The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips (10 page)

A FEMALE PROSTATE?

As we discovered in chapter 1, female genital tissue does not disappear after the seventh week of gestation. As the fetus develops, testosterone kicks in for those with XY chromosomes. In order for men to develop a prostate gland, prostatic tissue must first exist in the female template. In the female embryo, the entire urethra and its surrounding tissue develops from the urogenital sinus, as does the portion of the male urethra that passes through the male prostate gland, called the prostatic urethra. The question we should be asking then, is not if a female prostate exists, not if women ejaculate, but how the female prostate differs from that of the male.

The male prostate gland is roughly the size and shape of a walnut, and it is located at the base of the bladder. The “prostatic” portion of the urethra passes through its core, and numerous small ducts connected to a labyrinthine system of tiny tubes inside the prostate open through two prostatic ducts into the urethral canal. The prostate gland produces a clear alkaline fluid, which, at orgasm, is squeezed out through the ducts into the urethra where it joins the sperm as it jets by. Men usually ejaculate from one-half to two ounces, and the secretions of the prostate make up about 15 percent of this amount.
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Like the other seminal secretions, the prostate fluid is alkaline, which helps to keep the sperm alive in the vagina’s acidic environment.

G SPOT OR URETHRAL SPONGE?

The concept of a hypersensitive area inside the vagina, the Grafenberg spot or “G spot;’ burst upon the world stage in 1981 with the publication of
The G Spot and Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality
, and has now become such an indelible cultural artifact that it has been awarded a spot in the dictionary.
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In spite of its celebrity, there is still much confusion about what the G spot really is and where it is located, and many women are confused about whether or not they have one. These quandaries arose because the few researchers who have been interested in the issue chose to define it differently. Josephine Sevely and J. W. Bennett claimed that the

tissue surrounding the female urethra was identical to the
corpus spongiosum
that surrounds the male urethra, and cited gynecologist John Huffman’s study which shows up to thirty-one tiny prostatic- like glands embedded in it. Sevely simply referred to this tissue as “
corpus spongiosum
,” as the corresponding tissue in the male is called.
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This material was published in an expanded form in Sevely’s book
Eves Secrets: A New Theory of Female Sexuality
.
37

In 1981, Beverly Whipple and John Perry published an article in the
Journal of Sex Research
, and named it the “Grafenberg spot,” or the G spot.
38
In
A New View of a Woman’s Body
, the FFWHCs included an unnamed structure surrounding the urethra in their comprehensive definition of the clitoris and called it the urethral sponge. Two illustrations show a woman placing a finger inside of her vagina and feeling the sponge. “In addition to ejaculation, some self-helpers have said that stimulation of the urethral sponge can be a focal point for sexual arousal and orgasm,” the group noted. So
corpus spongiosum
, G spot, and the urethral sponge are all the same thing. Sevely’s findings were published first, and her investigation was the most thorough and wide ranging of the three. Whipple and Perry focused on the function of the G spot, linking stimulation of this spot to female ejaculation and orgasm, and they provided a wealth of personal accounts of women and their partners who had experienced or witnessed female ejaculation. Alice Kahn Ladas’s suggestion that they write a popular book put the concept on the map

in a way that endless articles in sexology journals could never have done. In the book, they write, “the Grafenberg Spot lies directly behind the pubic bone within the front wall of the vagina. It is usually located about halfway between the back of the pubic bone and the cervix, along the course of the urethra.... The size and exact location vary.”
39
This description proved to be confusing for many women who couldn’t find such a hypersensitive spot. Women who did not have orgasms through vaginal stimulation with fingers or the penis thought that they must not have a G spot. Originally, Whipple and Perry believed that stimulation of the G spot and female ejaculation resulted in orgasm, but Whipple later rejected this notion, noting that it might just increase pleasurable sensations. It seems that the FFWHCs’ detailed description of the urethral sponge and their inclusion of it in their definition of the clitoris provide the clearest picture of the structure and how it fits into the larger clitoral system. It makes clear that the sponge is not a part of the vagina, although it may be bonded to the vaginal “roof” in some way. Their illustrations show exactly how to find the urethral sponge, and, most importantly, they make it clear that every woman has one. How sensitive the sponge, or a spot on it, may be varies from woman to woman.

