One of the more interesting articles on female ejaculation, or squirting orgasms, has been published in the Guardian, under the headline “The debate about squirting is actually about whether or not women can be trusted to accurately report their own sexual experiences.”

And that does reflect a fundamental truth about female ejaculation: scientific investigators seem to start from a position where they are trying to disprove its existence.

It’s almost as though there’s something doubtful about the very existence of squirting orgasms, and women can’t be trusted to relate what they’re experiencing.

Male and Female Ejaculation

There are certainly some reasons why that female ejaculation is harder to accept. For one thing, female ejaculation is less noticeable than male ejaculation. In fact, it’s probably recognizable in many cases only to the woman who is experiencing it, and unlike male ejaculation, the evidence of it having happened may not necessarily be very clear.

But when you dig down a little bit further into the phenomenon of squirting orgasms, it’s also true that a denial of female  sexual pleasure is a theme which has run through a widespread patriarchal attitude towards female sexuality for many centuries.

So can we now separate the reality of squirting orgasms and female ejaculation from what men fantasize about, would like to believe is true, and also seem to try and deny?

Well, surely what women say about their sexual experiences serves as evidence of the existence of female ejaculation?

True, but what makes this slightly harder is the fact many women themselves deny the reality of female ejaculation. However, there are significantly more women who have discovered it and know it to be a genuine phenomenon, part of their sexual experience.

Another problem is that almost every conversation on the subject of female ejaculation finally ends up debating the question of whether or not it’s a real phenomenon.

And there’s a whole genre of pornography centered on squirting orgasms. This is not doing us any favours in our attempts to establish what is true and what is not true.

What we do know, however is that there a scientific study conducted by French gynaecologists seems to demonstrate that female ejaculation comes in two forms.

There’s the emission of some kind of pseudo-prostatic fluid from the female Skene’s glands (which resemble male prostate tissue). And second, there’s the expulsion of fluid from the bladder. This is the much more common form of “squirting” which is seen on Internet pornography and erotica.

Regrettably, many people who deny the reality of female ejaculation were delighted to have “evidence” that women were mistaken in thinking female ejaculation was a genuine form of sexual expression.

What a mistake! How could you not have realized, they say, that squirting orgasms are merely arousal-induced urinary incontinence?

Underlying all of this is the assumption that women can’t understand, or can’t describe, what they’re experiencing during sex.

Yet when a woman has ejaculated during sex, she has experienced a unique sensation of sexual arousal, and a unique symptom of orgasmic release.

Every woman who’s ejaculated will know that the fluid they release during squirting orgasms is different to urine.

Also, female ejaculation, squirting, or gushing, call it what you may, feels different from the act of urination. And, let’s remember, the evidence is that the liquid released when a woman comes is fundamentally different to her pee.

And there’s a deeper aspect to all of this, as well: the fact that the physical experience of female ejaculation is simply an expression of female sexual pleasure in its purest form.

Some people insist that female ejaculation is simply urination (or something vaguely similar). But this is a denigration of women’s experience of their own bodies and women’s ability to understand their own sexuality. It also conveys a sense that female sexuality is somehow “dirty” or “less pure” than the male orgasm.

Sure, this is a feminist position. And no wonder! The fact is, the politics of female ejaculation go far beyond the ability of an individual woman to experience sexual pleasure during ejaculation.

In both Britain and Australia scenes of female ejaculation have been “banned” in erotica, on the grounds that all the women are doing is urinating.

(How extraordinary that such material should be banned even if that were true. But that, of course, is another issue.)

Bearing in mind that most women who have female-ejaculated declaim that urination has no part to play in female ejaculation makes this political background feel something like covert censorship of female sexuality.

The reality of female ejaculation

This experiment throws a little light on female ejaculation in general, and squirting orgasms in particular.

The Nature of Squirting

The study was conducted by a gynecologist in France with a mere seven women.

At the start of the experiment the women were asked to empty their bladders and provide a urine sample – an ultrasound scan confirmed that their bladders were empty.

