The case of the missing G-spot

anD OTHeR mysTeRies of

FemaLe sexuamy

CAN A FEMALE EJACULATE? WHY 00 WOMEN

E ORGASMS? AS WE'VE DONE WITH MALE DESIRE. WE VISIT THE WORLD'S SEX LABS TO FINO OUT WHAT SCIENTISTS HAVE LEARNED ABOUT THE EROTIC RESPONSE OF PEOPLE WITH VAGINAS. WOMEN WIL ALWAYS BE A MYSTERY, BUT IT NEVER HURTS TO GATHER CLUES

1

y the time of his death in New York City in 1957, Dr. Ernst Grafenberg was the most famous German gynecologist in the world, which is a respectable achievement but less than what it takes to have your death noted in a newspaper or medical journal. That's less surprising when you consider that Grafenberg (GRAY-fen-berg) spent his life crusading against "the undervaluation of female secrets" in a time when a woman's orgasmic response hardly mattered in her ordained role as an

incubator of children. In his late 3Os—after returning from duty as a sanitation officer in World War I, where he saw enough carnage to write seven papers on treating gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen—Grafenberg completed a 29-page analysis of the contents of vaginal lubrication. Ten years later, in Berlin, he lectured on using silk placed on a coiled si!ver ring as a con­traceptive, which became known as the IUD and which he hoped would ease female anxiety about sex. In 1933, after the Nazis

forced Grafenberg, a Jew, to give up his position as head of the gynecology depart­ment at a Berlin hospital, he didn't flee, believing himself safe because so many of his patients were the wives of top party offi­cials. But healthy Aryan vaginas couldn't save him, and the Gestapo imprisoned Grafenberg on the questionable charge of illegally exporting a rare postage stamp. After lobbying by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, the Nazis accepted a ransom for his release.

Grafenberg immigrated to the U.S., where in 1944 he and another prominent but now largely forgotten sex researcher, Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson, argued in The Western Journal of Medicine for a then-radical contraceptive: a plastic cap placed over the entrance of the uterus to block sperm. As an aside, the men noted some patients had reported "a zone of erogenous feeling" on the anterior, i.e., front, vaginal wall. Grafenberg contin­ued the investigation while examining patients. In a 1950 issue of The Inter­national Journal of Sexology he reported that the urethra (which carries urine from the bladder) seems to be surrounded by erectile tissue similar to that inside the penis. Grafenberg found the anterior wall in every woman to be more sensi­tive than any other part of the vagina to pressure from his finger. Many women may not realize the zone exists, he sug­gested, because in the missionary posi­tion a thrusting erection would not hit it unless the woman draped her legs over the man's shoulders. It would be stimu­lated, however, if humans consistently

had sex in the manner most common among other mammals—coitus a tergo, or doggy style, in which the erect penis can apply pressure to the anterior wall. Further, Grafenberg observed that stimu­lation of the area caused many women to ejaculate a clear liquid that wasn't urine. These "profuse secretions" apparently had no lubricating effect, he wrote, since they did not appear until climax.

And that was that. Grafenberg's study was filed away for the next quarter century—and it might have gathered dust for a while longer but for the curiosity of a 49-year-old widow named Josephine Lowndes Sevely. Following the death of her husband, Sevely enrolled at Tulane University to pursue a degree. One day in spring 1976 she was listening to a biol­ogy professor describe the work of sex researchers Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. These respected scientists, the instructor explained, had identified the clitoris as the sole source of female sexual pleasure and ejaculation as the sole province of men.

Sevely was taken aback. That's not quite right, she thought. Glancing around at her much younger classmates, she wondered, Do they believe this?

