Kittys and Cougars.... A place to purrr

By Josey Vogels    

     The first time I ejaculated it took me by surprise. I was about 16 and enjoying a pretty healthy sex life with my first real boyfriend. He thought I had peed. I suspected it was orgasm-related (it sure felt good, and by age 16 you pretty much know your pee), but his suggestion made me wonder and suddenly feel embarrassed. I shyly told him that it felt more like what I imagined a guy must feel, intense build-up and then gush, the release. I didn't understand how it had happened (I hadn't heard of the G-spot or female ejaculation at that point) but I knew it wasn't pee. He thought that was pretty neat but I still got the feeling he didn't quite believe me.

He's not alone.

After sharing her doubts about the existence of the G-spot, because she's "never seen any scientific proof," Dr Ruth explains that "... a G-Spot orgasm is supposed to be much stronger than a mere clitoral orgasm; it may even include a supposed female ejaculation [my emphasis]."

Masters & Johnson, the biggies when it comes to shaping the way the medical world currently views sexuality, are less coy in their denial. They describe female ejaculation as "an erroneous but widespread concept." They write off the release of fluid as "urinary stress incontinence." You know, like dribbling when you

Shannon Bell thinks this is crap. She doesn't need scientific proof. (Since when has science done women any favours, after all?) She, like me, has chosen to rely on first-hand information. Bell, an academic and self-proclaimed "pornographic woman" even held a series of female ejaculation workshops (complete with demonstration) in Toronto to dispel the "myth of the G-spot." A friend of mine attended one and admitted that, while it was a bit bizarre to watch someone jerk off in front of a roomful of men and women, the workshop was incredibly enlightening.

"It tapped into how we're fed information, not just 'how do you find the G-spot?'" she told me, over the phone. Finding it's the easy part, she said. "We're always told how difficult it is to find the G-spot, but it's like you can't see the forest for the trees, it's right there, you can't miss it if you try." She knows this because a woman in the workshop demonstrated how to use a speculum on yourself and then invited everyone to check it out. "So, what did it look like?" "Uh, Jos, I'm at work."

The most I managed to get out of her was that it was like a bump on the upper wall just inside the vagina. To discover your own, you need only put your finger inside and you can feel it. The area feels a bit like the roof of your mouth and the bump is actually your urethral sponge (it was called the G-Spot after Dr Ernst Grafenberg who "discovered" it in the 50s). This sponge swells with fluid when stimulated. Pressure on this from fingers, toes, penises and other fun things can make you spurt.

Still, although science has come up with some proof that enzymes in this fluid are similar to male ejaculate (without the seed, of course), they still don't want to recognize it as female ejaculation. Because it's a part of the anatomy that remains vaguely defined, unfocussed-on, and not taught about, women end up thinking, 'I think I've found it, but I'm not sure.'

"Yeah, it's like, 'no it can't exist, because science says it doesn't' but yet there it is, I've seen it," my friend agrees. "It's as if they don't want to acknowledge that women have the same ability to ejaculate as men."

Shannon Bell traces the history of attitudes and theories about female ejaculation and the G-spot in her essay "Feminist Ejaculations," published in The Hysterical Male. edited by Montreal's Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (Montreal: New World Perspectives). In Greek and Roman times, Bell writes, doctors weren't debating whether female ejaculate existed but rather whether it had procreative properties. The theory went that making babies required both male and female "semen." Aristotle was the first to challenge this, saying the female discharge was not seminal but simply part of female pleasure.

It wasn't until Victorian times that the very existence of female ejaculation was formally challenged. A sexologist named Krafft-Ebing linked "excessive" female vaginal fluid to disease, and decided women who "expelled" it had some kind of pathology that was probably linked to the nervous system.

Ironically, lesbian feminist historian Sheila Jeffreys apparently interpreted all these theories as bunk and felt the notion of female ejaculation was just a figment of the male imagination.

My favourite proof of its existence, however, is Bell's description of the puberty rites of the Batoro of Uganda. She describes a custom called "kachapati," which means "spray the wall." The older women teach the younger women how to ejaculate when they reach puberty, Bell writes. It reminded me of a program I had once heard on this subject, and one women who had kachapatied the paint right of the wall at the foot of her bed.

I've ejaculated several times since that experience in my teens. I haven't learned to control it myself the way Bell has. Sometimes, with the right circumstances and the proper stimulation, it happens. The more it does, the more I understand how to make it happen. It's not necessarily more satisfying than a clitoral orgasm, just different. I don't feel the need for it to happen every time. It's fun when it does but I don't feel cheated or like my lover is inadequate when it doesn't. The bottom line is that it happens and I have no doubt as to what it is.

Researchers and sex therapists say one of their main concerns in supporting the existence of the G-spot is that they worry it will, as Dr Ruth puts it, send every couple on a "Lewis and Clark expedition up her vagina." Come on, give me a break. We've still got women who aren't achieving clitoral orgasms and it's not because we are denying that the clitoris exists. Lewis and Clark went where no Americans had gone before. They didn't know what they were going find there, but that didn't stop them from exploring.