The Grafenberg Spot: Do Women Ejaculate?

Hi Dr. Pinhas
I have some questions I am hoping you can help me with. My girlfriend and I were fooling around and she told me that she wanted to make me squirt. I had no idea what this meant but it sounds scary! What was she referring to? Is that something that happens to all women? Can you stop it from happening?
I also have a question about oral sex. When we were getting personal, she asked me if I would pleasure her by putting my tongue inside her vagina. I would actually like to pleasure her like that as I think it’d be quite erotic, but I was apprehensive because I heard somewhere that if air is introduced into the vagina it can cause death. Is it safe to pleasure her like that or do I run the risk of killing her? L L. Please help!

Response from Dr. Pinhas

What your girlfriend is referring to is “making you squirt” through your grafenberg spot. She is presupposing that you actually have an active G spot which may not be the case. If you do have an active G spot, it would be located on the anterior wall of your vagina behind  your pubic bone.  You would have to be very sexually aroused to start with and then she would have to take one or two fingers, inside of your vagina and press  the surrounding front vaginal wall and skenes ducts, which are located  there as well.  Light touch will just not do it.  The pressure must be deep and consistent.  A woman can stimulate her G spot herself, as well.  If you were sexually active with a man, the G spot could be reached by female dominant superior position of sexual intercourse (woman on top).

Ernest Grafenberg discovered this  “anatomical structure” in the late 1940’s.  He genuinely considered this broad area of tissue on the front wall of the vaginal the equivalent of a male’s prostate gland.  What is fascinating is that examination  of the glandular tissue of the G-spot reveals the presence of prostate specific antigen (PSA).   This is the same substance secreted by a man’s prostate gland.  More definitive research is needed on this tissue to assess the accuracy of this female homologue but the results, of whatever meager research that has been conducted, have been intriguing.

In my clinical experience, most women that I’ve discussed this with are curious about whether they have an active G spot.  Some have tried to locate it through sexual stimulation with a partner’s penis or fingers and many have given up in frustration.   Yet a Canadian/ U.S. study of some 2000 plus highly educated women, reported that they’ve ejaculated 40% of the time  at the moment of orgasm. Nothing is ever simple with humans. There are no hard and fast rules about female orgasm.    What I’ve come to understand over 30 years, is that many women do not have an active  ejaculating G-spot ( presuming theoretically that they do have some differentiated “prostate” like tissue with skenes duct’s running through, on the front wall of the vagina).  Other women can orgasm from deep stimulation of this tissue on the front wall of the vaginal canal without “squirting”. This is known as a vaginal orgasm.  Few women in my clinical experience actually squirt out secretions from their G-spots although many have vaginal orgasms.  If they are “squirters”, this happens when the skene’s ducts empty prostate like fluid that exit into the bottom of the urethra which then gets propelled out.  If you and your girlfriend do experiment on whether you are a “squirter”, make sure your bladder is empty.  In the late 1970’s, I heard numerous reports of women feeling embarrassed about urinating on their partners at the moment of orgasm.  Many of them became anorgasmic due to the shame of not being able to control their bladder.  For the longest time, in the 1970’s, there was raging controversy over whether women were actually ejaculating  urine or a substance of a different sort.  ( When you apply pressure on the front wall of the vagina and your bladder is full, you will have a powerful urge to urinate and may just do that!)  However, when Perry and Whipple, reported on the rediscovery of Grafenberg’s spot, as an alternative to urination at orgasm, many women breathed a sigh of relief.  An analysis of the fluid that gets ejaculated out, reveals some interesting findings.  Some researchers consider this  ejaculant to be similar to the  a man’ seminal fluid. High levels of prostatic acid phosphatase have been found in samples of womens’ ejaculant, which is the enzyme in semen. ( Yet some researchers still consider the fluid to be chemically similar to urine).

That your girlfriend wants to MAKE you squirt, can  put an enormous pressure on you.  You don’t know whether you have an active G-spot.  You may have some rudimentary structure that isn’t entirely active in producing fluid.  “Squirting” isn’t the new standard.  Each decade, when something new is discovered about human sexuality, there is always some standard that we women have to live up to.  Freud (whom, I am most intimate with)  started this  orgasm standard madness, when he claimed that women who didn’t have vaginal orgasms where immature, childlike and neurotic.  He suggests the need to transfer the clitoral orgasm to the vagina in order to be mentally healthy. How did he know about womens’ orgasms?  As courageous, a pioneer in the area of theoretical sexuality especially for children, in Victorian times, I do not believe he got it right when it “came” to orgasm and women. (Pun intended). ( However, just because I believe that Freud was theoretically short-sighted, on female orgasm, one does not through out the baby with the bathwater on his contributions to the human psyche.  I do not want to start off a barrage of Freud bashing, which most academic psychologists are often inclined to do…. the concepts of transference, counter transference and resistance are totally brilliant and alive and well in our culture–examples abound!) Let me get back to you… I’m going off again.

It seems to me, that if you naturally ejaculated from your G-spot, and you  were afraid that it was urine, you would be comforted to know about the G-spots existence and its potential for producing fluid.  If however, you don’t know whether you have an active G-spot, you can try and play with the spot, but only in the context of a highly erotic encounter, otherwise there will be no orgasms.( One can’t be clinical about finding this spot and feel highly erotic at the same time! LOL).   If after multiple attempts, you get frustrated and nothing happens erotically,  why knock yourself out to “create” an ejaculation that may not exist, although you might orgasm.  You then really might be ejaculating out urine if you are just trying to please your partner’s sexual goals for you.  This causes performance anxiety which goes a long way in creating sexual dysfunction. As women and men, we need to give up the impossible standards that pop culture places on us.

Relax with her; experiment, if you like; enjoy what you have together;  but do not create new orgasm standards to live up to! The old ones are quite enough!

PS: Cunnilingus does not cause air embolisms if you are not pregnant.  This is the stuff of another blog.  I’ll get to it shortly.