The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips (11 page)

have done so without putting so much as a finger in the vagina. Is vaginal stimulation necessary for female ejaculation? Once and for all, the answer is NO!

Can women
learn
to ejaculate? Some activists who are promoting education about female ejaculation believe that women can learn. Several women have told me that they “learned” to ejaculate after watching videos about it and strengthening their pelvic floor muscles. Certainly women can learn to recognize ejaculate that dribbles or oozes out, rather then squirts or gushes. It’s quite possible that some women who suddenly “learn” to ejaculate may be getting more sexually aroused than usual by masturbating with unusual zest and are finally producing enough ejaculate to be noticeable. One can certainly learn to have multiple orgasms and perhaps some women may discover an ability to ejaculate when they become multiorgasmic.

VOICES OF EXPERIENCE

At least part of the reason that female ejaculation has not been more widely recognized is that women typically do not share their sexual experiences with each other. Men may discuss their experiences with each other more readily, but may he less willing to discuss their partners’ ejaculatory ability, perhaps because they don’t like women competing on what has historically been male turf. In speaking to groups of women about sexuality over the years, many have shared

their experiences about female ejaculation. Often after one woman tells her story, others may recognize for the first time that they too ejaculate. It’s not uncommon to hear laughter and a sigh of relief, and then an admission that “all this time I thought I was wetting the bed!” or “I always attributed the wet spot to my partner.” Their testimonies always make others in the group understand that their experience is entirely normal.

Mikki learned about female ejaculation when she worked at one of the FFWHCs, and says that this information was enormously liberating:

I’ve got a long list of things to thank the feminist health movement for, but high on the list is knowing about female ejaculation. During sex, I worried and got embarrassed about the mess I seemed to make. Until I learned about the full anatomy of the clitoris and that other women had actually ejaculated, I held back during sex (with both women and men)—I had learned my lessons about wetting the bed. Now, I have a couple of plastic-backed pieces of fabric (3 feet by 5 feet works well for me) for no muss, no fuss. I put down my soak piece, and then we get it on and I can let go and shoot as much as I feel like. When I ejaculate I usually need inside stimulation of my spongy stuff (that’s the urethral sponge of the clitoris).Two or three fingers are good for me. I have

never tried to collect what I shoot out, but I have watched in amazement with my lover(s)—once it went in an arc about a foot high and landed about 2 feet away. It can be a little or it can be a lot (I guess a few tablespoons to a quarter cup). I don’t ejaculate as much when I masturbate as when I have a partner. My ejaculate keeps me wet and helps me have more than one orgasm. It definitely isn’t urine—doesn’t smell like it or have the same color. It smells and tastes differently according to the time in my cycle and what I’ve eaten lately. My partner has said that it is either sort of sweet (around ovulation) or sort of metallic (closer to menses). I don’t always ejaculate every time I make love, but now I know that I don’t have to hold back. That’s the main message to take from learning about female ejaculation: don’t hold back, and at the risk of sounding cliched, let it flow!

After many years of lying in the wet spot, Christie discovered that she was making it herself:

When I had sex exclusively with men, I noticed that after sex, there would be a huge cold wet spot on the bed—often as wide as eighteen inches, sometimes more. I naturally believed that it was all from the man, but that was before I knew how little many men actually ejaculate. When I started

having sex with women and also began masturbating a lot, I still noticed the giant wet spot and began taking a towel to bed with me. A few times I’ve had what I consider very dramatic squirting episodes where the fluid hit my toes. Once when I was masturbating, it hit the sheet, which I was holding up with my left hand and fluid splashed back down on me. During these episodes, I seldom have anything in my vagina. It was usually from clitoral stimulation alone and the gush usually came prior to orgasm.

