Much has been made of a study on female ejaculation in the media and on Twitter and Reddit lately. The media and the blogosphere have been rife with headlines like: “Scientists Say Female ‘Squirting’ is Just Peeing!”

Unfortunately, once again the bloggers and medical media got it wrong.

Read the original study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25545022

This study suffers from a severe case of selection bias. Finding that the fluid emission was urine was the only possible outcome of the study given its structure, because they selected only women who already had coital incontinence:

“Seven women, without gynecologic abnormalities and who reported recurrent and massive fluid emission during sexual stimulation, underwent provoked sexual arousal.”

The problem is that women with “massive” fluid emission certainly suffer from coital incontinence, rather than enjoying female ejaculation (though they may do both). Coital incontinence is the involuntary release of urine from the bladder, sometimes during penetration but often with orgasm and contraction of the pelvic floor muscles. Female ejaculation is emission of a semen-like fluid from the “female prostate”, or Skeens Glands.

There is female ejaculation and there is coital incontinence. They are two separate things. In case you were wondering, female ejaculation is a fact undisputed by rational researchers:

“Female ejaculation orgasm manifests as either a female ejaculation (FE) of a smaller quantity of whitish secretions from the female prostate or a squirting of a larger amount of diluted and changed urine (Coital Incontinence (CI)). Both phenomena may occur simultaneously. The prevalence of FE is 10-54%. CI is divided into penetration and orgasmic forms. The prevalence of CI is 0.2-66%.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23634659

Some women ejaculate. Some women have coital incontinence. Some women have both. This current study was structured only to find people with coital incontinence. It’s interesting that five of the seven also ejaculated:

“[Prostatic Specific Antigen] was present in S and ASU in five out of seven participants.”

This is buried in most of the stories, and is not mentioned at all in some of them.

There is one interesting finding in this study that bears further investigation. These women had a rapid increase in the volume of their bladders during sexual stimulation:

“After a variable time of sexual excitation, US2 (just before squirting) showed noticeable bladder filling, and US3 (just after squirting) demonstrated that the bladder had been emptied again.”

To my knowledge this is a previously unknown phenomenon. So this study does have something to say about coital incontinence but says absolutely nothing, or very little, about what we’re really interested in, which is female ejaculation.

Our upcoming show on January 20th on Riotcast is basically dedicated to this topic, so stay tuned!

Your pal,

Dr Steve