They then had sex with a partner or masturbated until they were close to their squirting orgasms, at which point they were given another pelvic scan and the fluid they emitted was collected, after which a final pelvic scan was performed.

Interestingly enough, although they’d started to receive sexual stimulation when their bladders were completely empty, by the time they were ready to orgasm and female ejaculate, their bladders were full again – and once they had squirted at the moment of orgasm, their bladders were empty.

On the face of it you might conclude that the fluid being ejaculated was urine, or that it was some other fluid produced during sexual arousal which had somehow got into the bladder.

However, one of the theories put forward by women who produce squirting orgasms is that fluid from the paraurethral glands may be forced back into the bladder when women unconsciously clamp their muscles down to prevent what they think is incipient urination.

So sadly, it might seem that this experiment doesn’t go very far towards demonstrating what this mysterious fluid which women ejaculate at the point of orgasm actually is….

Even so, a chemical analysis was performed on all of the samples the women produced. Two were like urine, but five of the seven women’s samples showed PSA (prostate-specific antigen) in the fluid they’d squirted, which had not been detected in their initial urine sample.

Although PSA is more commonly associated with male ejaculation, it is also produced by the Skene’s glands near the vagina.

Beverly Whipple, who was responsible for some of the earliest work on female ejaculation has said that in her view the term female ejaculation really has only relevance to the production of a small amount of milky fluid at orgasm, and not the squirting or gushing which was being investigated in this experiment.

In essence what Whipple is saying is that when women squirt or gush at the moment of orgasm they are expelling either urine alone, or urine mixed with liquids and chemicals from the female prostate tissue.

Sidebar: Obviously, in view of the experiment described above, one of the interesting questions here is whether the kidneys work faster and produce more dilute urine during sexual stimulation than at other times.

The critical thing about female ejaculation is that some women – and it seems to be around half of women – have experienced once or more than once the involuntary emission of fluid from the urethra at the amount of orgasm in quantities ranging from 30 to 150 ml.

This this has become known as squirting, although in fairness this term usually refers to a much large quantity of liquid.

No wonder the scientific community is still divided on this question – there are even some who question the very existence of the G spot, while others are still debating how it can be that some women emit as little as 2 – 4 ml of liquid which looks like watered-down milk while others emit large quantities of clear liquid that resembles urine.

What is female ejaculation? Can all women do it?

Clarity & Ejaculation

The debate centres on whether or not the large quantity of liquid which women may release during squirting orgasms comes from the bladder or from the female prostate tissue.

One theory suggests the milky white fluid produced by the female prostate tissue can be forced backward into the bladder (perhaps because a woman clamps down her muscles because she is scared of releasing any liquid during sexual arousal), and this is why the samples tested in the experiment described above contained PSA.

Yet it seems unlikely, intuitively unlikely, that women who self-report the expulsion of large quantities of liquid – say a glassful – during orgasm could really be producing this in their prostate tissue.

Just what conclusions can we draw from all of this work?

Well, good question. The answer is, it seems as though the smaller volume of fluid from the female prostate containing PSA is produced during mechanical stimulation of the G spot.

Larger quantities of liquid emitted during squirting orgasms do appear to come from the bladder, although how this fluid gets there in the first place is a little bit of a mystery.

Science is not very helpful at discovering exactly what female ejaculation is, but perhaps it doesn’t really matter.

Maybe the truth of the matter is that we need to listen to the 80% of women who have ejaculated fluid at climax and say that this ejaculation enhances and enriches their sex life!

In other words, we don’t need to know about the origin of female ejaculation to know that this is something which shows a woman is enjoying a healthy sex life, she’s in a state of relaxation, and stimulation of her G spot adds a whole dimension to her life.

Keep in mind that between 35 and 50% of women say that they’ve experienced squirting orgasms once or more than once. This is not likely to be involuntary release of urine, surely?

The fact that vast numbers of women report the release of this mysterious fluid, without knowing exactly where it comes from, serves to strongly support the idea that female squirting orgasm is a genuine phenomenon that gives women sexual pleasure, and whether it involves urination or not is an irrelevance.