lit a candle 17h agoRutgers lost a real one. 50 years of research right there.
Their story
Beverly Whipple was an American nurse, sexologist and researcher whose work helped bring the term "G spot" into everyday language and made female sexual response a respectable subject for science. A professor emerita at Rutgers University, she spent five decades studying women's sexual health, wrote or co-wrote seven books and…
Beverly Whipple was an American nurse, sexologist and researcher whose work helped bring the term "G spot" into everyday language and made female sexual response a respectable subject for science. A professor emerita at Rutgers University, she spent five decades studying women's sexual health, wrote or co-wrote seven books and more than 200 research articles and chapters, and gave over 800 talks around the world. She died at her home in New Jersey on November 2, 2026.
Born in New Jersey and raised in Secaucus, Whipple trained as a nurse at Wagner College on Staten Island and spent her early career as a nurse and nursing teacher. Her path changed when a student asked her what a man could do sexually after a heart attack, and she found that nursing education of the time had nothing to say about sexuality. She returned to Rutgers, where she earned a master's degree in counseling, a master's in nursing and a PhD in psychobiology with a major in neurophysiology.
In 1981 she was a co-author of "Female ejaculation: a case study" in The Journal of Sex Research, the first published use of the term "G spot". With the psychologist John D. Perry she named the sensitive area on the front wall of the vagina the Grafenberg spot, after the German gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg, who had described it in 1950. In 1982 she and Perry wrote The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality with Alice Kahn Ladas. It became an international bestseller, was translated into more than 20 languages and was reissued as a classic in 2005. The existence and nature of the G spot remained debated for decades, and Whipple later urged women not to fixate on it, saying there were many ways to experience pleasure.
From the mid-1980s she was on the faculty of the Rutgers College of Nursing, where she agreed to join only if she could study women, whom she felt medical research had neglected. Her later laboratory work, much of it with Barry Komisaruk, used animal studies and fMRI brain scans and showed that orgasmic sensation can reach the brain through the vagus nerve, bypassing the spinal cord, a finding with real meaning for women with spinal cord injuries. Their books The Science of Orgasm and The Orgasm Answer Guide were published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Whipple led AASECT and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and served as secretary general of the World Association for Sexual Health, which gave her its Gold Medal. New Scientist named her one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world in 2006, and a sexology research centre in Puebla, Mexico, bears her name. She was married to Jim Whipple from 1962, and her death was reported by The New York Times. No cause of death was made public.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), National Women's History Museum, Fox News/AP (2007), NJ.com (2010); death reported by The New York Times. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“There's so many ways that women can have sexual pleasure. We can't deny the experiences of women. We have to validate them.”
Interview with the Associated Press, 2007