My friend Rose gave me an account that she and her lover Ocha wrote about her experiences with ejaculation. Here is an abbreviated version of their piece:

I’d been working on my vaginal muscles for about a year before I saw a video of women discussing their personal experiences with ejaculation. I first ejaculated after my lover and I watched a video about female ejaculation together. Once we were sitting in chairs facing each other a few feet apart as we masturbated, and suddenly I began to ejaculate all over him for about 30 to 40 seconds. I don’t ejaculate every time but I often do, and the amount varies quite a bit, and sometimes I do it without even having an orgasm.... According to Ocha, “It’s not a competition, nor should there

be any pressure to out-shoot anybody. It’s just another delicious, wet, beautiful thing that women can do.”
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Jenna, whose account of ejaculating large quantities of fluid appears earlier, has thought a lot about the meaning of female ejaculation:

I’m very proud of my ability to ejaculate and enjoy celebrating it with someone who appreciates it. Yet I can choose not to do it. Some of my partners haven’t liked it that I ejaculate so much, so if I don’t trust them to be comfortable with it, I won’t do it. I must say that my ejaculatory orgasms feel different than the non-ejaculatory ones. My pulse gets much higher and my vagina vibrates.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

For those who are still doubtful about female ejaculation, there are a handful of sexy, illuminating videos made by activists, which document some spectacular instances. Each one has its strengths, and all offer complementary information on how different women feel about and experience ejaculation.

The first video was produced by Beverly Whipple, who is, without a doubt, the modern godmother of female ejaculation. Because of the potentially sensational nature of the subject matter, Whipple took pains to make
Orgasmic Expulsions of Fluid in the

Sexually Stimulated Female
as medical as possible. In this brief seven-minute video, we see two volunteers from the waist down, feet in stirrups, with a male doctor’s gloved finger stimulating them vaginally. The video is designed to reassure women, and perhaps their doctors, that ejaculation is entirely normal. Even in the sanitized setting, the ejaculations are quite impressive. One of the messages of this video, which Whipple has since revised, is that stimulation of the G spot is the route to female ejaculation. We now know that vaginal stimulation of the G spot on the urethral sponge may or may not result in ejaculation and orgasm.

Dorrie Lane, a San Francisco sexuality educator, made
The Magic of Female Ejaculation
, the first nonmedical video on the subject. Dorrie provides some history of female ejaculation, an anatomy lesson, and supportive information in an upbeat, down-to-earth manner. She talks about how she first ejaculated and demonstrates how she does it. During the ejaculation segment, you can clearly see the tip of Dorrie’s urethral sponge peeping through the vaginal opening.

Fanny Fatale, a sex educator and producer of erotic videos, made
How to Female Ejaculate
. Fanny takes time to include essential information about the anatomy of the clitoris and urethral sponge, then she and three friends, including champion ejaculator Shannon Bell (see below), discuss their experiences with each other and demonstrate how it happens for them. Carol Queen, author of

Exhibitionism for the Shy
(see Resources) says that she ejaculated for years before she knew what was really happening and that it makes her angry that she “had to struggle [to understand] something that’s my birthright.”

Carol observes that her ejaculate tastes salty and briny, like buttered Popcorn, or like the floor of the forest. Fanny says that hers hardly has any smell.

Even though all four women ejaculate often, the difference in their experiences are remarkable. And, if you want to see part of the urethral sponge, here’s your chance: Fanny’s can be seen clearly just inside of her vaginal opening as she masturbates.

Nice Girls Don’t Do It
is a short video produced by Kathy Daymond, starring Shannon Bell, a woman renowned for her ability to ejaculate on a dime. While she ejaculates any number of times, Shannon provides information about anatomy, and discusses the role ejaculation has in her sexuality. Unfortunately the voiceover on the soundtrack competes with coffee-shop chatter in the background, which is intended to provide a casual air to something potentially shocking, but the din becomes intensely cloying, disrupting the viewer’s concentration. Nonetheless the visual images are impressive, and Shannon has a compelling philosophical take on the subject. Female ejaculation is just one of the topics addressed in
The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop
, or
How to Be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps
, by Annie Sprinkle and Maria Beatty. The intent

of this imaginative and entertaining video encourages women to discover the power, intensity, and variety of sexual experience. In the first part, Annie and her friends explore their interest in dressing up, being sexy, and having fun with sex. Annie then discusses female ejaculation, demonstrating her own technique, which brings her to a five-minute orgasm that is not to be missed.

