By Mara Altman

Beverly Whipple grabs one of the two plastic uterus models she keeps on top of her bookshelf. “Everyone always wants me to do this,” she says with a bit of exasperation, but willing to play along. The Secaucus native sticks her pointer finger into the vaginal canal and rubs the plastic with about as much enthusiasm as one might approach doing the dishes.

She begins her spiel: “It’s found between 11 and 1 o’clock. It’s a sensitive area that swells when stimulated.”

Now in her late 60s, the sexuality researcher has given this pitch countless times since she and co-author John Perry popularized the G-spot in 1982 in their book, “The G Spot and Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality.”

Just behind her neat blond bob lies evidence of the book’s international renown — a shelf containing a vast number of the book’s 19 translations: “Le point G,” “Der G-Punkt,” “G-sonen,” “O ponto G,” “Il punto G,” “Die G Kol” and other languages that a QWERTY keyboard cannot support.

Other G-spot memorabilia is strewn around Whipple’s Voorhees home office in South Jersey — such as the bumper sticker she got from a fan that says:“I

Whipple puts the plastic model to the side and begins speaking about her latest research. Like an artist, she does not want to be known by only one of her works.

“I find it interesting that we are focusing on the G-spot as opposed to the 170 other studies I’ve done on sexual health,” she says.

Finding the G-spot was a turning point in Whipple’s life, but its discovery, like other findings she’s made during her more than 40-decade career, was only a consequence of her larger research goals.

“The most common question I get is, ‘Am I normal?’ ” she says. “My goal is to validate women’s experiences.”

Whipple located the G-spot when women complained about leaking fluid, which they thought was urine, during sexual activity. Seeking to validate their experiences, Whipple researched medical literature and found an article Ernest Gräfenberg published in 1950, reporting the evidence of female ejaculation and an erogenous zone on the anterior wall of the vagina.

Sexuality expert Beverly Whipple on female sexual research and naming the G spot

Though many women still find this magic orgasm button elusive (I, for one, wish I could plug its coordinates into a GPS), after studying 400 women and analyzing the fluid, which she found differed significantly from urine, Whipple was convinced that the area was special.

Despite colleagues’ suggestions to name the area “the Whipple Tickle,” Whipple and Perry named it the Gräfenberg Spot, or G-spot.

“He had so many contributions to the field,” she says of honoring Gräfenberg with the name. One of her most prized possessions is an early model of the Gränfenberg ring — the first widely used intrauterine device, which looks like a circular spring.

Even though the G-spot became a buzzword and women all over the world began searches — often frustrating — into their nether regions, Whipple says it’s never what she intended.

“I never wanted to set this up as a goal,” she says of the G-spot. “I just want to validate women’s experiences and make them feel good about the variety of ways they can feel sexual and sensual pleasure.”

Whipple never expected to pursue a path in sexual health. (Her mother, whose only response to Whipple’s acclaimed book was to tell her there were three typos, did not expect her to, either.)

When Whipple started teaching nursing, a student asked her a question that stumped her: “What can a man do sexually after having a heart attack?”

The year was 1975 and sexuality was not yet incorporated into nursing programs. Besides gaining the knowledge to answer that question — if you can climb two flights of stairs without getting short of breath, you can engage in sexual activity — Whipple wanted to know more. She enrolled at Rutgers and completed two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in psychobiology, with a major in neurophysiology.

In the mid-1980s, Whipple was offered a faculty position. Believing that women had been neglected in medical research, she accepted the job offer under the condition that she would be able to conduct research on women.

“Most researchers were men and were fitting women into the male model,” she says. “They’d say, ‘This is how men respond, so this is how women should respond.’ We have found that is not correct. Women respond in many different ways.”

Whipple went on to become one of the pre-eminent sexual researchers in the world. Her office is so filled with plaques commemorating her work that they are slowly commandeering the wall space leading into the living room.

In 2006, she was voted one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world by New Scientist magazine. Next year she will be awarded the Gold Medal by the World Association for Sexual Health for lifetime contributions to the field. She’s co-authored seven books, earned more than 65 awards, spoken in 88 countries and been responsible for more than 170 publications — her most requested of which describes how diets heavy in spicy chilies may block the naturally occurring analgesic affect of the G-spot, therefore causing childbirth to be more painful.

