Aeric Meredith-Goujon
Chelsea Summers
/On Drugs and White Tigers
A personal meditation of female ejaculation
By Chelsea G. Summers
One afternoon in the mid-1980s, my mom asked me a question, a question I’d wager that your mom never asked you. It was such an odd question, a query of such cinematic proportions that the asking of it hangs on my memory’s walls like a sepia photograph. I recollect the quality of the sunlight slanting through the glass door to the patio. I see the dust motes suspended in air. I see my mother sitting, pert and alert, her back as keen as a Springer spaniel’s on a hunt, her fingers knit together like a chunky scarf, an unsettling smile poking at the corners of her mouth. It was a big question, one of those questions whose answers define you. It was a question you don’t forget, as you don’t forget the asking of it.
“Chelsea,” my mom said, “do you ejaculate when you orgasm?”
I looked at her blankly.
“You know,” she said, bright and blithe, “because I do and your grandmother did. I was wondering if it was genetic.” Her hands smoothed the newspaper spread open on the table before her. She sipped her black coffee and looked at me expectantly.
I sputtered something about not being sure, something about maybe asking my boyfriend. I felt my mind turn sheeted as a blizzard. I’d never heard about female ejaculation, what my decades-later boyfriend would call “the white tiger of female sexuality,” or what would become known to dominant culture as “squirting.” I felt deeply unsettled, mired in a strange morass of processing the discovery of something else my mom could do more enthusiastically and easily than I, of finding out that not only was my mother’s sexuality more prodigious than my own but so too was my grandmother’s, and of wondering how it was females ejaculated.
It was, after all, the ‘80s, and the cultural acceptance of the notion that women could ejaculate was decades away. I’d return to college, leave it, move to Gotham, start stripping, go back to college, and nearly graduate before I’d hear about female ejaculation again.
“Sure,” my friend Rita said, twirling a finger around her Tanqueray and tonic. “Squirting. I don’t do it, but I know girls who do.” It was a slow shift at FlashDancers, and we girls clustered near the popcorn maker like a scrum of slow-moving tropical moths. There was probably a ball game on. We were probably biding our time as the minutes clicked the quarters away and the men-folk would come to us drunk and happy or drunk and morose. Either way was fine as long as their credit was good.
Squirting, I said, rolling the concept around.
“Sure,” said Rita, who knew everything and was surprised by nothing. “Some men are really into it.” She shrugged. Her long red hair shrugged with her.
To come was heaven, to squirt divine, or so I believed when I began, in ’04, reading sex blogs and writing one of my own. It was a fucking eldritch inadequacy to feel, this dearth of ejaculation, this purgatory of normative, dry female orgasms. All around me on the web the world was populated with human super-soakers, women whose humdrum appearance belied the wet white tiger that waited between the sheets. Ordinary sere orgasms were the meat and potatoes of yesterday; today wanted Kobe beef and yucca. Sound was mere fury; a real woman did more than tell: she showed. In fact, she showered. She shot; she soaked; she glistened with fat buckets of dew. Everything else was pedestrian.
My feelings of dry inadequacy were in no small part stoked by my mother’s moist matrilineal line. I imagined my ancestors striding a wet swath through history. Pilgrims, pioneers, frontierswomen, suffragettes, flappers, all of them shooting happy, flabbergasting fountains. All of them, that is, but me, the strange, dry, disappointing child.
Thus I did what brainy, determined women do: I took to the Internet and I researched. I read about the connection between Kegels and squirting. I bought Kegel balls. I clenched and unclenched. I pushed down and relaxed when I fucked my boyfriend. I thought wet, squirty thoughts. I bought into it.
“Chelsea,” my mom said, “do you ejaculate when you orgasm?”
It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. And then one afternoon, not long ago, it did.
“You know,” she said, bright and blithe, “because I do and your grandmother did. I was wondering if it was genetic.” Her hands smoothed the newspaper spread open on the table before her. She sipped her black coffee and looked at me expectantly.
I sputtered something about not being sure, something about maybe asking my boyfriend. I felt my mind turn sheeted as a blizzard. I’d never heard about female ejaculation, what my decades-later boyfriend would call “the white tiger of female sexuality,” or what would become known to dominant culture as “squirting.” I felt deeply unsettled, mired in a strange morass of processing the discovery of something else my mom could do more enthusiastically and easily than I, of finding out that not only was my mother’s sexuality more prodigious than my own but so too was my grandmother’s, and of wondering how it was females ejaculated.
