Too tired to get busy? Got a headache that leaves you wanting sleep, not sex? In this LifeScript exclusive, sex expert Beverly Whipple talks 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…
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), among other books. LifeScript caught up with her to talk about all things sex:
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.
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?
LS: You’re one of the researchers credited with discovering – or rediscovering – that women can 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, analyzed it and found that it was chemically different from urine.
We 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.