The truth about female ejaculation: Dismantling the porn myths

Colombian actress Amaranta Hank turns on the camera and starts recording. She is alone and almost naked in a large bed. The actress begins to masturbate, first slowly, then faster as she grows aroused. Finally, apparently coinciding with her orgasm, a transparent liquid comes out of her vagina: she has just squirted.

Thirty seconds later, it happens again. In a video that lasts three minutes and has more than 1.4 million views, Hank, a pornography professional with a growing number of followers, appears to have these experiences spontaneously. What not all viewers know is that, in the porn industry, which is a $100 billion business, everything is always coldly calculated, including squirts.

Hank says that she has learned to fake the squirt. “The scenes are very fast. There are too many cameras and you may not even like the actor you are sharing a scene with. In contexts like this, with so much pressure, it is impossible to really do it,” she says. To facilitate filming, the squirt is often faked using water bottles, water bags attached to the actresses’ backs and even enemas, she explains. With her legs raised and the camera focused at a certain angle, the scene almost seems real.

It has long been known that female and male orgasms are different. But for many, squirting has become somewhat of an urban legend, considered the ultimate pleasurable experience, a kind of female equivalent to male ejaculation, the definitive evidence that the woman has enjoyed the sexual act.

Reality says otherwise. As Hank knows firsthand, it can be faked without extraordinary arousal, just the right training. On the other hand, many women experience pleasurable orgasms without the need for any liquid to shoot out from anywhere. And yet the myth endures.

In recent years, porn has created a sexual fantasy around squirting. On the pornography portal Pornhub there are more than 200,000 videos under the title “squirting” or “how to squirt,” according to company data updated in 2021. Although it has just now become trendy, there have been records of squirting since Hippocrates spoke of “female semen” in the 4th century B.C.

Sexologist Almudena M. Ferrer explains that squirting is often confused with female ejaculation, but that they are two totally different things, both due to the composition and the mechanisms and organs that produce them. The first is the expulsion of a dilute liquid from the Skene glands, containing urea, uric acid and creatinine. Female ejaculation is the release of a whitish, thick and scant liquid from the so-called female prostate. Both can occur without having to reach orgasm.

One of the reasons why female ejaculation is surrounded by urban legends and half-truths is due to the lack of scientific studies on the subject. In Spain, the director of the Andalusian Institute of Sexology and Psychology, Francisco Cabello, decided to study the phenomenon in 1993. He did it, he remembers, worried about what many women told him in a Spain that was still trying to definitively shake off Francoism. As a result of full sexual relations, they confused their squirts with the urge to urinate, which often caused them to repress their own orgasms.

At the time there was very little information about it, so Cabello undertook research that analyzed pre-orgasmic urine and post-orgasmic urine for the presence of markers of male seminal fluid. He wanted to find differences produced by the contribution of urine to the elements that make the paraurethral urethral glands and Skene’s ducts. “The conclusion we drew at that time was that 75% of women had PSA levels in their post-orgasmic urine,” he says. This means that many women had the possibility of squirting and that a large part of the squirt’s composition, in fact, was urine.

Thirty years have passed since those discoveries. Norma Ageitos Urain, a sexologist and sociologist, says that “many ghosts have been generated around this issue, when it is only a physiological reaction of the body. In addition, it has put pressure on women because many times their partners seek to replicate what they have seen in porn, and that is impossible.”

One of the myths around squirting is that it is the climax of an orgasm. This may not be true. Psychologist and sexologist Diana Lozano says that there can be a squirt without an orgasm and still have a great time: “In sex, different goals have always been set around orgasms. A few years ago it was finding the G-spot and now it is squirting.”

Amaranta Hank, 31, did not have her first squirt until the pandemic arrived and she had time to do something she had almost never been able to do: explore her body alone and enjoy it. She started working on OnlyFans and, with the help of her sex toys, a lot of patience and dedication, she was able to achieve it without having to fake it like she had done for so many years on set. “You need to reach a very high level of arousal with no distractions, but each body is different and different things work for each woman.”

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