“Even Nippon Meat Packers in Japan requested it,” she says proudly. “They put chili in some of their meats.”

When Whipple’s not spending time with her five grandchildren, she lectures at conferences — in the next year she will visit Turkey, Scotland, Mexico and Poland — and continues her research at Rutgers as an unpaid professor emerita.

Even though she retired nine years ago, she says she will not go quietly into some post-professional couch potato slump.

“I need to learn more so that I can help more women,” she says.

As Whipple has done throughout her career, she goes to great extents to give women’s diverse — some even perceived as outlandish — sexual experiences a scientific basis.

“We can’t say it is what it is unless we do studies,” she says.

In the 1980s, a colleague, Gina Ogden, brought Whipple’s attention to women who said they could orgasm from imagery alone — no touch. Whipple demonstrated by these women’s self-reports as well as their significant increase in heart rate, blood pressure, pupil diameter and pain thresholds that they had experienced touchless orgasm.

“There was no difference in their orgasm from genital self-stimulation compared to orgasm from imagery alone,” she says.

Whipple also has proved, working alongside Barry Komisaruk, that women with complete spinal injury can experience orgasm. “The books said no, it can’t be,” she recalls. “Colleagues said, ‘No, it can’t be.’ ”

She and Komisaruk invited the paraplegic women into their lab. One in particular, who had not touched herself in the two years since her injury, had 16 orgasms in 12 minutes. “She was told that she couldn’t,” Whipple says, “She was crying and I was crying.”

Most recently, Whipple has been working with women who suffer from persistent genital arousal disorder. It is a disorder that leaves its victims in a constant state of arousal that no amount of orgasms can relieve.

Whipple and Komisaruk plan to help these women by having them undergo biofeedback in fMRI machines.

“They can look at their brain and see the parts that are activated and then turn them down,” she says.

Among her other major projects is investigating interesting leads. Recently she interviewed a man who said he could talk women to orgasm.

“It wasn’t good,” she says, disappointed. "The subjects he talked to were women who could already orgasm through imagery. So we still don’t know what he’s capable of.”

Besides the research, the plight of a famous sexuality researcher also means listening to strangers’ personal stories. “One woman told me that her husband was on Viagra but it didn’t work. So I said, ‘What kind of stimulation do you use?’ and she said, ‘Oh, you mean I have to touch it?’ ”

Whipple has been married for 48 years to a retired rocket scientist, whom she met when she was 16 years old. She and Jim had been watching “Peter Pan” at a Jersey Shore drive-in in adjacent cars.

When asked how all the research has affected her own sex life, she deftly dodges the question. “Our bedroom is not my laboratory.”

Though she’s shy to speak of her own experiences, Whipple makes it no mystery that intimacy is a top concern. She says sexual expression with a partner has been correlated with a lot of health benefits: more-youthful looks, longer lives, an increase in the immune system and decrease in the chances of breast cancer and heart attack.

“Pleasure is very important,” she says. “Think of the opposite: pain and war.”

Whipple gives workshops around the world, helping couples communicate and discover their own unique pleasure zones. “People often think, ‘My partner should know what I like. I shouldn’t have to tell them,’ ” she says. “But some people like chocolate ice cream and some like vanilla ice cream. We can’t be expected to be the same.”

To help people talk about pleasure, Whipple, along with Ogden, developed a grid called the extragenital matrix. It matches 15 types of touch with 35 parts of the body to help couples discover what gives them pleasure.

“I can’t stand (it) if anyone blows in my ear, even if Jim comes to whisper, but if he sucks on my big toe, that’s like a plus 12,” she says, “I wouldn’t know if we didn’t map our bodies.”

In her latest book, “The Orgasm Answer Guide,” a collaboration among four researchers, Whipple purposefully alludes to orgasm as something to “experience,” not to “reach” or “achieve.”

“When you focus on a goal, you are going to miss a lot of pleasure along the way,” she says.

In other words, the woman who brought us the G-spot — still with pleasure on her mind — is pushing us to appreciate the more obvious pleasures in life.

“Sometimes holding hands can be the most wonderful satisfying feeling in the world.”