Squirting is one of the few things in human sexuality that people argue about with total confidence and almost no information. Everyone has a theory. Almost nobody has read the studies. So let us do the unusual thing and look at what the research actually says, because the real story is stranger and more interesting than the folklore.
First, a distinction that clears up half the confusion. Scientists who study this do not treat "squirting" and "female ejaculation" as the same event. In the moment they look identical. They are not. One is a large gush of thin, clear fluid. The other is a small amount of thick, milky fluid. Different volumes, different sources, different plumbing.
Two things wearing the same name
The cleanest argument for splitting them came in 2011, when Alberto Rubio-Casillas and Emmanuele Jannini published a case study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Their conclusion was blunt: real female ejaculation is the release of a scanty, thick, whitish fluid from the female prostate, while squirting is the expulsion of a diluted fluid from the bladder. Same moment, two separate mechanisms. A 2022 review in Clinical Anatomy went further and called them "similar but completely different phenomena."
So when someone films a dramatic arc of clear fluid and labels it ejaculation, they are usually mislabeling it. That is squirting. The quieter, milky version is the ejaculate.
What is in the fluid
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for the internet. In 2015 a French team led by Samuel Salama ran a careful study, also in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Seven women who reliably produced large emissions were asked to empty their bladders, then had pelvic ultrasound scans taken before and after squirting. The bladder was empty at the start. It filled during arousal. It emptied at the moment of the gush. Biochemically, the expelled fluid was essentially dilute urine.
The bladder fills. Then it empties. The camera calls it magic. The ultrasound calls it a bladder.on the Salama et al. 2015 findings
Before anyone declares the whole thing a myth, read the rest of the sentence. The same study found a "marginal contribution of prostatic secretions" in the fluid. Trace amounts of PSA, prostate-specific antigen, the same marker men produce. It is not pure urine. It carries a signature from the glands around the urethra.
The female prostate is real
Those glands have a name and, since 2002, an official one. The Skene's glands, sitting alongside the urethra, were formally listed as the "female prostate" in Terminologia Histologica, the standard reference for anatomical naming. Not a metaphor. They grow from the same embryonic tissue as the male prostate and produce some of the same chemistry.
An earlier 2007 study by Florian Wimpissinger measured this directly. The fluid from female ejaculation carried prostatic markers, and its PSA levels ran roughly a hundred times higher than the women's own urine. So the milky ejaculate really does come from a prostate. It just happens to be one that most anatomy classes skip.
How common, and does it matter
Nobody has a clean number. A 2013 systematic review put estimates anywhere from 10 to 54 percent of women reporting some form of ejaculation, the range that wide because researchers keep measuring different things. A large 2023 US survey found that around 40 percent of women said they had squirted at least once. Common enough to be normal, rare enough that plenty of women never experience it. Neither is a problem to fix.
Which is the useful part. Squirting is not a skill you owe anyone, and it is not proof of a better orgasm. It is a quirk of anatomy that some bodies do and others do not, then dressed up by pornography into a performance metric. The pressure to produce it on cue is the piece worth dropping.
What this has to do with control
If there is a thread back to what we care about here, it is arousal itself. All of these responses ride the same wave: the slow build, the rising tension, the point where the body tips over. Learning to read that build, to sit at the edge without falling, is a skill worth having whatever your body does at the top. That is the whole idea behind edging, and the reason the benefits of practicing it show up as much in attention as in stamina.
The science here is young and a little contested. What is not in doubt: the phenomenon is real, it is widely misunderstood, and the honest version is more interesting than the myth.