In pain? Have an orgasm

[14inches]

In Pain? Have an Orgasm
By Norine Dworkin-McDaniel,
Friday, July 20, 2007


Sex researcher, educator and counselor Beverly Whipple, Ph.D., has been studying and talking about sex since the late 1970s. She is a professor emerita at Rutgers University in New Jersey and co-author of The Science of Orgasm (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), among other publications. Last year, New Scientist named her one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world. LifeScript caught up with Whipple to talk about the G spot, ejaculation and why you might want to skip the aspirin and have two orgasms the next time you’re in pain…

LifeScript: Why is it so important to study sex?

Beverly Whipple: My goal has been to validate the experiences of women. For instance, women who liked vaginal stimulation were told that all orgasms are from clitoral stimulation, and we’ve found that’s not necessarily so. Clitoral stimulation is wonderful, but we’ve shown that women can have orgasms from many different forms of stimulation.


Some women can experience orgasm with other body parts, like breast or neck stimulation, or even if no one touches them. In The Science of Orgasm we talk about how electrical stimulation of the brain can produce orgasm and how people can have orgasm during epileptic seizures. I’ve interviewed women who were male and had sex change surgery and they also have orgasms. The whole purpose of that was to say that you can have orgasms from sources other than typical genital stimulation.

We’re all unique individuals. We have different tastes in terms of the clothing we choose to wear, the food we choose to eat and the people we choose to be with. Isn’t it natural that we all have different tastes in terms of what brings us sensual and sexual pleasure? So that’s what my research focus has been on – validating women’s experiences.

LS: You’re one of the researchers credited with discovering – or rediscovering – that women can actually ejaculate. How did that come about?

Whipple: I was helping women who had stress urinary incontinence – which is when you cough or jump or sneeze and have some dribble of urine – to learn Kegel exercises to prevent them from having to undergo surgery for the condition. But some women said they only lost fluid during sexual stimulation … So we collected the fluid and analyzed it and found that it was chemically different from urine. Urine contains urea and creatinine while female ejaculate contains [the enzyme] prostatic acid phosphatase (PAP), prostatic-specific antigen, glucose, and fructose. We went back to the [scientific] literature and found that Ernst Grafenberg had written about this female ejaculation back in the 1950s. We don’t know how Grafenberg determined it was different from urine, but we did the first chemical analysis.


LS: Did these women think they’d been urinating during sex?

Whipple: They did, because they didn’t know that anything else came out of the urethra. When I spoke about it for the first time on national TV in 1980 on the Phil Donahue Show, I had 5,000 letters from women thanking me for explaining this and helping them to feel normal. Some of these women had had surgery to correct this. Others had stopped having orgasms.

LS: You’re also credited with helping to rediscover the G spot. How’d you find that?

Whipple: The women who had female ejaculation told us there seemed to be a sensitive area felt through the front wall of the vagina that seemed to stimulate this expulsion of fluid. We found Grafenberg’s article from 1950, and he talked about this sensitive area.

So a physician friend and I did 400 physical exams on women looking for this area of sensitivity and we found it in all of their vaginas, between 11 o’clock and 1 o’clock – if you’re lying on your back, 12 o’clock would be your belly button. We just went around the different spots of the vagina, stroking with a come here motion, and we asked, How does this feel? How does this feel? We’ve been lucky in terms of our research subjects. They’ve been very kind.


LS: How did you discover that orgasms can have a pain-relieving effect?

Whipple: I knew that vaginal mechanical stimulation in rats produced a very strong pain-blocking effect, which was stronger than 10 milligrams of morphine per kilogram of body weight. That research was done by Dr. Barry Komisaruk [Whipple’s co-author on The Science of Orgasm] and colleagues. I did my doctorate at the Institute of Animal Behavior. I was the only one who did human research there. We built a human physiology lab there, and that’s where we did the studies to see if the same thing would happen with stimulation of the G spot.

We found that pressure on the G spot elevated pain thresholds by over forty-seven percent and pleasurable stimulation increased it by more than eighty percent. When women had orgasms, their pain thresholds went up by more than one hundred and eight percent. And there was no change in tactile or touch thresholds, which means it’s not a distractor and it’s not anesthetic. It’s an analgesic [something that alleviates pain, as opposed to causing loss of feeling in an area].


LS: What kinds of pain can an orgasm relieve?

Whipple: I’ve studied whiplash pain, arthritis pain, post-operative pain, labor pain.

The pain relief doesn’t last a long time. Only about eight to ten minutes.

We’re looking at biofeedback for ways to enhance this effect. We’re looking at brains with functional MRIs and finding areas that are activated with different types of stimulation and finding ways to either cool down or enhance those responses for pain relief or pleasure enhancement.

LS: You talk with many women about their sexual experiences. What’s the one thing women always ask you?

Whipple: They ask “Am I normal? Is what I enjoy and find pleasurable normal?”


LS: What do you wish women would really understand about sex?

Whipple: I wish women would understand that there are many ways to have sensual and sexual pleasure and satisfaction and to honor their bodies. And to enjoy what they individually enjoy – not what a book says they should enjoy. Don’t strive for a goal, such as finding the G spot or having multiple orgasms or experiencing female ejaculation. Just enjoy whatever you enjoy.

LS: How can women get comfortable with themselves, sexually speaking?

Whipple: We use something called the Extra-Genital Matrix to help women map their bodies and to find different touches that are pleasurable to them. We list thirty-six body parts [from the scalp to the toes] and fifteen types of touch [from stroking to spanking, sucking to nipping]. We encourage women to use a scale of one to ten – ten being ecstasy – for what feels good and use negative numbers if they don’t like something.


It gives women permission to see that there are other parts of their bodies that are pleasurable for them, and it gets them out of the mindset that there’s only one way to respond sexually.

Want to learn more? Get your own copies of The Science of Orgasm and The G Spot and Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality.