoPiccolo, L. (Eds.) Handbook of Sex Therapy. New York: Plenum Press, 1978, pg. 179.

⁵ Tanagho, E. A., M.D. and McAninch, J. W., M.D. Smith's General Urology. Norwalk, Connecticut: Appleton & Lange, 1995, Table 30-5, pg. 539.

⁶ Bullough, B., David, M., Whipple, B., Dixon, J., Algeier, E. R., and Drury, K.C. "Subjective reports of female orgasmic expulsion of fluid," Nurse Practitioner, March, 1984, pg. 59.

⁷ Ladas, Alice K., Whipple, Beverly and Perry, John D. The G-Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality. New York: Dell Publishing, 1982, pg. 152

⁸ Sevely, J. Lowndes, and Bennett, J. W. "Concerning female ejaculation and the female prostate," Journal of Sex Research, 14: 424-427, 1978, pg. 5

⁹ De Graaf, Regnier. (1672) "New treatise concerning the generative organs of women." In Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, Supplement No. 17, 77-222. H. B. Jocelyn and B. P. Setchell, eds. Oxford, England: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1972, pgs. 103-104.

¹⁰ Berkow, Samuel G. "The corpus spongeosum of the urethra: its possible role in urinary control and stress incontinence in women," American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 65: 1953, pg. 350.

¹¹ Grafenberg, Ernst. "The role of urethra in female orgasm," International Journal of Sexology, 3:, 1950, pg. 147.

¹² Zaviacic, M., Whipple, B. "Update on the female prostate and the phenomenon of female ejaculation," The Journal of Sex Research, 1993, pg. 149.

¹³ Grafenberg, pg. 146

¹⁴ Zaviacic, M., Zaviacicova, A., Holoman, I. K. and Molcan, J.. "Female urethral expulsions evoked by local digital stimulation of the G-spot: Differences in the response patterns," The Journal of Sex Research, 24: 311- 318, 1988, pg. 311

¹⁵ Normal Renal Function, pg. 88, in Smith's General Urology. Norwalk, Connecticut: Appleton & Lange, 1995

¹⁶ Tanagho, E. A., M.D. and McAninch, J. W., M.D. Smith's General Urology. Norwalk, Connecticut: Appleton & Lange, 1995, Table 30-5, pg. 539.

¹⁷ Heath, D. "Female ejaculation: its relationship to disturbances of erotic function," Medical Hypotheses, 24 (1):103-106.

¹⁸ Schubach, G., Ed.D., A.C.S. The G-Spot & Female Ejaculation, http://www.DoctorG.com/female-ejaculation.htm