It was, after all, the ‘80s, and the cultural acceptance of the notion that women could ejaculate was decades away. I’d return to college, leave it, move to Gotham, start stripping, go back to college, and nearly graduate before I’d hear about female ejaculation again.
“Sure,” my friend Rita said, twirling a finger around her Tanqueray and tonic. “Squirting. I don’t do it, but I know girls who do.” It was a slow shift at FlashDancers, and we girls clustered near the popcorn maker like a scrum of slow-moving tropical moths. There was probably a ball game on. We were probably biding our time as the minutes clicked the quarters away and the men-folk would come to us drunk and happy or drunk and morose. Either way was fine as long as their credit was good.
Squirting, I said, rolling the concept around.
“Sure,” said Rita, who knew everything and was surprised by nothing. “Some men are really into it.” She shrugged. Her long red hair shrugged with her.
To come was heaven, to squirt divine, or so I believed when I began, in ’04, reading sex blogs and writing one of my own. It was a fucking eldritch inadequacy to feel, this dearth of ejaculation, this purgatory of normative, dry female orgasms. All around me on the web the world was populated with human super-soakers, women whose humdrum appearance belied the wet white tiger that waited between the sheets. Ordinary sere orgasms were the meat and potatoes of yesterday; today wanted Kobe beef and yucca. Sound was mere fury; a real woman did more than tell: she showed. In fact, she showered. She shot; she soaked; she glistened with fat buckets of dew. Everything else was pedestrian.
My feelings of dry inadequacy were in no small part stoked by my mother’s moist matrilineal line. I imagined my ancestors striding a wet swath through history. Pilgrims, pioneers, frontierswomen, suffragettes, flappers, all of them shooting happy, flabbergasting fountains. All of them, that is, but me, the strange, dry, disappointing child.
Thus I did what brainy, determined women do: I took to the Internet and I researched. I read about the connection between Kegels and squirting. I bought Kegel balls. I clenched and unclenched. I pushed down and relaxed when I fucked my boyfriend. I thought wet, squirty thoughts. I bought into it.
Aeric Meredith-Goujon
And once or twice, I sort of felt an odd blurp-blurp, kind of like when you squeeze out the last soupcon or two of hair gel from a nearly empty tube. My orgasm—about which I have no complaints; my orgasms are tip-top, high caliber, yowling keening, convulsive things with power enough to make klieg lights burn brighter—sometimes seemed to blurp perhaps a bit soggier. I took it as mission accomplished, though to be patent honest, I knew I was prevaricating a bit.
In actuality, it was less out-and-out prevarication than a kind of wishful thinking optimism. After all, squirting was my birthright. If anyone should need a pile of towels at her bedside, I am that she, a woman born of a long line of white tigers. I thought that I would hum the bars, go blurp-blurp-blurp, and fake it until I made it wet.
It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. And then one afternoon, not long ago, it did.
It was the painkillers. I’m sure of it. I’d torn my rotator cuff and had surgery to repair it. I was in a lot of pain and had been prescribed a fat container of Vicodin. That afternoon, I had taken two. I was trying to take a nap because I was going to a party, and it being only a week after my surgery, I was still in a red-raw, pained and sleepless place; therefore, I had to nap.
Unlike the vast majority of humans, I do not find Vicodin to be a soporific. It makes me dizzy, loopy, forgetful, fuzzy and wide, stare-eyed awake. I thought I’d masturbate to take the frenzied edge off, release the endorphin hounds, and perhaps finally sleep. I unearthed my Hitachi, plugged it in, and took it inexpertly in my left hand—my right one was bound in a sling, useless and hurting. I lay in bed, covers over my body, Hitachi poised over the covers, and its assertive buzzing quieted by the eiderdown baffling. Adrift on puffy Vicodin pillows, I pressed the Hitachi against my muffled clit.
My mind wandered, race-walking. It lurched from vision to vision, like my imagination was stitched together as some kind of happy, friendly, sexy Frankenstein creation. No fantasies, just random images flashing like strobe light adverts and the thrum of the Hitachi far too distant against the strange background. Flash! Imaginary party. Flash! The dashboard of my Maverick as seen when making out in high school. Flash! Lady Gaga. Flash! Something else. Flash!
