Gushing: the Spurting Story!

Yep, I'm going to be making water jokes with the pictures the whole time.

Gushing:  the Spurting Story!

 (Originally published in Sass Magazine)

            When I received a message about this, I honestly didn’t know much beyond the brief mention of “female ejaculate” in the first season of The L-Word (I love Dana!). The original message, and I’ll paraphrase here to protect the gusher, stated that she’d done this off and on in the past, but hadn’t done so yet with her girlfriend until one fateful night…apparently her girlfriend of two-ish months was not exactly into it, which I think is silly considering she caused it.

            Before we delve into the slippery and wet of the issue, there should probably be a history lesson (don’t go skipping through the history to get to the sex stuff—remember what the subject matter is—it’s all sex stuff). The existence of gushing or female ejaculation has been debated and it’s kind of odd who falls out on each side. A huge swath of the women’s lib movement/Gloria Steinam feminists dismissthe existence of gushing as pure fantasy, more specifically, pure malefantasy. If this made you shake your head in wonder, don’t worry, you’re not alone; I completely didn’t follow this when I read it either. Granted, my knowledge of straight male fantasies is about as plentiful as my knowledge of skyscraper construction:  I’ve seen them from the outside and have been in a few, but I have no idea how or why they’re made nor do I care to learn. Still, I don’t for an instant believe the entirety of female ejaculation was completely imagined, disseminated, and conjured into mythical existence by straight male fantasy. Other people have dismissed it as urine…that is apparently also completely false.

Aren't we glad it's NOT urine?

             Scientists of the vaginal, anatomical, and evolutionary bent have theorized that the g-spot is actually analogous to the prostate in what tissues each are made up of in the same way the clit is made up of a lot of the same structures as the penis. The g-spot and the prostate apparently function like valves. Gushing is not urine; this has been scientifically shown again and again by chemically testing what is actually in the liquid, and it isn’t urea (the protein base compound found in urine). To get down to the really chemically-analytical explanation, gushing seems to be the base liquid that semen would be added to in male ejaculate.

            Now that we know it isn’t a myth constructed by the straight male fantasy machine and it isn’t errant urine, let’s talk about why and how it happens. The answer, in a nutshell, is nobody really knows. I put it out to friends, lesbians, straights, bisexuals, stone-butches, super-femmes, and even gender ambiguous with some interesting, but largely conflicting reports. A lot of internet research said g-spot stimulation was the key, but then a friend of mine said she does it nearly every time she climaxes and she only climaxes through clitoral stimulation. I asked around and found a few other women who have gushed after clit-climaxes. At this point, it was less about the original question—which I do have an answer for, bear with me—I just wanted to unravel the mystery of gushing for myself.

As wet as you're likely to get if you use a dental dam--seriously, safe sex, ladies.

             I started eliciting advice on how to do it. Relaxing and letting go was something I was told, which, if true, would explain why I never had since I tense up like I’m undergoing electric-shock when I orgasm. Intensity was also apparently important; darn, poor me in researching this part. Armed with my two pieces of widely agreed upon information, I brought the quandary to my girlfriend. She told me she didn’t want to do it, wasn’t interested in making me do it, didn’t want me to do it in front of her, and if I was going to test it on my own, lay down a towel so I don’t make a mess on the off chance I do manage to make it happen. This really did demonstrate an element of the potentially off-putting aspects of the act. Before I could actually test whether or not I was able to gush, I had to know how common this reaction was.

            After asking a wide-range of people, I got an equally wide-range of answers, and they really didn’t seem to follow any helpful trends. Some lesbians loved it. Several butches I asked thought of it as ejaculating and really enjoyed the masculinity of that; other butches saw it as a badge of honor to make a femme gush. Many femmes agreed that they’d done it with a variety of reactions, but most didn’t really see it as masculine. Straight men I asked were almost completely split:  some liked it, some hated it, some had never seen it outside of porn and had no idea if it was real or not. Surprisingly, the two groups with a consensus were bisexual women, who didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and gay men who categorically thought it was creepy and several told me they thought vaginas had teeth in them (just kidding boys…but not really). Gay men aside, it really does seem to be entirely personal preference.

            Now let me state here, I did all due-diligence when it came to testing this for myself. I won’t get into the grittier of the extremely gritty details, but let’s just say, no stone of masturbation was unturned in trying to achieve this. And I couldn’t do it. Relaxing at the point of climax didn’t help, intensity didn’t seem to make a difference, and g-spot stimulation (which I canand do climax from, lucky me!) didn’t make any appreciable difference. I shared the results of my catastrophic failure with my girlfriend, and she assured me it was for the best that I didn’t teach myself a trick she didn’t want me learning.

I mean, it's not water sports...google water sports if you don't know what that is.

             So, to the answer for our dear friend, Ms. Gusher…

            Depending on who you ask, what you did was a beautiful, sexy thing or a gross deal-breaker with a lot of gray area in between. From the sound of it, this isn’t an all-the-time sort of thing for you. From my own experimentation (and the abundance of how-to articles/videos/guides on the internet), it doesn’t seem easy to do. It also might need to be something your girlfriend gets the fuck over too. Bodily functions happen during sex. Once you get out of the honeymoon phase of the first six months of your relationship, you’ll probably fart, burp, and pee in front of your girlfriend on at least a weekly basis; some parts of relationship intimacy are gross, but you get over it because it’s just biology and part of doing business as a human being. Part of your girlfriend doing business with your business parts, might mean occasionally having to take a splatter on the face or hand. Come on, straight girls apparently do it all the time and the stuff they’re getting shot with has swimming things in it…I’m getting gayer just thinking about it. If she can’t get comfortable with the fact that sometimes you spurt a little bit, and the studies did show it’s not significantly more than average male ejaculate volumes no matter what internet porn says (I had to watch unspeakable things to research this article), then maybe she should go out and find herself a nice sandbox to play in. There are people out there who are into it, and if this is a deal-breaker for her, you’re probably better off finding one of the ladies who loves it and try spurting in their general direction.