When the professor, a fungal geneticist named Joan Bennett, assigned the class to write term papers, Sevely already had a topic in mind. A few weeks later, Ben­nett found herself immersed in and deeply impressed by Sevely's report, in which the English literature major offered a parade of historical references to vaginally induced

orgasms accompanied by the release of fluid. Sevely's first citation was the work of Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf. His 1672 textbook, New Treatise Concerning the Generative Organs of Women, contains 15 chapters filled with descriptions and drawings of female genitalia, including the membranous lining of the urethra, which he called the female prostate. "The function of the prostate," he observed, "is to generate a pituito-serous juice which makes women more libidinous with its pungency and saltiness and lubricates their sexual parts in an agreeable fashion during coitus." He added, "It should be noted that the dis­charge from the female prostate causes as much pleasure as does that from the male prostate," which produces a milky-white fluid that accounts for 25 percent of semen. Women can be enticed to this pleasure, he said, by "frisky fingers."

Bennett gave Sevely an A+, wrote her a long note of encouragement and told her she thought the paper should be published. That fall Sevely began gradu­ate studies at Harvard, expanding her research and soliciting feedback from sexologists such as John Money in Bal­timore and Dr. William Masters in St. Louis. Bennett helped prepare the mate­rial, and in February 1978 The Journal of Sex Research published J. Lowndes Sevely and J.W. Bennett's "Concerning Female Ejaculation and the Female Pros­tate," followed by 38 references. They included Grafenberg's study, which Sev­ely first learned about from a citation in Kinsey's 1953 best-seller Sexual Behavior in the Human Female but which Harvard

Medical School librarians had some trouble tracking down. Reporters began calling Sevely about this amazing "new" erogenous zone, and the publicity caught the eye of Edwin Belzer Jr., a professor of health education at Dalhousie Uni­versity in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He sus­pected from personal experience that many women who complained of incon­tinence during sex (and who were some­times "fixed" with debilitating surgery) were not expelling urine but had, prior to Sevely and Bennett's review, accepted the dismissive authority of Kinsey and Mas­ters and Johnson. Soon after, he visited Albuquerque to catch up with colleagues from his days teaching at the University of New Mexico. When they asked what he was up to, Belzer explained his inter­est in the puzzle of female ejaculation. A graduate student who happened to be listening asked if they could meet pri­vately. Over coffee at the student union, she explained how, to satisfy her own curiosity, she had on numerous occasions taken pills that contain Urised, a medical dye that turns urine blue. She would then masturbate by stimulating the front wall of her vagina. The fluid that stained her sheets at climax had either no color or a slightly bluish tinge. "It was her report that convinced me this was no unicorn hunt," Belzer says.

And then the dam broke. In New Jer­sey sex researchers Beverly Whipple and John Perry were in the midst of a study in which doctors or nurses examined the vaginas of 400 women who said they expelled fluid at orgasm but who, when tested, had pelvic muscles far too strong to blame incontinence. Belzer, who had retrieved every source cited by the Tulane researchers, heard Whipple and Perry speak, in turn, at a conference; a week later he mailed them a copy of Grafenberg's paper. Whipple and Perry were astounded. Grafenberg had identi­fied the same sensitive area women vis­iting their lab were describing to them. Because it lies deep within the vaginal wall rather than on its surface, the area requires firm, rhythmic pressure and is usually not sensitive unless the woman is aroused, when it swells to the size of any­thing from a small bean to a half dollar. It's difficult for a woman to find on her own unless she is squatting. Because of its proximity to the bladder, putting pres­sure on the area will make a woman feel as if she has to urinate. That may dis­courage women from exploring or prevent them from enjoying a vaginal orgasm.

As they prepared their "evidence in support of a new theory of orgasm" for the February 1981 issue of The Journal of Sex Research (Belzer would contribute a report in the same issue on "orgasmic expulsions"), Whipple and Perry decided to honor Grafenberg for his discovery. The world's most famous dead German

gynecologist would no longer be over­looked. In fact, he would have his own spot in history, his name on—and behind—the lips of millions of women.

As it turns out, Whipple and Perry's tribute—the "Grafenberg spot" (shortened by a reporter to the Gee spot and then by a publisher to the G-spot)-—is a misnomer. Even Grafenberg would have thought so, since he used the word only twice in his study, once to say it wasn't a fixed spot but an area or zone and once to point out that women had innumerable erotically charged spots all over their body. Moreover, the G is more suitable as a tribute to Regnier de Graaf, who beat Grafenberg to the punch by nearly three centuries, although he's far from the first: A 12th century Indian love manual notes a sensitive spot "inside and toward the navel." (Whipple and Perry would later clarify that Grafenberg was the first modern researcher to describe the area.) Josephine Sevely, who in 1987 pub­lished her research in a book she called Eve's Secrets, objects to the term G-spot. "Don't call it that," she says in an interview. "You could educate people if you don't call it that." Gary Schubach, a researcher who wrote his doctoral thesis on the source of female ejaculate, proposes the area be renamed the G-crest, since, when swol­len with arousal, it feels more like a ridge than a spot. Early on, Whipple and Perry adopted De Graaf's language, calling the

area "the female prostate gland." But G-spot proved to be an ingenious shorthand (especially, Perry notes, for a name with an umlaut), and a book Whipple, Perry and psychologist Alice Kahn Ladas published in 1982, The G Spot and Other Discover­ies About Human Sexuality, has sold more than a million copies in 19 languages.

The G-spot—or the idea of it— commanded attention for the simple reason that it meant the clitoris was not the sole source of female pleasure, as Kinsey and Masters and Johnson insisted but many millions of women knew to be inaccurate. It meant there is no textbook female orgasm; some women come by clit, some by vagina but most apparently by a "blended" response involving as many as five major nerves. Some ejacu­late, some don't. Every variation on the theme is natural and normal. In a 2005 study of blood flow in the brain during climax, Whipple and a Rutgers University colleague, Barry Komisaruk, identified four distinct cognitive responses created by stimulating the clitoris, G-spot or cer­vix or by "thinking off" with no stimu­lation (a specialized skill, to be sure). They also found that women paralyzed by spinal cord injuries can reach orgasm through their cervix or vaginal walls. The reason? While the clit is connected to the brain primarily by the pudendal nerve, which travels through the spinal cord, the vagina is supplied by the pelvic

nerve, which does not, and the cervix by the pelvic, hypogastic and vagus nerves. The female orgasm will not be denied.

Male scientists have been debating for some time whether women can have vaginal orgasms without the involvement of the clitoris, that amazing organ whose only apparent function is to give pleasure. Women don't seem to care so much as long as both possibilities aren't ignored, although many report vaginal orgasms to be more intense, especially with ejacula­tion. In the early 20th century Sigmund Freud hypothesized that as a woman matures, she abandons her "phallic" masturbatory focus on the clitoris (the female version of the penis, said Freud) and turns to the more feminine, penetra­tive pleasure. Starting in the 1920s Dr. Karen Horney relentlessly mocked this "clitoral-vaginal transfer theory" until the aggrieved Austrian finally lashed out, claiming his critic had undiagnosed penis envy. Writing in his 1949 Human Sex Anatomy: A Topographical Hand Atlas, Robert Latou Dickinson sided with Horney. "Exalting vaginal orgasm while decrying clitoris satisfaction is found to beget much frustration," he reported. "Orgasm is orgasm, however achieved." John Perry believes Freud has gotten a bum rap. The psychoanalyst recognized both areas as capable of producing cli­max, Perry (continued on page 145)

G SPOT

(continued from page 78) notes, but at the time "it would have been as unthinkable for a Victorian to advocate the active use of the vagina before mar­riage as it was to advocate the continuation of masturbation after marriage." The clit doesn't atrophy after a woman begins to have mature vaginal sex, Freud wrote; its function becomes to transmit "the excita­tion to the adjacent female sexual parts just as pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire."

Rather than Freud, Perry says, Alfred Kinsey is responsible for the notion of dis­tinct innie and outie orgasms because he so adamantly dismissed the vaginal variety. He based his belief in a single sexual trigger on

the (act that it exists in men, i.e., the penis. But Perry notes there is no scientific basis for that conclusion, espe­cially since it's clear men can also reach climax through pros­tate stimulation. To validate his view, Kin-sey set up an experi­ment in which three male and two female gynecologists touched more than 800 women at 16 points, including the clit, labia, vagina and cervix, with the equivalent of a cotton swab. Triumphantly, Kinscy repotted that while almost all the women felt the light touch to their clits, only 14 percent felt it inside their vaginas. He concluded that it was "impossible" for the vagina to be "a center of sensory stimulation." Some see evidence in the way women masturbate: Kinscy found that of those he surveyed S-l percent said they manipulated their clits and labia minora, and

less than 20 percent inserted a linger or an object and even then usually stimulated their clit at the same time. In other words, women may be fantasizing about intercourse, but they aren't trying to re-create it.

Despite Kinscy's confidence in his methods, Perry notes that a swab doesn't feel much like .1 thrusting erection or a finger, and mere is no evidence that light touching of any area tells you much about a person's sexual response. In addition, Kinsey found that 91 percent of the women could feel pressure applied to the vaginal wall. So rather than proving vaginal orgasm a "biologic impossibility," Perry says, Kinsey showed the opposite. Nevertheless, after the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Humtm Female. psychologisLs began repeating their single-locus mantra to female patients. In the 1960s Masters and Johnson declared

the vagina had only two functions: to serve as a place to stimulate an erection to orgasm and as a place to deposit semen. Helen Singer Kaplan, another prominent sexologist, said, "Probably most women are not intended to have orgasm during intercourse." Yet no one could explain why so many women, includ­ing thousands of those interviewed by Kinsey and his researchers, had such good things to say about the vagina. Kinsey concocted a few hypotheses to explain pleasure from penetra­tion, including the "psychological satisfaction" of the act (reflected years later in a comment by sex researcher Shere Hite that ditoral orgasms are "real" while vaginal ones are "emotional"), the grinding of their partner's pelvis when he doesn't use his arms to support himself (pro­moted decades later as the "coital-alignment technique") or indirect stimulation of the dit

when it is tugged by the movement of the muscles in the vagina and pelvic floor.

There's another factor Kinsey didn't con­sider. In 1924, in a French medical jour­nal, an amateur sexologist named Marie Bonaparte (a great-grandniece of Napo­leon) reported the results of her examina­tion of 243 women recruited through doctor friends. She interviewed each patient about her sexual response, then measured the dis­tance from the woman's vagina (more pre­cisely, her urethral opening) to her clitoris. Bonaparte found that the 21 percent of her sample who had the most space—as much as two inches—reported the least frequent orgasms from intercourse. The 69 percent who had less than an inch said they nearly always came from penetration. The 10 per­cent who had precisely an inch, Bonaparte

said, lived on the "threshold of frigidity." Kim Wallen, a professor of behavioral neu-roendocrinology at Emory University who has verified Bonaparte's math and hopes to repeat her experiment, sums up the findings thus: "If the distance is less than the width of your thumb, you are likely to come." If true, the maxim raises an intriguing question: Are many, most or all women who regularly cli­max during penetration simply those whose clits are nearest the thrusting penis? Is the G-spot a pink herring?

NONBELIEVERS

Whatever the science, the G-spot has infil­trated the popular culture to such an extent few men or women seem to doubt its exis­tence; the sex-toy shop Babeland.com stocks 65 styles of vibrators and dildos designed to

reach the area, bo m August 2001, when Terence Hines, a pro­fessor of psychology at Pace University and an adjunct professor of neurology at New York Medical College, portrayed the spot as fanciful, echoing criti­cism heard in 1982 after the release of The G Spot, he found a target drawn on his groin. A dedicated skeptic (his book Pseu-doscience and the Para­normal is in its second edition, and he's a research fellow with a group that debunks alternative medi­cal therapies), Hines speaks about the G-spot with the glee of a man who enjoys a good pissing match. When a student in an introductory physi­ology course asked about it during a dis­cussion of human sex­uality, Hines assumed its existence had been proved. But when he reviewed the medi­cal literature, he was underwhelmed. In a

scathing commentary published on August 28, 2001 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Hines said he could find only two clinical studies, neither close to convincing. A 1981 case study by Belzer, Perry, Whipple and others involved a woman who experienced "deeper" orgasms and whose anterior vaginal wall appeared to grow about 50 percent dur­ing arousal. A 1983 review by Whipple and five colleagues involved gynecologists who first underwent three hours of training before being asked to determine if any of 11 women had a G-spot (four did). Besides the fact the subjects knew what researchers were looking for, which certainly introduced bias, writes Hines, "it is astonishing that the examination of only 12 women, of whom only five 'had' G-spots, form the basis for the claim that this anatomic structure exists."

In his coup de grace, Hines concludes that without more definitive research, "the G-spot will remain a sort of gynecological UFO." That catchy phrasing immediately generated buz/, including invitations from women who offered to show Hines their spots firsthand, but the 9/11 attacks pushed the debate out of the news. Hines says he's surprised no one in the eight years since has answered his challenge, which Clara Peller might have pre­sented as, Where's the nerves? While Grafen-berg mentions nerves inside the anterior wall of the vagina, he cites another study, which Hines says offers no source and mentions it only in the course of dismissing the idea the vagina has nerves. Hines says he had hoped his commentary would be an introduction to definitive research he would conduct himself; he planned to dissect the front vaginal wall of a number of female cadavers (tricky but not impossible, he says) and use medical staining to search for nerve bundles. However, he says the Catholic officials who run the New York Medical College refused to allow it.

Have any studies since 2001 given him pause? A handful have been intriguing, he says. For instance, the tide of a 2006 Journal of Sexual Medicine report—"Prospective Study Examining the Anatomic Distribution of Nerve Density in die Human Vagina"—suggested to Hines that the histological research he longed to see had been completed. "Alas, no," he says. "The subjects were surgical patients, and the tissue was biopsy samples, not the entire ante­rior vaginal wall. In fact, the audiors write, 'We did not document a corresponding increase in innervation in the anterior vagina. However, we do not claim diis is proof die G-spot does not exist.' That's the correct conclusion but also offers support for my position."

Two years later Hines dog-eared another study in the same journal. A team led by Dr. Emmanuele Jannini, a professor of experi-

mental medicine at the University of LAquila in Italy, took high-definition ultrasound images of the genitalia of 20 volunteers. He found the nine women who said they had G-spot orgasms had slightly thicker tissue (by about two millimeters) along the upper wall between the vagina and urethra than the clitoral-orgasm group did. Although his study was small, Jannini nevertheless claims he has proven some women don't have G-spots. But Hines isn't sure how Jannini can be so certain, given that he defines the G-spot as "the human clitoris-urethrovaginal com­plex." This, Hines notes, "extends the size of the zone quite a bit—why not just say it's the entire vagina? What I think is going on here is that if the vaginal tissue is thicker, the vaginal space is smaller. In other words, the woman is tighter—and everyone has a bet­ter time regardless of the relative number of neurons." Other factors could also be at play in whether a woman responds to vaginal stimulation, including the size of her clitoris, her stale of arousal and the strength of the hammock-like pubococcygeus muscle, which has a direct line to the sexual center of the brain via the pudendal and pelvic nerves.

Along with many feminist writers, Hines says his criticism comes out of a concern that the notion of a hypersensitive area sets women up for failure. "Women who don't respond to stimulation, as the G-spot myth suggests they should, may end up feeling inadequate or abnormal," he writes. Ed Belzer has had the same reservations. "I was speaking years ago to a couple about sex therapy," he says, "and when the husband brought up the G-spot the wife chimed in, 'I don't want to hear about this. It took me long enough to accept myself without having another hurdle to get across.' We've always been sensitive about that; it's not an athletic achievement." For many, the "dis­covery " of the G-spot only ratcheted up what

JoAnn Loulan describes in Lesbian Sex as "the tyranny of orgasm"—women are expected, like men, to be satisfied only if they reach the "goal" of climax.

Naturally, every prominent G-spot researcher took issue with Hines's conclu­sions. VVhipple and Pern- could barely contain themselves, noting the critic had cited only 24 of more than 250 studies on the matter before dropping this anvil on his head: "Bv saving the G-spot is a myth. Hines has now contrib­uted to denying women's sexual response and pleasurable experiences." Dr. Jules Black, a prominent obstetrician in Australia, wrote I lines personally: "If the phenomenon cannot yet be explained to the nth degree physiologi­cally, anatomical!), biochemically, hislologi-cally, histochemically, etc., so what? There are many bodily functions where the pathways from cause to effect aren't fully worked out. For years I have been telling Beverly Uhipple to get some of her proven research subjects to will their vaginas to science so that we can reverse engineer them."

Some have tried. In The Human Female Pros-late, a summary of 150 vaginal dissections he has conducted, pathologist Milan Zaviacic of Comenius University in Bratislava. Slovakia says he found about 70 percent of women have ramp-shaped meatus prostates, with the thickest part of die tissue located near the urethra. Further, he counted as many as 31 microscopic ducts emptying into the urethra, most in the front third. Next, there's the 15 percent of women with posterior prostates, in which the thickest part is located closest to the bladder. Seven percent of women have a middle prostate distributed along the length of the urethra but with a smaller concentra­tion in the middle, like a dumbbell. The final type, the rudimentary prostate, found in about eight percent of women, has few glands and ducts. Why is this important? Because, Zaviacic writes, "the main part of the female prostate tissue does not correspond with die topological placement of the G-spot." That may explain, says Deborah Sundahl, author of Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot, why some women have trouble finding the zone. "They arc looking too far back in the vagina and miss­ing the location of the most common meatus prostate, which is just inside the vagina, near the urethra, or not far back enough, which is where the posterior prostate can best be felt," she writes. This variability is one reason many researchers reject the term female prostate—the male prostate has a highly defined size, shape and location; the female version is apparently a vagabond shape-shifter.

If a G-spot can't be found, does it exist? In a 2002 study, Jannini at the University of L'Aquila reported dissections of the pelvic regions of 14 female cadavers had revealed two women who did not have erectile tissue along the front inner wall of their vagina and five who did not have paraurethral glands (sometimes called the Skene's glands, after a doctor who described them in 1880 but believed them to be inactive), which may account for female ejaculation. Three years later anatomist Dr. Helen O'Connell pro­posed that the G-spot may never be found because it's not a separate structure that can be identified through dissections or scans. Instead, it's part of two erectile bulbs that extend from a highly sensitive external nub

into the body, where they wrap around the urethra and vagina (see "The Deep Secrets of Her Clitoris and Yours," page 78). The G-spot, she suggests, is the unseen clitoris.

HONEYPOT

like the G-spot, the phenomenon of female ejaculation has had its doubters. Although descriptions of women emitting fluids as they climax date to at least the fourth century, Alfred Kinsey, whose opinions held great weight following the 1948 publication of.SVx-ual Helmvior in the Human Male, wasn't buying it, arguing that any expulsion was surely just lubrication from the vagina] walls pushed out, sometimes at great force, by orgasmic con­tractions. William Masters reached the same conclusion. Despite the praise he offered for Josephine Sevely's research ("the lady certainly has done her homework"), he and Virginia Johnson derided the idea of female ejaculation as "erroneous." John Perry recalls that the woman who first piqued his and Whipple's curiosity had years earlier sought out Masters, who dismissed the sugary fluid she emitted as a sign she was "prediabetic." The famed researcher had a chance to stake his claim on the G-spot, Perry says, "had he not assumed unusual symptoms were inher­ently pathological."

The woman had been introduced to Whip-pie and Perry in 1979 by her doctor; she agreed to demonstrate in a lab with the assis­tance of her husband, who used his fingers to massage her anterior vaginal wall. (This would become the 1981 case study cited by Terence I lines.) With her urethra under a bright light, and while being filmed, die woman came and ejaculated three times in less than five minutes, creating wet spots anywhere from a centimeter to more than three feet away. The team later collected four samples by pressing a drinking glass against her taint. A biochemical analysis showed the liquid contained more lartrate-inhibited acid prosphatase (thought to be prosuilic) and glucose and less urea and creati-nine than urine. Subsequent studies of female ejaculate would identify prostate-specific anti­gens (PSA), which are also produced by the male prostate. Whipple and Perry say die vol­ume of clear or milky-white fluid typically fills no more than a quarter teaspoon; there is no "gushing" as described in ancient erotica and by Griifenberg or seen in modern porn. They explain the discrepancy by noting that people are prone to exaggerate, such ;is happens with self-reports of menstrual blood (in reality it's usually about four tablespoons) and semen (about one teaspoon). Yet many women insist they soak die sheets; die females of more than one "primitive" African tribe have been said to spray die walls. Gary Schubach devoted his d(xtoral research at die Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco to figuring out why some women may at best squirt their partner in the eye while others waterboard them. Each of seven volunteers masturbated in a lab until they were near orgasm. Schubach then inserted a catheter and drained each woman's bladder, keeping die device in place to isolate die lluid originat­ing there at orgasm. Then each woman con­tinued to masturbate until she climaxed and ejaculated, an exercise in concentration that any man who has awoken from surgery with a tube sucking out of his penis ran appreciate.

Schubach and his colleagues observed about 95 percent of the fluid at climax came from the catheter, even though the bladder had been drained only minutes before. And this was a gush by any standard: from a half liter to a liter of fluid. Although analysis showed the liquid had been "de-urinized" (it contained only 25 percent of the urea in pee), Schubach hypothesized that it must have come from the walls of the bladder and new kidney produc­tion. The other five percent of the fluid, "in some women and at some times," likely came from the paraurethral glands.

When Perry read Schubach's study in 1997, he admits, it made him rethink his position that women who "gush" something other than urine exist only in the erotic imagination. He wondered if the fluid might be similar to "beer piss"—the diluted urine produced on the fly when you are emotionally or physically aroused (such as while watching a big game, hitting on a woman at a bar or having sex) and find you have an immediate urge to pee. The debate comes down to this: Is anything that passes through the bladder by definition urine? Whipple says yes, that only expulsions from the paraurethral glands are female ejac­ulate—since it's nearly impossible for men to urinate and ejaculate at the same time, why

shouldn't that also be the case for women? Schubach—and now Perry—says the ejaculate comes sometimes from the urethra, sometimes from the bladder, and sometimes it's a mix­ture. It may be that every woman ejaculates but the fluid usually flows back into the blad­der. (One study found PSA levels in female urine to be higher after orgasm than before.) Whatever the case, why would this evolve? Is ejaculation designed to keep the flow moving outward to prevent urinary or bladder infec­tions? Is it produced as "washback" (seen in other mammals) to flush out excess sperm or sperm deposited by an earlier suitor? Perhaps men deserve some credit for its evolutionary survival: If you mate with a female who gets so aroused when you do her doggy style that she spurts all of a rival's future offspring into the dirt, you'll be damn sure to find others like her. Some scientists suggest this is why semen has gotten thicker over the eons; it's harder to wash away. More food for thought: The fruc­tose in female ejaculate happens to be sperm's favorite meal. Perhaps ejaculate gives them a boost, like race officials handing Gatorade to marathon runners. At the finish line waits the next generation of ejaculators.