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For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Peer-Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman.
This week, we're doing something a little different.
We're bringing back some of our favorite episodes of 2025.
And today, for our last episode of the year, we're serving up something rather spicy.
This show first aired in April.
Here's Rachel Feltman.
Just a heads up before we dive in, today's episode is about human sexuality.
We talk about sex, sometimes using slang terms, but without any profanity.
I'd probably give this episode like a PG-13 rating.
So if you usually listen with kids, maybe give this one a solo trial run just to make sure you're comfortable with the questions it might raise.
And if you just really don't like hearing people talk about sex, then this episode probably isn't for you.
No hard feelings.
We'll see you on Friday.
Now that that's out of the way, the human body is capable of doing some pretty incredible things, including things we don't yet understand.
But few physical phenomena inspire as much speculation or debate as the one colloquially known as squirting.
My guest today is Wendy Zuckerman, host of the hit podcast Science Versus.
You may remember her from her previous appearance on Science Quickly back in August.
If not, I'll refresh your memory.
We talked about anal sex.
She's back today to tell us how Science Versus tackled the surprisingly controversial science of squirting.
Wendy, welcome back to the show.
It's so great to have you.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
So the last time you were on Science Quickly, you were talking about your deep dive into the science of anal sex, the very neglected science of anal sex.
Tell me about your latest sexual health research endeavor.
I know, Rachel.
I wanted to tell the audience we cover other issues, you know.
Science Versus is a great, extremely varied show.
And you are back here today to talk about more sex stuff.
Exactly.
While the season is going to cover ADHD, fluoride methamphetamine creatine, I am here to talk about the first episode of this season, which is on squirting.
Incredible.
So there may be listeners who are like, what's that?
Great question.
So yeah, what is it?
Yes.
So it is this rather mysterious phenomena where folks who have a vagina sometimes, when they're extremely aroused about to orgasm, at the moment of orgasm, A large amount of fluid will gush out of them.
And it's this big mystery around what is this fluid?
Where is it coming from?
Is it coming from the vagina, the urethra?
Is it pee?
Is it female ejaculate?
And for many years.
On the internet you see these sort of fights playing out and they often have this kind of political-ish tone to it where often sort of feminist websites will argue it is not pee, we have a special ejaculate.
And then you have these kind of other websites that are saying you know, kind of downplaying the squirt and saying you know no, it is just pee.
And then in the middle of that you have a lot of people being angry and so we just wanted to say like this is ridiculous.
We're in 2025.
How can a physiological phenomena
How can this thing cause so much drama and be so politicized?
What is this liquid?
We should be able to know.
We have very sophisticated science.
We should be able to determine what this liquid is.
Absolutely.
So what did you know about the concept going into making this episode?
So I have squirted just sort of at the beginning of my sexual encounters.
And for me, when it happened, I really thought it was pee.
I was quite certain.
I wasn't devastated or anything.
I was just like oh, bodies are weird, but I don't want to be cleaning the sheets every time that this happens.
So I'm going to kind of train my body not to do that.
And I was able to.
Nowadays, it sort of has this very powerful element.
It's part of porn and it has these exciting elements to it.
And it's sort of real accomplishment that you have squirted.
But I guess still to a lot of folks who do it.
And we did this large survey of our listeners who has squirted and how many times and how they felt about it.
And you still see this sort of real confusion around how people feel about it, which is often tied to this idea of what exactly is this liquid?
And so I was just very curious myself where people were getting their evidence from here and what we could know about it.
Yeah.
Well, I definitely want to get into the survey itself.
But first, with your episode on anal sex, you really found collaborators who were also mystified at the lack of research and who helped you make this very scientific.
Were you able to do the same thing for squirting?
Yes.
So with squirting, we actually do have some data that has really probed this question of what is that fluid.
There's still a lot missing in the data, so we have sort of a bunch of small studies that have been well done, and so, in this case, while our survey was really helpful to sort of capture how many folks this is happening to and how they feel about it, we were able to look at the peer-reviewed literature this time to really see what's going on here.
