You know how all those ladies’ magazines are telling you how to have mind-blowing orgasms using the same techniques they’ve been touting for years, usually involving cowgirl and/or trying to revamp missionary as a totally “hot” position (not saying it’s NOT, obviously, just it’s reputation and all). Well…if you read a lot of magazines on this topic, it may have struck you that most of the advice is…the same. All the same. All based on ideas of how the female genitalia worked. IDEAS. Because very little of this was tested. Most studies of sensitivity in women were actually assumptions based on sensitivity in men, and thus focused almost exclusively on the clitoris (with the idea that the clitoris is basically the male penis, and the vagina is just this hole. Yeah, I know).
Until now. Ladies, we have the new study on which all of Cosmo’s articles will be based for the next decade at least. We’ve got…a vagina map. And a complete FEMALE homunculus.
(I maded you a homunculus)
Komisaruk et al. “Women’s clitoris, vagina, and cervix mapped on the sensory cortex: fMRI evidence” Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2011.
As the authors of this paper point out, most of the work described the homunculus has been done in men. The homunculus is a sensory representation of your body, mapped onto your brain. Basically, when someone touches your toe, you “feel” it first in your primary somatosensory cortex, which is at the very top of your head, running in a thin ridge over your skull from ear to ear. Like a headband. A headband of FEELINGS. One of the many cool things about this map is that the amount of cortex you get devoted to a body part is dependent upon how many neuronal inputs that part has. This means sensitive bits, like your hands, tongue, and penis, are going to be huge, while your lower back doesn’t get a lot of attention. When you make a model of a human, where all the bits of you are represented by the attention they receive in the somatosensory cortex, you get the kind of grotesque little buddy up there, with huge hands, tongue, and highly well endowed. Well, I guess you know what we’re good at. 🙂
But of course, most of this mapping took place in men. In the original studies, they actually did electrical stimulation on people’s BRAINS while awake, going over the somatosensory cortex, and asking where people felt the stimulation, in their toe, the fingers, their chest, etc. Men reported feeling a touch on the penis (isn’t it crazy that you can touch someone’s brain and they think you’re touching their PENIS?!) in the medial region of the paracentral lobule, right near the foot (yes, in your brain, your penis or clitoris is next to your foot).
(Clicky to embiggen)
What we have here is a representation of the homunculus, with a circle showing the paracentral lobule, which represents the sensory map of the genitalia in MEN. When they’ve done studies on women, they have usually stimulated just the clitoris. Some studies have gotten activation in this area, while others have gotten it a little more lateral, further away from the foot.
So this study wanted to figure out who was right, and it wanted to do the whole deal, not just the clitoris. After all, the vagina isn’t just a hole, there’s a lot of sensory ability in there, as well as in the cervix. So they got 11 women, put them in an fMRI with their favorite sex toys (according to description, it sounds like they all brought the Rabbit), and had them stimulate themselves in various areas, while they recorded the activity in the brain (sounds a lot better than in other studies, where the experimenter used a toothbrush to stimulate various groin areas. Not particularly titillating for most).
Now, some of you might be aware that I decry a lot of fMRI studies. A lot of them are overblown, based on changes in the brain that don’t necessarily correlate with behaviors at all. But this is the kind of study I can get behind. Straight up anatomy, you touch it, and it shows where you feel it. No questions about WHY or whether it makes you more anxious, the data are the data.
And they did get data.
You can see here various areas of the brain with various touches on the anatomy, using the finger and the toe for reference. You can see the finger is really lateral, with arrows toward the sides of the cortex, while the toe is more toward the midline…right near the genitals! You can see the clitoris, vagina, and cervix all get a nice big chunk right at the midline, which places the genitalia in women in the same place as the genitalia for men.
Sure, expected. Never been DONE before, but expected. But then they got something which I was VERY interested to see.
That is NIPPLE stimulation in women. You can see here that there’s sitmulation going on in TWO places, one further outward where the chest representation is, and one…right on the genitals. This is the first time I have EVER seen physical evidence for nipple-associated eroticism (of course, they didn’t ask the women how they FELT about it). And it makes me wonder if anyone’s ever looked at men.
Of course there are the usual caveats. This was self-stimulation, maybe experimenter stimulation would be different, but since they were after a sense of touch here, and not masturbation, I kind of doubt it. And as for Cosmo of the future? To give yourself the earth-shattering orgasms, you just got to rub that brain the right way, and you’ll feel it all over.
Komisaruk et al. “Women’s clitoris, vagina, and cervix mapped on the sensory cortex: fMRI evidence” Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2011.
