Female Ejaculation: The Other Fluid

Most of what you have read about female ejaculation was actually about squirting. The two words get used as though they were one thing, which is how a small, quiet, rather elegant piece of your anatomy ended up buried under a decade of camera angles.

There are two fluids. They come from different places, they look different, they arrive in different amounts, and a woman can produce either one, both at once, or neither. The larger one gets all the attention. The smaller one is the one that carries your own prostate signature, and it deserves a better introduction than it has had.

Because the volumes are so different, the smaller event often goes unnoticed entirely. Plenty of women have ejaculated for years without ever registering it, having been told to expect something dramatic and finding a teaspoon.

The Skene glands sit on either side of the urethra, just inside the opening. They are small, they are easy to miss in a diagram, and they develop from the same embryonic tissue that becomes the prostate in a male body. That shared origin is why researchers named them the female prostate, and it is why the fluid they produce carries prostate-specific antigen: the identical marker measured in men.

That marker is the reason the argument about female ejaculation ended. When you can measure a prostatic protein in fluid released during a woman orgasm, the question of whether the phenomenon is real has been answered in a laboratory.

A small volume, thicker than arousal fluid, whitish or milky rather than clear. It tends to appear at or just after orgasm. Many women notice it as a slickness that is different in texture from everything else, rather than as an event with a beginning and an end.

Because it can arrive alongside squirting, the milky fluid often gets carried out inside the larger clear gush and never seen on its own. That combination is ordinary. So is having one without the other.

Vaginal dryness in the perimenopausal years is common and well documented, and it changes arousal fluid rather than the Skene glands. A good lubricant is equipment, in the same category as a towel or a pillow under your hips, and using one takes nothing away from what your body is doing on its own.

In an international survey of 320 women who ejaculate, eight in ten called it an enrichment of their sexual lives. Women keep discovering this in their forties and fifties, often for the first time, which says something about how much of it was ever about age.

If you came here wondering whether the fluid you produce counts, it counts. If you came wondering about the bigger version, is squirting pee answers the question the internet keeps getting wrong. And if you have been trying without result, the real blockers is the page written for you.