IS IT URINE?

One of the reasons that female ejaculation has remained so controversial is that definitive studies on the fluid’s constituents have

never been done. In the early 1980s, Whipple and Perry found that prostatic acid phosphatates (PAP), an enzyme that is present in male prostatic secretions, and glucose (a sugar)were “substantially higher in the ejaculatory fluid [of women] than in the urine samples.” Urea and creatinine, two of the principle constituents of urine, were “substantially lower in the ejaculatory than in the urine specimens.”
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This analysis suggests that female ejaculate is not urine.

In an effort to show that female ejaculate is not from the bladder, Edwin Belzer, who taught human sexuality courses at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, reported and interesting experiment done by one of his students who ejaculated easily. She took Urised—a bladder relaxant drug that turns the urine fight blue—several times during masturbation. Afterward, she found either a faint bluish tinge or no color on her sheets where she ejaculated. She then urinated on the sheet. That spot was a deep blue, indicating that there was plenty of blue dye the urine, where it was supposed to be, but little or none in the ejaculate, where it was not supposed to be.
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The most recent study on female ejaculation, conducted by two Spanish researchers, Francisco Cabello Santamarie, a physcicist and psychologist, and Rico Nesters, a clinical analyst, was reported at the Thirteenth World Congress of Sexology in Valencia, Spain, in

1997.
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These researchers analyzed the urine of twenty-four women before and after orgasm for signs of prostatic secretions. Six of the

women ejaculated and that, too, was analyzed. All of the women masturbated to orgasm and had not had sexual contact for two days. Their analysis focused on identifying the presence of prostate- specific antigen (PSA), since this is a primary chemical in male prostatic emissions.

The results of the Spanish study are impressive. In all cases, the preorgasmic urine was just that—urine. But PSA was present in 75 percent of the postorgasmic urine samples, and in all of the ejaculation samples. As expected, the amount of PSA was high in the ejaculation samples and lower in the postorgasmic urine. Cabello Santamaria surmised that the PSA is pushed into the bladder either because the sphincter muscle that holds in urine is weak, or because it opened momentarily during orgasm. (This phenomenon occurs in men who have had prostate surgery. It is called “retrograde [backward] ejaculation.” Men who seek to delay ejaculation by squeezing the base of the penis may also experience this phenomenon.)

There may be another reason, however, that some women’s post orgasmic urine contains PSA. Some of the glands may empty into the urethra, and if the ejaculate does not squirt out, it would remain in the urethra to be picked up by the first post-ejaculatory flow of urine.

Santamaria and Nesters express the hope that their investigation will have “a tranquilizing effect on women,” first, to assure them

“that it is a perfectly normal and, probably, common phenomenon,” and second, to help those who do not experience it avoid “an ‘endless quest’ for their ejaculation, because they probably do ejaculate, but in scarce quantities.”

These reports strongly suggest that the fluid coming out of the female urethra during sexual response is not urine, but are problematic in that they each evaluated the female ejaculate for different constituents. Male ejaculate has been analyzed exhaustively, and volumes have been written about its makeup. At least nine different substances are present in male prostatic fluid, including PAP, PSA, and fructose. There is, however, one test—the sniff test—that anyone can do at home to determine whether they are ejaculating or urinating. After sex, sniff the wet spot on your sheets. If you have urinated, you will smell the unmistakable acrid odor.

HOW MUCH DO WOMEN EJACULATE?

There have been different estimates of how much fluid women ejaculate. Sevely found that “the amount of prostatic fluid released through the female urethra may be as much as 126 milliliters (about one quarter of a cup, or four ounces).”
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A quarter of a standard eight-ounce cup is actually two ounces, so it is not clear which measurement Sevely actually means. In
The G Spot
, Whipple and Perry reported that the amount of female ejaculate varied from “a few drops to about a quarter of a teaspoon,” although they

acknowledged that the range could be as high as a cup (eight ounces) or more.
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Desmond Heath, a New York psychiatrist who conducted an extensive inquiry into the subject of female ejaculation over several years, suggests that “the pararuethral glands of Skene are capable of producing and ejecting impulses, associated with sexual stimulation, a clear watery fluid [from] two openings either side of the urethral meatus at a rate of 30 to 50 ccs [7 to 15 ounces] in 30 to

50 seconds.”
45
Cabello Santamaria and Nesters report that they collected “up to 16 ml,” or about five and one-half ounces.

