At one point during my interview with feminist pioneer and G-spot expert Deborah Sundahl, she laughed out loud and commented on how odd it was to become “ A historian of one’s own life”. I responded that “ At least you know you did something right”. This may have been an understatement considering the storied road Ms. Sundahl traveled before she wrote the first book on female ejaculation and then went on to direct a series of how-to videos. After all, this is a woman who was active in helping battered women when the phrase was coined, this is a woman who co-founded the first erotica periodical aimed at women, and this is a woman who did battle with Andrea Dworkin at the height of her powers and lived to tell about it. Now she is a published authority on women’s sexuality and specifically, in the area of female ejaculation and the G-spot. COOL’EH was honored that Deborah took a moment to speak to us and we did our best to let her do the talking. As you might expect, she did have a lot of ground to cover.

Give me an idea of how On Our Backs started?

Our intent was to change the culture…and we succeeded. And specifically what we changed was the culture of women’s sexuality. I was a student at the University of Minnesota, Women’s Studies, and I believed in uncovering and reclaiming women’s voice, in this case erotic. Because what we learned in Women’s Studies was that women’s voice was overshadowed by men’s. And in erotica, all the sexual materials up to 1984 (when On Our Backs came out) were made by men, for men and we changed that.  



Who did you collaborate with in making the magazine?

Nancy Kinney. We knew each other from Take Back The Night marches in Minneapolis. Nan started the very first women’s weight training class at the University of Minnesota and she also taught the first self-defense class for women at the University. I myself worked at a shelter for battered women, Harriet Tubman, which was the very first battered women’s shelter in the country. What did all that have to do with sex? Well, it was about women reclaiming their power that was our background. And when we moved to San Francisco after college in 1983, we were like; it’s time to reclaim women’s erotic voices. We started to ask the question “Who are we as erotic beings, what are our concerns, what are our fantasies, what do we want?” The climate at that time was very sexually repressive; Andrea Dworkin said, “Sex is rape”. You sleep with heterosexual men, you sleep with the enemy…it makes me laugh a little bit now but at the time things were very polarized. It was dead real. Watch Valley of the Dolls from the late sixties and see the sort of sex kittens that women were expected to be, I mean, we were up against a lot. It’s incredible how much has changed in one or two generations.



Once the magazine got going, what were the major challenges?

Well, we weren’t hardcore enough for the adult distributors and we were terribly embarrassing to the feminist distribution network, like Ms. Magazine and the hundreds of feminist bookstores around the country. They didn’t want to carry a sex magazine! So we had to kind of cultivate our own distribution network, which we did, and in five years all those feminist bookstores were carrying us. Another problem we faced was that there were no erotic products catering to women, so we were part of a movement of photographers, writers, designers and sex toy makers; all women. It was like a wave, we caught a wave, a wave we helped create and direct. We made the ads, and the ads have a lot of power to change culture. It’s like, here’s women with sexy sex toys that are designed by women, they’re quality, they are pretty, they are functional and you can put them on your dresser. This was putting a positive spin on women’s sexuality. Let me tell you this; the very word sex toy was created by us and by the women around us. Before that they were called marital aids, which implied that something is wrong with your marriage and that you only have sex when you are married. Sex “toys”, of course, is freed of any kinds of monogamous bonds and it implies fun. We were all about “sex is fun”, “sex is healthy”…let’s talk about every single solitary taboo and shadow, let’s put it on the table, let’s play with it, let’s photograph it, let’s write about it, let’s advertise about it. Let’s create a whole new cultural mindset around sexuality.

Did a rift form between the direction you were taking and what other feminists were doing?

Oh yeah, it was called the “Feminist Sex Wars” [laughs]. It lasted between 1985 and about 1991, and it was the right wing feminists like Dworkin and Katherine McKenna, up there in Canada. Katherine McKenna was responsible for the city of Cincinnati passing a civil law that if you were raped you can sue the local porn store for selling the porn that caused that man to rape you. Dworkin was the politician; McKenna was the lawyer so you had a big duo there, big guns. And many academics that wrote about it and fell in behind them. And then you had us young…not to use a Sarah Palin word, god help me…mavericks [laughs], thirty-year-old’s on the scene, going “Hey, we come from a domestic violence background but we are not going to be victims. We instead are going to claim what we want sexually and find our empowerment there”. I was also a stripper at the local theatre, the Mitchell Brothers in San Francisco. Very famous theatre and the brothers who owned the place were quintessential free-speech advocates, first amendment, right out of the hippie era. So the whole climate was kind of tilted in our favor to fight this repression. This was around the time of the Meese Commission; he was a right wing guy under Reagan, I think, and they arrested some porn directors and threw them in jail for pandering and pimping and we were radical and in opposition to all of it, so we made a magazine.

