It's about unravelling the wonders of the world and occasionally the really arb and absurd too, as celebrated by the annual Ig Nobel Prize. (Last year's winners included studies on how sheets get wrinkled, why hamsters recover better from jetlag if they're on Viagra and the feasibility of a "gay bomb" that when dropped on opposing troops would turn battlefields into group love-ins).

It has a way of making miracles seem even more miraculous, especially when you start examining things on the microscopic and atomic scales.

Healing papercuts take on a new dimension, let alone something as bizarre and wonderful and complicated as baby-making, knitting all those strands of RNA together, building organs from stem cells pre-loaded with the blueprints to make anything at all.

But science does have its downside too, especially when the media seizes on any new research, no matter how preliminary or sketchy.

Spot The Problems
Take the brand new study on the G-spot that was just released which seems to indicate that, sorry ladies, you either got it or you don't.

Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L'Aquila in Italy used a vaginal ultrasound to scan the area long believed to be home to that elusive pleasure zone in nine women who experience vaginal orgasms and 11 who don't.

The scans showed that the nine who did had thicker tissue in the urethrovaginal space, which means, Jannini says, that "women without any visible evidence of a G-spot cannot have a vaginal orgasm."

Now, people vary. We have millions of quirks of biology and genetics to create a diverse and intriguing spectrum of people. Some have more melanin, others are more likely to be lactose intolerant or have a higher risk of getting certain kinds of cancer or blue eyes or red hair or clubfeet, just for example.

But there's only one regularly occuring and normal instance of basic structural human design I know of (scientists, please feel free to correct me) where you're either born with it or you're not – and that's separated earlobes. But even those people whose ears connect seamlessly to their necks still have some kind of earlobish lump of skin that they can put decorative metal hoops through.

It seems highly improbable that some women hit the genetic jackpot by being born with a G-spot and the rest are just gonna have to suffer.

But of course there are some major problems with this research – the biggest being the small sample size of the test subjects. As every first year med student knows, you can't interview or test a small bunch of people (in this case a mere 20, all presumably Italian) and sommer extrapolate the results to all of womankind.

Other scientists have pointed out issues like the possibility that what Jannini thinks is the G-spot is actually the internal structure of the clitoris (which runs up inside you like a wishbone) or the remnants of a leftover embryological prostrate gland or that it's tissue that has built up from stimulation, like a muscle.

Women Are Complicated
But I think what bugs me most about the study is that the conclusions seem bloody short-sighted, seemingly ignoring a lot of what we know about female sexuality.

While the simple mechanics of male sexual dysfunction can mostly be addressed with a little blue pill (psychological issues not withstanding), women are complicated. A woman may have all her working parts and still never experience orgasm.

Getting off is not just about physical stimulation or getting the blood flowing to the right areas, it's about being comfortable with your body, figuring out what feels good, having a partner willing to help, and what's going on in your headspace.

Before we give lazy lovers a get-out-of-jail-free card on satisfying their partners and blame biology, we need to examine all the possible contributing factors.

When our inner toddler asks the question but whyyyyyyy don't some women experience vaginal orgasm, we need a better answer than it's because 11 out of approximately three billion women on the planet don't have a build-up of thicker tissue on the front wall of their vaginas. That's just not gonna cut it.

It's going to require a lot of solid empirical research, but hey, it's gotta be more fun than building theories about wrinkled sheets.

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