Asking for a friend. By CARINA HSIEH
ou’re at brunch with
your BFF (the one who
overshares and you love
her for it) when she men-
tions how her latest hookup
made her orgasm so many GD
times she had to strip her
sheets at 3 a.m. because they
were soaking wet.
“Uh, you mean you peed your
bed?” you ask.
“No,” she explains, “squirting,
as in gushing during orgasm, is
totally different from pee.”
“I don’t think so,” you counter.
And then you’re both whip-
ping out your phones to prove
each other wrong. But after
scrolling through hundreds of
articles, neither of you can find a
definitive answer.W h a t k i n d o f e f f e d - u p
sorcery is this?
Despite millennia of evidence
that squirting is a very real thing
that happens to some women
during sex (see the receipts, at
right), so much about it still
remains a big fat question mark.
Experts have yet to come to aconsensus on how, when, or why
squirting happens—and most
important, whether or not it’s
*actual* pee that comes out.
For starters, let’s take
research that estimates around
10 t o 54 p e rc e n t o f wo m e n ex p e l
fluid during sex. Okay, so either
half of all women do it...or
almost none. Yeah, not helpful.
There are a handful of other
small, conflicting studies about
the phenomenon, but doctors
say way more specific research
is needed, which makes it tricky
to scream “It’s pee!” or “STFU,
it’s not pee!” at brunch with any
kind of conviction.
The thing is, though, the
world really, really wants to
understand it. Perhaps thanks to
porn—in which women are often
seen shooting out streams of
fluid during foreplay and inter-
course—curiosity over this
sexual feat has reached an all-
time high. (Searches for “squirt-
ing” on Pornhub more than
doubled between 2011
and 2017, and women are
4 4 p e rc e n t m o re like l y t o l o o k
for this stuff than men.) Basically,
it’s the Loch Ness monster of our
sexuality: The less evidence
there is about it, the more we
want to know.*Oprah voice* So,
what is the TRUTH?
Oz Harmanli, MD, chief of
urogynecology and reconstruc-
t i ve p e l v i c s u rg e r y a t Ya l e
Medicine, has reviewed much of
t h e re s e a rc h o n s q uir t in g. H is
personal conclusion? The liquid
is urine that can be mixed with
some sort of female ejaculate.
But (eek) mostly urine.
Let him explain: Squirts often
contain something called pros-
tate-specific antigen, a protein
found in semen, which suggests
that women do have the ability
t o c o m e s o r t o f like g u y s d o. B u t,
h e a d d s, “t h e re is n o g l a n d o r
reservoir in the female body,
other than the bladder, that can
produce the amount of fluid that
is re l e a s e d w it h s q uir t in g.”It’s the Loch Ness
monster of our
sexuality: The less
evidence there is
about it, the more
we want t o know.Is
squirting
actually
just
pee?lust
92 Cosmopolitan October 2019