In early June, the Chronicle/SF Gate devoted a few miles of HTML to an article about the “G-Shot”. This is a new procedure where women who feel (or are convinced they feel) G-Spot inadequacy, have a shot of collagen injected into their urethra. The idea behind the G-Shot is ostensibly to swell up the urethral opening and canal and heighten sensitivity. It was invented (and trademarked) in 2005 by Dr. David Matlock, a Los Angeles gynecologist and plastic surgeon (he now sells G-Shot kits to colleagues and recently opened the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute of America in Los Angeles).
Re-cross your legs, and chill with me for a minute. Now, historically, people have done, and still do, some seriously wacked things to their bits in order to have better, more intense, funner crazier sex. Guys shoot themselves with caverject to maintain erections on porn sets; they also get silicone injections to add size. Women get their pussies tightened by plastic surgery docs more and more, and less than a hundred years ago gals underwent bizarre mechanical medical procedures for “female hysteria”, not to mention the Spanish Inquisition-style devices doctors once recommended to prevent masturbation.
You really haven’t come a long way, baby. But have you come, lately? The real questions I have about the G-Shot, once I get past my visions of guys with questionable sexual pleasure knowledge hovering over vaginally insecure ladies with three-and-a-half-inch needles are simple. Does it work, or not? Is there any long term-damage to sexual function? Do the docs explain everything before they shoot?
(And now my embattled Chronicle editor moans.) Sadly, the SF Gate piece suffered from a certain typical sex journalism malaise; it was not sex-negative, for a change, but the author began the piece setting us all in doubt as to whether the G-Spot exists at all. The actual sex information about the topic (the G-Spot) was entirely missing from the piece — and later when the procedure is described, it’s totally, utterly confusing as to what’s even going on when the shot is administered. The writer totally danced around the G-Spot’s anatomy, which required an explanation. I mean, seriously — the vagina ceased to be a dark mystery cave like 40 years ago. Was it the writer’s distaste or ignorance? Or is it because the fundamentals of mainstream sex reporting rely on consumers (readers, customers) having the same level of sexual confusion as the women getting the shots, or the men administering them?
The women getting shots, and things like vaginal rejuvination (plastic surgery) are facing some serious issues, which I would love to see explored in any article about the G-Shot. Is anyone devoting time to finding out what these issues are, and what the docs think about them? I mean hey — even famous porn stars have vaginal plastic surgery disasters.
I’d love to see these things (like the G-Shot) reported on by someone with sexual knowledge. Also: even-handedness with pros and cons. The article asked the question “does it work?” but didn’t ask “how does it fail?” though this may be attributed to the writer’s sex knowledge limitations preventing them from knowing what questions to ask. (Keep in mind I’m not in judgment of women making their pussies into Franken-gasm machines if they so desire, as long as they’re informed.)
So, here’s a snip from Enhanced romance: The G-Shot — Is it the latest panacea to improve your love life?:
Karen Roberts scheduled an appointment with her plastic surgeon at the end of a long day. The 22-year-old student at Solano Community College attended morning classes, caught up with homework and took her 4-year-old daughter to a matinee.
By 4 p.m. she sat inside Dr. Justin Salerno’s office, readying to become the surgeon’s first patient to receive an injection called a G-Shot, also known as G-spot Amplification. With a 3 1/2-inch needle, Salerno would pump a small dose of collagen into his patient’s Grafenberg Spot and make it swell to the size of a quarter.
The G-spot has been the subject of lore and controversy since it was first identified in 1950 by the German gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg. Some sexologists believe the small area behind the pubic bone and accessible through the anterior wall of the vagina is an erogenous zone that when stimulated leads to heightened sexual arousal and powerful orgasms. Others dispute the zone’s very existence, arguing that studies have turned up no scientific evidence of the G-spot’s location, or only highly questionable results.
In the case of Roberts (a pseudonym used at her request to protect her privacy), she was unsure whether the G-spot existed, and if it truly held the key to a vibrant sex life. But she was willing to find out.
“If I could come home like my husband, have sex and feel that release,” Roberts said before her appointment, “I’d be one happy woman. But instead I come home, I spend all this time concentrating, hoping something will happen and I just end up frustrated.”
The procedure, which has been performed on approximately 250 women nationally in the past two years at a cost of $1,850 each, appealed to Roberts because she felt life’s rigmarole had left her fatigued by the end of the day, hardly in an amorous mood. Even when she felt the surge of excitement, reaching an orgasm was a time-consuming endeavor that took more effort and energy than she and her husband had to offer.
Link.
Now, dig the response in Sound Off about the G-Shot from someone with practical sexual pleasure knowledge, Dr. Carol Queen:
To be sure, there are some women and men who suffer from true sexual dysfunction, who need and could really use pharmaceutical or other medical help.
But most people with sexual issues do not fall into this category. Most people who are unhappy with their sex lives have partners with whom they are incompatible in some way, or they (and their partners) suffer from insufficient or incorrect information about sexual arousal, pleasure and functioning.
Plus, Americans harbor the “Fix it, Doctor” belief that a visit to the physician can and will cure what ails them, even if “what ails ‘em” is not, in fact, an ailment at all.
The real problem with innovations like the “G-Shot” is not that they might not work, though news coverage like the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent article about the procedure devoted scant ink to that possibility.
The real problem is that these Next Big Sex Things obscure the role of good, old-fashioned sexual and anatomical knowledge and the ability of partners to communicate about what they like, what they want, and what works best to arouse and satisfy. They also obscure the fact that different people may best be pleased by different things. That’s because, simply, everyone is not alike.
But then, why would a plastic surgeon devote any time at all to explaining this? There’s no money in that for him, as there assuredly is for doing the “G-Shot” and the next procedure and the next.
Just as most MDs don’t take the time to look up from writing a prescription for Viagra to say “Oh, by the way, if you simply cut out fatty foods and nicotine, cut down on alcohol, and walk twenty minutes every day, you probably wouldn’t need this stuff.”
If most of the new breed of “G-Shot” docs won’t take the time to tell their female patients the basic information needed to succeed at sex, who will?
Link.
Now, I’ll do the thing no one else here has — explain G-Spot anatomy. Read it in an excerpt from The Smart Girl’s Guide to the G-Spot, after the jump.
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* The Very Bloody Marys by M. Christian
