Scientists think they know where and what a woman’s ejaculate comes from

Okay, it’s time to talk about female ejaculation, which isn’t as mysterious as many people think.

Scientists have found evidence that women who “squirt” are releasing either pure urine or a mixture of urine and fluid from the female prostate gland.

Researchers in France were the first to use ultrasound scans to look at this mysterious process. They found that the ejaculate comes from a woman’s bladder and is mostly urine.

The team, led by Samuel Salama, a gynecologist at the private Parly II hospital in Le Chesnay, worked with a small group of seven healthy women who said they had “recurrent and massive fluid emission” when they were sexually stimulated. At climax, it’s not uncommon for a small amount of milky white fluid to leak out of a woman’s urethra, but it’s not common for a woman to “squirt” enough fluid to fill a drinking glass.

“A few small studies suggest that the milky white fluid comes from Skene glands, which are small structures that drain into the urethra,” Helen Thomson wrote at the time for New Scientist.

Some doctors think these glands are like the male prostate, but their size and shape vary a lot from woman to woman, and no one knows what their exact purpose is.

Salma’s team first asked the participants to give a sample of their urine. Then, their pelvis was scanned with an ultrasound machine to make sure there was nothing left in their bladders.

The women were left to either masturbate in the lab or have sex with a partner until they were about to climax. This gave the scientists enough time to set up their ultrasound machines.

As the women were climaxing, they were scanned, and the fluid they were releasing was put into sample bags. This must have been one of the most embarrassing times of their lives. After that, one last scan of their pelvis was done to look at the bladder.

Even though the women had gone to the bathroom and emptied their bladders before the big event, a scan taken right before they climaxed showed that their bladders were full again. This was because the women had been sexually stimulated.

After the climax and ejaculation, the volunteers’ scans showed that their bladders were once again empty. The results were written up in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

So, does this mean that the liquid squirted out during sex is urine? The team already knew it was coming from the bladder, so it seems likely.

When they compared the urine samples taken during climax to the ones taken at the start of the study, they found that two of the seven women’s samples were chemically the same.

The samples were a little different for the other five women.

The team found a small amount of an enzyme called a prostatic-specific antigen (PSA) in the ejaculated urine of these volunteers.

“PSA, which is made by the prostate gland in men, is usually linked to male ejaculate, where it helps sperm swim,” said Thomson in New Scientist. “Salama says that PSA is mostly made by the Skene glands in women.”

So, when women ejaculate during an orgasm, they either release plain urine or urine that has been diluted by fluids from the female prostate gland.

Thomson talked to an independent expert, Beverley Whipple, a neurophysiologist from Rutgers University in the US. She said that when we talk about female ejaculation, we should really only be talking about when PSA is released, not urine.

The only questions left about this phenomenon are whether or not it has some kind of adaptive purpose and why so few women can do it. Researchers think it might have something to do with the fact that some women don’t make PSA at all, or with the size and shape of the prostate gland.