Colombian actress Amaranta Hank turns on the camera and starts recording. She is alone and in the entire decoration only one room is visible, in which the protagonist has a large bed to make herself comfortable, in addition to Hank himself, who is almost naked. The actress begins to stimulate her vagina to masturbate: at first she does it at a slow pace until she gradually increases the frequency as her excitement increases. Finally, seemingly at the same time as her climax, a transparent liquid comes out of her vagina: a so-called squirting has just occurred.
Not even 30 seconds go by and it happens again. In a video that lasts three minutes and has more than 1.4 million views, Hank, a porn professional with an increasing number of followers, seems to live these experiences spontaneously, almost surprisingly. What not all viewers don’t know is that in the porn industry, which makes around $100 billion a year, everything is always coldly calculated. Squirts too.
Hank says he’s obviously learned to fake the squirt over time. “The scenes are very fast, there are too many cameras and you might not even like the actor you share a scene with. In such contexts and with so much pressure, it is impossible to achieve this,” he says. To make filming easier, squirting is often simulated using water bottles, water bags attached to the actresses’ backs and even enemas, he explains. With her legs raised and the camera focused, the scene seems almost real.
But where does this idea come from? It has been known for many decades that female and male orgasms are different. However, in the collective imagination of many, the squirt appears almost like a kind of myth or urban legend as the ultimate pleasure, a kind of female equivalent of male ejaculation, the definitive proof that women enjoyed the sexual act.
The reality is that this is not the case. As Hank knows firsthand, it can be faked and even experienced without extraordinary arousal – just the right workout. On the other hand, many women experience completely pleasurable orgasms without any fluid having to squirt out anywhere. And yet the myth continues.
The reason for all the excitement is that a sexual fantasy has arisen around squirting, which has become fashionable in recent years thanks to porn. According to company data updated in 2021, there are more than 200,000 videos on the pornography portal Pornhub under the title Squirting or how to achieve a squirt.
Although it is only now in fashion, it has been around since the physician Hippocrates in the 4th century BC. BC records of spraying. C. spoke of “female sperm”.
Sexologist Almudena M. Ferrer explains that the mythical squirting is often confused with female ejaculation, but that they are two completely different things, both because of the composition and the mechanisms and organs that produce them. The first is the expulsion of a dilute fluid from the Skene’s glands containing urea, uric acid and creatinine, while in female ejaculation a whitish, thick and scanty fluid is released from the so-called female prostate. It is very important to emphasize that both can happen without having to reach orgasm.
One of the reasons female ejaculation is surrounded by urban legends and half-truths is the lack of scientific studies on the subject. In Spain, in 1993, the director of the Andalusian Institute of Sexology and Psychology, Francisco Cabello, became a reference in this matter when he decided to study a phenomenon that the rest of doctors preferred to remain ignorant of. He did it, he remembers, worried about what many women were telling him in a Spain that was trying to finally shake off Francoism. As a result of intense sexual relationships, they mistook their squirts for the urge to urinate, which often resulted in them suppressing their own orgasms.
There was very little information about it at the time, so Cabello conducted research that examined urine before and after orgasm for the presence of markers of male semen. The idea was to find possible differences arising from the contribution of urine to the elements that make up the paraurethral urethral glands and the Skene ducts. “We concluded at the time that 75% of women had PSA levels in their urine after orgasm,” he says. This means that many women had the opportunity to squirt and that a large part of its composition was actually urine.
30 years have passed since these discoveries and squirting is more relevant than ever thanks to the influence of porn. The sexologist, sociologist and board member of the State Association of Sexology Professionals (AEPS), Norma Ageitos Urain, assures that “many minds have arisen around this issue, although it is only a physiological reaction of the body.” In addition, it exerts pressure women when it comes to a sexual relationship because their partners often try to reproduce what they have seen in porn, and that is impossible.”
One of the myths surrounding squirting is that it is the climax of an orgasm. However, this may not be true either. The psychologist, sexologist and head of sex therapy at the TAP Center, Diana Lozano, remembers that you can squirt without orgasm and still have a great time: “During sex, the goal has always been to reach climax “A few years ago it found the G-spot and now it’s squirting.”
Amaranta Hank herself, 31, didn’t get her first shot until the pandemic hit and she had time to do something she almost never would have been able to: explore and enjoy her body alone. He started working on OnlyFans and, with the help of his sex toys, a lot of patience and dedication, was able to achieve it without having to fake it like he had done for so many years on set. “You have to reach a very high level of arousal and there are no distractions, but every body is different and different things work for every woman.”