Urination stimulation

Dear Sasha,

The topic has been exhausted, and yet I’m still in the dark about female ejaculation, specifically where it comes from and what it is. It’s a conundrum wrapped in a riddle wrapped in my vagina. And a messy one at that.

Dear Flo,

The more research I do into female ejaculation, the more I realize, I too do not know what the fuck is going on. I’ll ask you to read these opinions from well-regarded sexual health experts and see what you make of it all:

In The Clitoral Truth, Rebecca Chalker writes, “The urethral sponge is a very significant part of the clitoral system. Embedded in its spongy erectile tissue are up to 30 or more tiny prostatic-like glands that produce an alkaline fluid similar in its constitution to the male prostatic fluid. Two of the largest, called the Skene’s glands, are near the urethral opening, where the urine comes out, but numerous others are buried in the spongy tissue surrounding the urethra. All of these glands together are referred to as paraurethral glands, meaning ‘around the urethra,’ and they are the source of female ejaculation.”

Chalker then relays an experiment done by a student at Dalhousie. The student, an easy ejaculator, took Urised—“a bladder relaxant drug that turns the urine bright blue—several times during masturbation. Afterward, she found either a faint bluish tinge or no colour on her sheets where she had ejaculated. She then urinated on the sheet. That spot was a deep blue, indicating that there was plenty of blue dye in the urine, where it was supposed to be, but little or none in the ejaculate, where it was not supposed to be.”

Then there’s Dr. Gary Schubach. Several years ago, he catheterized the bladders of seven women who expelled fluid during orgasm, first getting them all to pee. “The fluids obtained could then be analyzed for their individual composition,” the study reads, “having lessened the possibility that they had been mixed in the urethra.” Conclusion? Almost all the fluid expelled from these women undeniably came from their bladders. “Even though their bladders had been drained, they still expelled from 50 to 900 ml of fluid through the tube and into the catheter bag. The only reasonable conclusion would be that the fluid came from a combination of residual moisture in the walls of the bladder and from post draining kidney output. There was also a consistency of results that showed a greatly reduced concentration of the two primary components of urine, urea and creatinine, in the expelled fluid.”

Previous studies have posited that the fluid is actually chemically altered urine and that there may be a chemical process that occurs during sexual excitement that changes its composition. “On four occasions, the research team saw evidence of milky-white, mucous-like emissions from the urethra outside of the catheter tube,” Schubach’s study continues. “Although three of those emissions were recorded by the video cameras, the research team was only able to capture a small portion of the fluid for laboratory analysis. An objective reading of the previous literature indicated the possibility of such an emission from the urethral glands and ducts.”

And then there’s Paul Joannides, the author of the Guide to Getting It On, who says: “Science knows next to nothing about the male prostate gland, yet it is large, and you can actually feel it. We haven’t found anything in the female body other than the bladder that would produce several ounces of female ejaculate, yet some writers are claiming that women have a prostate gland, and that it can do this and more.”

Then there’s me. My own ejaculate is frequently pee. I know this because it often smells as such, and the last time it happened I was sitting on my boyfriend watching it gush into his belly button. It was yellow. I leaned in for a sip. Pee. Definitely. I looked at him and said, “Wow, lucky you. Ordinarily that’d cost a guy at least 200 or 300 bucks.”

In other words, Flo, we’re all waiting for someone to sort this out with some definitiveness. Wouldn’t it be rad if it actually were—in cases where it clearly isn’t urine—primarily fluid that came from the kidneys and the bladder and whose chemical structure was altered via sexual stimulation? Something to put on your application to the Justice League for sure: “Can change urine’s chemical composition through climax.”

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM