How did I hear about it for the first time? No one seems to talk about it but your goofball aunt or your older sister’s sex-crazed best friend. If it’s discussed at all it’s in hushed or fearful tones—we’re all so afraid to “pee.” Squirting was certainly not something they addressed in my abstinence-based, public school sex ed class. My mom never even talked to me about it, and she wasn’t exactly modest. She taught me about the birds and bees when I was six, talked openly with us about sex (when we asked), and had a generally body-positive approach to parenting.
Maybe she never knew about it, either?
I think I might have learned about squirting from Dan Savage, actually.
Dan Savage is a gay man. Not exactly the person you’d expect to be educating women about their bodies.
I wanted to experience it. I thought of myself as sexually competent and GGG and so on but I’d never done it, and once I heard about it I felt like I was being left out of a secret. Imagine if you’d never had an orgasm.
“What’s all the fuss about?” you might wonder.
Or maybe you would say, “Goddammit—me too!”
I brought it up in the car with Jack one day in late winter. We were on our way to dinner with friends following a pre-dinner cocktail at one of our favorite bars. We’d been making an effort to focus more on us. This was how open relationships were supposed to work, right? I didn’t think we could justify seeing other people if we weren’t also romancing one another, so we did. We tried.
Jack told me his experience with partners who squirted was limited, and inconsistent. It wasn’t that common, he said, but he’d heard an interview on a podcast recently that was all about female ejaculation and they mentioned a YouTube video. As he was parking the car, with a knot in my voice, I forced myself to ask.
“Do you think we could try it?”
“Sure!” he said. If anything, he seemed excited. Come to think of it, Jack never made me feel ashamed for my sexual curiosity or expression. I did that to myself.
A few days after our conversation, we looked up the YouTube video. In it, a woman is interviewing a man about his experience getting partners to squirt. Another man telling a woman how to squirt.
“Use two fingers,” the guy said.
Okay. Check.
“Make a ‘come here’ motion against her G-spot.”
I wasn’t sure I even knew where my G-spot was. How was that possible? It’s my body.
“If it doesn’t happen at first, don’t get discouraged,” he said (I was already discouraged). “Try going faster, alter the pressure, mix it up.”
On our second try, Jack and I mixed it up to some success. However, whatever good feelings I had about it—Jack’s willingness, the physical pleasure, our amiable bond—were displaced by my frustration that it didn’t work that well. I believed that squirting held some coveted knowledge or epiphany and I wanted to get WOKE! I was imagining the Bellagio. I was hoping to meet God.
I tried not to turn my disappointment on Jack, who I vaguely saw as an antagonist in my quest, which was not only unkind but unproductive. Jack was born in 1954, when uttering the word “pregnant” on TV was considered offensive. His parents never talked to him about sex, ever. How was he supposed to learn without a patient partner to practice with? I mean, he was doing it for me. I wish I’d embraced it as a mutual pursuit.
Instead, not wanting to do anything to engender any more sexual frustration between us, I dropped the subject with him. I didn’t want my disappointment to taint our efforts toward improving our sex life in other ways.
A week or so later I saw a Facebook Live in a private women’s group I belonged to, a conversation between two women I vaguely knew that they titled, “Female Ejaculation: Demystifying the Divine.” The timing was uncanny.
I joined a few minutes after they began, as they were speaking of the mysticism of squirting, calling the ejaculate “nectar” or amrita, a Sanskrit work that means immortality. One of the women mentioned that her lover captures it for her and they add it to the tequila they sip as part of their lovemaking ritual. This sounded completely far out and weird and I loved it. I’ll have what she’s having!
I listened closely to the Facebook chat. Lots of the same info I had already heard: come hither fingers. G-spot. Vary the pressure. Also:
“You have to bear down.”
“You might feel like you’re going to pee; ignore that.”
I made a mental note.
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