How long did you run On Our Backs? It is still around, right?

Yes it is. We had it for ten years and by the time I sold it, the culture had been changed. The magazine just needed to look better, all its issues had been laid out, it simply needed to kind of redo them again in a higher quality, glossy standard. We didn’t have a lot of money; we couldn’t print on glossy paper most of the time. Unfortunately, the new publisher didn’t do that. She had the money to do that but she let it languish and I didn’t really care for the next ten years that they did. It kind of got too dark and too hardcore, which kind of reflects what happened to the women’s erotica in the late nineties till now. It really got too heavy, too dark and too addictive and they really got enamored with the whole porn industry which now is free from the raids [of an earlier era]. The younger generation came on the scene; Jenna Jameson, rock stars had porn stars for girlfriends, we saw all that happen in the late nineties. I just felt that was the wrong road and I saw the next generation of women’s erotica hook up with people we were in opposition to, y’know, we didn’t like the porn industry. They changed it, they did, people like [porn star] Nina Hartley changed it. She is an RN from the Bay Area, knew what was going on, smart woman…but you can get absorbed by a bigger machine there and that is pretty much what I feel happened. So the women’s erotica voice is a bit…diffused right now, but in a way, one could say that like feminism, it’s diffused because it’s no longer needed.



I could see that logic, sort of like the Civil Rights movement. Obviously it didn’t solve all the problems but when things like the Ku Klux Klan, voting rights, and hardcore segregation are defeated, things change. Once the bigger monster is slain, you may find that not everyone agrees on what to do about the smaller issues and that once-unstoppable consensus may dissolve.

It’s freedom…that’s what I believe it is. It gets kinda diffused once people have freedom to go their own way and explore their own things. And for me, I went and explored the G-spot and female ejaculation.

Let’s get into that…but hold on, when you were doing the magazine you were a lesbian, right?

Yes. Yes, all of this came out of lesbian…we changed the lesbian culture, absolutely. They were obviously uptight about penetration [laughs], thank you Andrea Dworkin! Then they became the dildo queens…so you know [laughs]. Amongst other things, they were also the artists who documented the sexual changes, and the sexual growth and development, definitely. There was a lot going on there in a deeper way (just to be clear).

But you are married to a man not, correct?

No, I’m single.

Oh, ok?

You want me to talk about that?

Sure.

Well, I don’t really talk about it.

Oh, ok, forget it…

[Interrupting] What is there to say about it? I was a lesbian, now I’m not, I don’t really have anything else to say about it. I haven’t been a lesbian for fifteen years, so…



So, let’s talk about female ejaculation. What do you think of the generally held opinion (according to an impromptu survey of women I know) that it’s either something you can do or you can’t and that’s it? Kind of like being double-jointed or wiggling your ears.

[Laughing] I did have one woman who called me up the other day and said she ejaculates from sound when she tap dances, so that may not be far off [laughing]. Here’s the thing, the G-spot is the female prostate, and all women have one, as do all men. Ejaculation is prostetic fluid; all women can ejaculate if they want to. Now, we’ve been told the G-spot doesn’t exist, so what you have is the same old issue, silencing, a central piece of our sexuality has been silenced. It has been called non-functioning and non-existent. It has been mocked and diminished…and it’s a lie. My job is to get women to get this organ working again and the very first piece of that is information, and that is what is in my books and videos and lectures. The information is this; it’s the female prostate and it works and all women can ejaculate, they just have to learn how. Some women have ejaculated and mistaken it for excessive vaginal lubrication, some have ejaculated a lot and mistaken it for pee. In fact, the urge to ejaculate is often mistaken for the urge to urinate and since that is the last thing any woman wants to do when she’s having sex, you better believe she is gonna clamp down on that urge to an amazing degree. And therefore women are tense. And if you ask men, “What’s your biggest complaint about sex [with women],” most men will say “, she wont let go”. That’s because if she lets go she is going to ejaculate all over your face and the bed and the pillows too [laughs]. The amount can be as much as a litre in one lovemaking session, which means a session where a woman may have an orgasm a couple of times in which she ejaculates each time. So you can get a big puddle going. And it’s lovely.



So this is a vaginal orgasm we are talking about, as opposed to a clitoral orgasm?

That’s correct.

And so you find that most who are having clitoral orgasms are not having vaginal ones?