I highly recommend these videos to anyone who wants see some super-ejaculators in action. Many women have told me that after seeing one or more of the videos, they finally understood how it all happens. My friend Eileen, who had never ejaculated, called me from California one day out of the blue.

“I just had to tell you that I ejaculated!” she exclaimed. “How did it happen?” I asked.

“My boyfriend and I were watching a video on female ejaculation, and we were fooling around for a couple of hours, and suddenly, it just happened. Boom! Ejaculation!”

Was she more turned on than usual?

“Yeah,” she said, “I think it was the idea that I could ejaculate that got me so turned on.”

These videos are listed in Resources.

WHY ARE PEOPLE OPPOSED TO FEMALE EJACULATION?

While female ejaculation has been discussed for most of recorded history throughout a variety of cultures, it. remains a controversial

issue. Although Whipple and Perry’s study of the content of women’s ejaculate has been widely criticized, there has yet to be a definitive study. The Spanish study mentioned earlier is a start, but it has not been published in a mainstream sexology journal. The videos that have been done also confirm that women can ejaculate, but sonic critics, including Beverly Whipple, believe that some of the women in these videos are only squirting diluted urine.
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Perhaps another reason for the slow acceptance of female ejaculation that superstar sexologists such as Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson, did not believe that some women ejaculate, in direct contradiction to their own observations. Kinsey and his colleagues denied that women ejaculated, although they observed that “muscular contractions of the vagina following orgasm may squeeze out some of the genital secretions, and in a few cases eject them with some force.”
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Masters and Johnson likewise deny that female ejaculation occurs. “Despite a popular misconception, most women do not ejaculate during orgasm;’ they insist. Their proof? “The erroneous belief that women ejaculate probably stems from descriptions in erotic novels of fluid gushing from the vagina as a woman writhes and moans at the peak moment of sexual passion.” Yet they note that fourteen of the three hundred women in their own studies described a “gushing or expulsion of fluid at orgasm.” They also admit that “we have [emphasis in original] observed several cases of women who expelled a type of fluid that was not urine.”
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After an exhaustive quest to find a medical explanation for the copious ejaculations of a patient, Desmond Heath, an attending physician in psychiatry at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, came up dry. In desperation, he called the Masters and Johnson Institute, and reached the master himself. “Five minutes on the phone with Masters convinced me that the knowledge [of female ejaculation] had never been lost for it had never been known.”
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Many sexologists who are typically somewhat sympathetic to women’s issues refuse to accept the existence of female ejaculation, demanding more rigorous standards of proof. Likely they will sit comfortably in their disbelief, because there is zero scientific funding for studies on women’s sexuality, unless it is on sexual dysfunction, and it is rare that researchers can support such studies on their own. Until the time when funding becomes available, we will just have to take women’s word on ejaculation and await the science to confirm their testimonies.

In an article in On Our Backs, the renowned feminist sexzine, Fanny Fatale suggests one reason for the lack of acceptance of this phenomenon: “Society cannot accept female ejaculation precisely because it makes men and women equal.”
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WHAT’S THE POINT?

Some women may find the idea of having a prostate gland—or many prostate glands—preposterous or don’t like to think that they have a

sexual structure that is so quintessentially masculine. Others may not like the idea because ejaculation is so firmly associated with the performance aspects of men’s sexuality Some feminist commentators are also concerned that if we incorporate female ejaculation into our concept of women’s sexuality, it will become some sort of standard for “great sex,” and that women who do not have spectacular ejaculations like the ones shown in videos will feel inadequate. These are serious and legitimate concerns, especially in light of the trend to downplay the “performance” aspects of sex. Regardless of how many women ejaculate, they should have access to detailed information about it. Just knowing that ejaculation is a normal part of women’s sexuality can help us see it for what it really is—an expression of intense sexual pleasure. Knowing precisely where the fluid comes from can dispel shame or fear of “wetting the bed;’ and can further prevent many women from suppressing their sexual response to avoid it. It may also help others avoid undergoing disfiguring medical procedures to “fix” it. Whether or not we all ejaculate, just knowing that many of us do can help us to see our sexuality as more active, assertive, and powerful than we had previously believed.