Squirting Study

Not long ago, the Journal of Sexual Medicine published a scholarly article by a group of French scientists investigating the anatomic origins of “squirting” (female ejaculation).

The investigators performed pelvic ultrasounds on seven women who are able to “massively squirt”. (I’ve seen this happen. I know it’s absolutely real—not a parlor trick.) Women who squirt, and their partners, report that it’s a clear, sweet, watery liquid that does not look or smell like urine. (We all know what pee is, and it would be a serious stretch to consider female ejaculate as pee, other than noting the hole it comes out of.)

In this study, the women had bladder ultrasounds after voluntary urination, again after about 30 minutes of sexual stimulation, and then again after squirting. The results revealed that their bladders were, as expected, empty after voluntary urination; “noticeably full after sexual stimulation”; and then empty again after squirting.

To quote the researchers, their conclusion was then simply that squirting is “essentially the involuntary emission of urine”. While possibly true, I think they may have made a leap in calling it “urine”. (We can discuss how “voluntary” it is in another article.)

“The golden rule is that there are no golden rules” -George Bernard Shaw

For those women who ejaculate a lot of fluid, it’s understandable that there is no reasonable reservoir in the urological track that could hold and release that large a volume, other than the bladder. But just because the fluid is stored and expelled from the bladder, does that necessitate it being called “urine”? We have to first agree what “urine” is—I don’t mean from a medical/scientific point of view, but rather from a layman’s perspective. (If it doesn’t look like pee or smell like pee, then is it pee? There’s a whole industry that says no.)

So back to the question, just because it comes from the bladder, must it be “pee”? The question warrants further research: does the fluid come from the kidneys, or retrograde from the periurethral glands, or from somewhere else? Or is it from a combination of sources? The French study doesn’t rule out that the buildup of fluid in the bladder came from stimulation of the G-spot (periurethral sponge) and then filled the bladder retrograde. In fact, an analysis of the fluid from these women showed that it contained Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) which was not present in samples taken prior to sexual stimulation.

Another issue to consider is that if the fluid in indeed coming primarily from the kidneys, does sexual stimulation increase the rate of fluid production or does sexual stimulation alter the composition of the fluid produced (i.e. dilution) in such a way that renders it as something recognizably distinct from what most people would call urine? Observation would seem to indicate that fluid production during sexual stimulation is more rapid than what a woman would experience during those 30 minutes had there been no sexual stimulation.

In summary, finding support for female ejaculate being expelled from the bladder is in my opinion not synonymous with calling it urinating. There are still too many unanswered questions.