Well, What is going on?
Okay.
So let me tell you about one of the studies that we found.
It was done by a French gynecologist and we spoke to him, Samuel Salama.
It was very funny when I was chatting to him.
I sort of asked him, why did you do a study on squatting?
And as you'll hear, it's very well thought out.
And he started, he's like, I was going to do a French accent, but I won't.
Save the listeners that.
One accent will be enough.
And he started going, it's an interesting phenomena.
At the time, we really didn't know what the fluid was.
And I was like, come on, Sam.
Why did you do the study on squirting?
And he says, okay, okay, okay.
When I was younger, I'm like, thank you.
He said he had a lover.
She squirted.
They were both so curious. what was going on.
They tried to find out and they tried to ask friends and doctors, and no one gave them a credible explanation.
And so years later, he's studying sexology.
He has a clinic that he can use that can really get to the bottom of this.
I think he was asked, everyone needs to do a research project as part of his studies.
And he says, great, now's the opportunity.
And so what he does is he gets seven, what he called systematic squirters.
Which meant that these were folks who could squirt every single time they got aroused.
Because for some people it sort of happens every now and then.
But if he's going to the trouble to do the experiment, he wants to make sure that these folks are going to squirt when they need to squirt.
So he gets the women to come into the lab.
And what's really cool is that he does an ultrasound of their pelvis and bladder at various points of this squirting adventure.
So first he gets them to go to the bathroom.
And then ultrasounds their pelvis and bladder.
And so he can see that after they've gone to the bathroom, the bladder is empty.
That's what should happen.
And then he says, okay, go into this very sort of sterile looking room in the clinic and go forth.
But what he did, which was very insightful is he said before you squirt at the peak of arousal, get me to come back in.
I'm going to ultrasound your bladder again.
Mm-hmm.
And so which I just imagine what it would be like for these folks to hold onto that aroused state while you get ultrasound of your bladder.
And then the ultrasound's done.
And then he says, okay.
Get back to it.
Back to it.
Now you can squirt.
And he walks out of the room again.
Then they squirt.
He comes back into the room.
You can hear him on the tape and he's sort of describing this liquid is everywhere.
Because in some cases it can be quite a lot of fluid coming out.
The world's record for squirt is 1.35 liters, which don't make me translate that into gallons.
It's a lot of liquid.
It's a lot of liquid.
Think about it.
Yeah.
Americans know that a big bottle of soda is two liters.
So we have our frame of reference.
Yes.
Okay.
I thought so.
I thought so.
So then he does another ultrasound of the bladder after the squirt is done.
And what is really curious is that He saw that at the peak of arousal, before they had squirted.
So remember, their bladders were empty because they'd peed before this whole process begins.
Then he ultrasounds their bladder at peak of arousal and he can see the bladder has filled up again.
Yes, which is very curious and very interesting for anyone who has had the experience of going to the bathroom before a sexual activity, having sex and then peeing straight after and wondering that's so crazy.
I just peed 15 minutes ago, but this is a very interesting phenomenon.
And another study that got two folks, a straight couple, to have sex in an MRI also noticed that the woman, their blood, is filled up during arousal.
So it must be something about you know heart rates going, blood's moving around, processes are moving faster.
We're not exactly sure why this happens, but so bladder fills up.
Then the squirt happens.
Rachel, you want to guess what's going on with the bladder?
I would guess that it empties probably.
It did.
The bladder was empty.
Telling us that the liquid.
Was coming from the bladder.
Right.
Yes.
And Sam also looked at the chemicals inside the squirt, because he had all the liquid there and he could see various chemicals that we tend to find in urine.
So urea, uric acid, things like this.
Other studies have found this as well when they've looked at the chemicals in squirt.
Sometimes one study found that it was quite diluted.
Right.
I was going to say it would make sense for it to be pretty dilute if the bladder is sort of quickly filling up again.
It would, although when I asked Sam about this, he said sometimes it's dilute and sometimes it's not.