That’s correct. Because of feminists…we took out our vibrators and decided to learn how to have orgasms because sixty percent of women were not having orgasms. And Betty Dotson led the way…and we learned how to have clitoral orgasms and this was a good thing. And we taught our men, in the 70s, how to have oral sex, and in the eighties we started to kinda look for this G-spot but mostly we delved into fetish areas. And so the vaginal orgasm was labeled a myth…there was a small cadre of feminists (cadre was really a good term back then [laughs]) who didn’t want to jump on the clitoral bandwagon and said, “ No, I love my vaginal orgasm!”. Doris Lessing wrote in The Golden Notebook, describing the vaginal orgasm “It’s like dropping into a deep dark pool of emotion” and it’s because the G-spot has a different nerve from the clitoris. It has a different orgasmic sensation and it is truly one of deep, melting love. Enter tantric techniques, enter sex and spirit, and enter deeper connection and love. And we depart from what I call “sport sex” and we go into that arena.

Okay, so tell me where the female prostate is located.

The female prostate surrounds the urethral canal and it starts at the outside opening of the urethra and extends about two inches along that canal. It’s ducts and glands, about forty-eight of them are sprinkled along the urethral canal, that first few inches or so. Therefore, because the vaginal canal parallels the urethral canal, you can feel the G-spot through the roof of the vagina. So a woman can sit down in front of a big mirror, spread her labia lips, push out with her vaginal muscle and see her own G-spot! You can see it! You can see the ridges on what I call the body of the G-spot, the head is what surrounds the urethral opening and as you run your finger from the urethral opening it will gradually go into the vaginal opening. That’s where the ridges begin and as you continue along that organ, your finger will curl up and if you pull firmly forward, you are pushing on the tail of the G-spot which is what is most sensitive in women just learning to awaken their G-spot. That’s the first step, a woman needs to get acquainted, spend time by herself uninterrupted and get to know this organ and how she likes to stimulate it.

Ok, if you have never had a vaginal orgasm, let alone ejaculated, how do you even get started down that road?

Ok, well there are two things going on. One is that it is very easy to ejaculate just [by] getting the information. Half the women get the info, go home and ejaculate that night. The other half of the women work at it for a year and they will ejaculate. But for women, learning to have that G-spot orgasm, that vaginal orgasm that can take years. The reason for that is, number one, that incredible physical tension from clamping down. Number two; the G-spot is numbed out in most women. If you are pushing up on the roof of the vagina, towards the entrance, you are on the G-spot; she is just not feeling anything. And that is easy to understand when we realize it’s a prostate gland and as men know, it’s ultra sensitive by nature. So why isn’t she feeling anything? Well it has to do with the way we make love in western culture which is ram, ram, ram…so that ultra sensitive organ is numbed out so it takes a while to reawaken it’s sensitivity. And like a very tense muscle, if you give it massage and some intellectual awareness that it is tense and tight, then it will go from numbness to pain, as the blood flows back into it, to pleasure. And that is exactly the process that happens with the G-spot and its something called The G-spot massage, and it’s a therapeutic process more than an erotic one. That’s what is going on with the G-spot in a nutshell. One in four women have been raped or sexually abused, that is a feminist statistic, and that trauma is being stored in the body and being stored in the G-spot.

What about women who have always been able to do this, are they just naturally relaxed…

Right, some women have always ejaculated and always had vaginal orgasms, so they are just relieved to hear and think, “Oh, we thought it was something but we didn’t care”. Or where some partners got freaked out, thought it was urine and couldn’t live with a woman who pissed the bed every time they had sex and they got divorced. So that is why it is crucial that this information get out there, it has caused a lot of problems in marriages. Also because women are clamping down so hard that they start to feel this quote, unquote “discomfort”. So they don’t want to have sex all that much. But that discomfort that they might think is the urge to pee is really the urge to ejaculate. So I described the opposite extremes of the woman who never had it shut down and it just flows, to the woman who is completely shut down sexually and is wounded. And there is all this stuff in between, and that is what happens when you have a pathology, when something has been denied. It’s like you’ve taken a prism and shattered it on the ground and it’s in a million pieces and that’s all the symptoms that women have and it all goes back to this root. If you learn about your G-spot and where it’s located, you can actually see it…and you get to know it, you will reclaim that part of your sexuality and you will learn to ejaculate. You will learn how to have vaginal orgasms, and therefore a deeper, more loving connection in your relationships.

Check Out:


Female Ejaculation and the G-spot
www.isismedia.org/female_ejaculation_gspot.htm

www.deborahsundahl.com