And then this strange building, burning need to pee. I had to pee, I felt and felt it bad. I felt it, and I didn’t care. I pressed the Hitachi closer, its thrumming thick and comfortingly hot against me. The pee and the attendant not caring, the wistful wondering and the lack of caring, I pressed and I pushed and my orgasm swelled thick and hard and fast and it called me to press, to push to let go, and I did. I shot a long stream of whatever it is that we women who squirt squirt when we squirt about squirting. I soaked through my snow-dome jammies, and I soaked my sheets below me. I was high as a kite and I was squirting and it was fantastic, and then it was just wet.
I shambled out of bed, changed my pajamas, spread a towel with my left hand, crawled back in and slept the sleep of my forebears.
Having squirted, I have, of course, tried to squirt again. I have tried to no avail. I imagine it was the combination of exhaustion, pain, a week without orgasms and drugs that allowed me that magic moment. I have met the tiger, and I am she. Even if it was only once, it was wet, hot, and irrefutable.
And yet. I wonder if that orgasm is merely some kind of mysteriously murky outlier. I wonder if some day, when I’m not looking, it’ll happen again. I wonder what happened to my birthright and what it means that I only have access to it when I’m not myself, when I’m not myself at all. I wonder if it’s possible that I’m more uptight than my mom and my grandma (and then I remember their ramrod posture tight as a twinset, and I know that’s not true). I wonder if the squirting will happen again. I wonder if I’ll ever be chasing that tiger in the forest of the night.
In actuality, it was less out-and-out prevarication than a kind of wishful thinking optimism. After all, squirting was my birthright. If anyone should need a pile of towels at her bedside, I am that she, a woman born of a long line of white tigers. I thought that I would hum the bars, go blurp-blurp-blurp, and fake it until I made it wet.
It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. And then one afternoon, not long ago, it did.
It was the painkillers. I’m sure of it. I’d torn my rotator cuff and had surgery to repair it. I was in a lot of pain and had been prescribed a fat container of Vicodin. That afternoon, I had taken two. I was trying to take a nap because I was going to a party, and it being only a week after my surgery, I was still in a red-raw, pained and sleepless place; therefore, I had to nap.
Unlike the vast majority of humans, I do not find Vicodin to be a soporific. It makes me dizzy, loopy, forgetful, fuzzy and wide, stare-eyed awake. I thought I’d masturbate to take the frenzied edge off, release the endorphin hounds, and perhaps finally sleep. I unearthed my Hitachi, plugged it in, and took it inexpertly in my left hand—my right one was bound in a sling, useless and hurting. I lay in bed, covers over my body, Hitachi poised over the covers, and its assertive buzzing quieted by the eiderdown baffling. Adrift on puffy Vicodin pillows, I pressed the Hitachi against my muffled clit.
My mind wandered, race-walking. It lurched from vision to vision, like my imagination was stitched together as some kind of happy, friendly, sexy Frankenstein creation. No fantasies, just random images flashing like strobe light adverts and the thrum of the Hitachi far too distant against the strange background. Flash! Imaginary party. Flash! The dashboard of my Maverick as seen when making out in high school. Flash! Lady Gaga. Flash! Something else. Flash!
And then this strange building, burning need to pee. I had to pee, I felt and felt it bad. I felt it, and I didn’t care. I pressed the Hitachi closer, its thrumming thick and comfortingly hot against me. The pee and the attendant not caring, the wistful wondering and the lack of caring, I pressed and I pushed and my orgasm swelled thick and hard and fast and it called me to press, to push to let go, and I did. I shot a long stream of whatever it is that we women who squirt squirt when we squirt about squirting. I soaked through my snow-dome jammies, and I soaked my sheets below me. I was high as a kite and I was squirting and it was fantastic, and then it was just wet.
I shambled out of bed, changed my pajamas, spread a towel with my left hand, crawled back in and slept the sleep of my forebears.
Having squirted, I have, of course, tried to squirt again. I have tried to no avail. I imagine it was the combination of exhaustion, pain, a week without orgasms and drugs that allowed me that magic moment. I have met the tiger, and I am she. Even if it was only once, it was wet, hot, and irrefutable.
And yet. I wonder if that orgasm is merely some kind of mysteriously murky outlier. I wonder if some day, when I’m not looking, it’ll happen again. I wonder what happened to my birthright and what it means that I only have access to it when I’m not myself, when I’m not myself at all. I wonder if it’s possible that I’m more uptight than my mom and my grandma (and then I remember their ramrod posture tight as a twinset, and I know that’s not true). I wonder if the squirting will happen again. I wonder if I’ll ever be chasing that tiger in the forest of the night.
- 11/03/2010