And he actually had a photo of the squirt and it looked like yellow pee.
Maybe not the most concentrate pee one has ever produced, but it definitely did not look like water to me.
And so from that study, it's only seven women.
But there's some very curious research that we also talk about in the episode.
That's also suggesting that the bulk of this fluid is coming from the bladder.
Right.
So that mystery solved.
But you also created this big survey that I think you said thousands of people responded to.
So tell me a little bit about that.
Although mystery solved, there is a tiny bit more mystery, which explains why you have this battle online.
Because, although the bulk of the fluid is coming from urine, in some cases there is a little bit of this sort of other substance that ends up in squirt, which comes from the female prostate, and we discuss at length.
There's a lot of sort of mystery controversy around this gland, but both, if you have a penis, a vagina, you do have sort of this prostate gland, although it looks quite different, and so that is where the bulk of this fight comes from.
Is that sort of this idea that okay, the bulk of of squirt might be pee, but there's a little bit that comes from the female prostate and that therefore makes it different.
And so in our episode we sort of discuss what on earth the female prostate is, some interesting new findings in that area and whether that does sort of change the substance.
At that point, that becomes a sort of philosophical discussion. argument.
Is this an Arnold Palmer situation?
Is it a Shirley Temple?
Is it a Manhattan with a dirty olive juice?
We had many chats around the office about what is this?
Is it changing it?
Is it not?
And I think that just depends on your perspective.
But to go back to the survey, and I think That is where sort of it all kind of comes to the fore is that because we do see this pattern?
And so our survey found this but other research has as well that for those who tend to think it's pee, they generally feel more negative about squirting, which makes perfect sense.
If you feel like you have just peed all over your partner or peed all over your bed, that's not necessarily a great thing.
Whereas if you feel like you have just ejaculated over your partner, well, you just had a sexy time.
And so in our survey, 45% of those with vaginas had squirted at least once in their lifetime.
Other surveys show this as well.
So that is a huge number of folks this is happening to.
It tells us that this is a normal physiological process.
You don't just get almost one in two of us.
I think you could feel good about it no matter what that substance is.
Yeah.
Were there any other surprising takeaways in the survey?
The really interesting finding that I would love.
I know science funding is in a tough spot right now, but perhaps in future days.
So squirting is always talked about a phenomena that just happens if you have a vagina and there's sort of been this assumption that if you have a penis you do not squirt because you ejaculate.
Instead, that's the fluid coming out of you during sexy times.
Because there's a lot of mysteries around the physiological process, we just thought we'd ask people with penises have you squirted too?
We found that it was something like 76 percent of folks with penises said they squirted too, and we explicitly said you know, we're not talking about ejaculate come this kind of thing, And that we asked around to urologists about what they thought of this.
And some were quite skeptical.
It would be that high.
Some thought, maybe because you know, we know, that there's some mechanisms around the penis that If you are erect you really shouldn't be able to pee, because it sort of blocks off that process, which is, thank you, evolution.
You don't want someone peeing inside you.
There's a lot of variation in the human spirit out there.
And so sometimes that mechanism doesn't work that well.
And so it makes sense that you know.
One researcher we spoke to said it's possible that after a penis ejaculates, maybe if they then continue to be aroused, Maybe then what comes out next is a bit more like Pete.
We really don't know.
There was one case study in the literature that we found of someone with a penis who did squirt.
So this was sort of like a verified singular case study of a man squirting.
And then we have our survey, but that's all we know.
Yeah.
Well, a lot still to learn.
Thank you so much for coming on to talk about this with us.
I'm really excited to listen to the whole episode on Science Versus.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
That's all for today's show.
You can find an extended version of this episode over on our YouTube channel.
And don't forget to check out Science Versus for an even deeper dive into the subject of squirting.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Peer-Lewis, along with Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Patek and Jeff DelVisio.
This episode was edited by Alex Sugiera.
Shana poses in Aaron Shattuck Fact Checker Show.
Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Kendra Pierre-Lewis.
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