In my own queries to women who ejaculate, estimates vary widely from a few drops to repeated gushes that require a mop up. One interviewee, Jenna, unabashedly classifies herself as a “gusher”:

I used to take a towel to bed, but the ejaculate would soak through four thick folds and then I could literally ring the towel out. Finally I got a lambskin mat, which doesn’t allow the liquid to seep through, and it’s washable. Still, I often have to mop the floor when I’m finished. I have developed the ability to manipulate myself to repeatedly release ejaculatory fluid, given enough engorgement of erectile tissues and state of arousal.

Danielle told me:

One lover I had didn’t believe in ejaculation, even after she squirted a dime-sized puddle on the bathroom floor one night. We smelled it and it had a mild, indefinable odor, but she thought it was urine. Then once, when I was sort of curled up in her arms with my knees behind her shoulder— splat!—I ejaculated all over her face and arms—I don’t recall it as an orgasm necessarily, just very intense pleasure. After we recovered from our surprise, we evaluated it and decided that it would fill at least one standard test tube and about half of another [about an ounce and a half]. At that point, she changed her mind.

How can we account for the enormous variation in the amount of ejaculate? We know that the amount of male ejaculate ranges quite a bit, from one half to two ounces, and that the fluid produced by the prostate is about 15-20 percent of this, so there is some variation in the amount of prostatic fluid that men produce. It is clear, however, that many women produce much, much more.

Although there has yet to be a study of the effect that varying testosterone levels in women (or in men for that matter) may have on the production of prostatic fluid, it would seem that the amount of testosterone a woman has may be a determinant in how much

ejaculate a woman produces. All women have some testosterone, and while the amount may be influenced by some lifestyle and environmental factors, genetic inheritance may be the strongest single factor. There may be a number of reasons for the huge differential in the amounts of female ejaculate. Some women may simply have more, or bigger, glands than others, or their glands may normally produce more fluid, the way some people sweat much more than others. Some women who have had vaginal births may have weak or damaged pelvic floor muscles, and simply cannot get a strong squeeze from the muscles, while other women’s glands may have been damaged or scarred from past infections so that the fluid doesn’t come out, save for a drop or two from the glands that empty directly into the urethra. Other women may not ejaculate because their urethral glands have gotten lazy from a long-term lack of sexual activity or from the low intensity of their sexual response. Unknown hormonal factors may also suppress the production of prostatic fluid. The world is divided into two groups when it comes to female ejaculation: those who believe that it exists, and those who don’t. Most likely, those who ejaculate or have had a partner who does tend to be the believers, and those who do not see an obvious squirt from themselves or their partners are often the disbelievers. The Spanish study suggests that all women ejaculate, but that it ranges from too little to be noticed to the very obvious, and that in some women, it

may be squeezed back into the bladder to emerge with the next urination.

Sevely suggested that one of the reasons many women do not think they ejaculate is that during intercourse, the urethral meatus, or opening,” is pushed inside the vagina” so that “if a woman ejaculates fluid only during coitus, the outlet of the fluid is obscured inside the vagina.”
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Even if the urethral opening is not pushed or pulled inside of the vagina, a woman’s ejaculation is blocked by the penis or pubic mound. In this case, it ends up as a wet spot, which for some women is quite large.

Another reason many women do not appear to ejaculate is that their partner has his or her orgasm before she is fully sexually aroused, so the opportunity simply never arises. Women who have had urethritis, an infection of the urethra caused by gonorrhea or other bacteria, may have scarring along the urethra; the tiny paraurethral ducts may scar over, preventing ejaculation. Perhaps some older women, like older men, have decreased erectile and ejaculatory capability because of atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries, which may affect ejaculatory capability. In
The G Spot
, and in early papers coauthored by Whipple and Perry, female ejaculation was closely linked to stimulation of the G spot, although it is noted that “a few women report that they also ejaculate through clitoral stimulation alone.”
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I’ve talked to many women who ejaculate and say that they