Juice

The fascinating, little-known history of female sex fluids through the millennia.

For over 2000 years, vulval sex fluids were understood to be a natural part of female pleasure, only to become disputed or categorically erased in the twentieth century. Today what do we really know about female ejaculation and squirting? What does the research show, and why are so many details unknown? In Juice, Stephanie Haerdle investigates the cultural history of female genital effluence across the globe and searches for answers as to why female ejaculation—which, according to some reports, is experienced by up to 69 percent of all women and those who have vulvas upon climaxing—has been banished to the margins as just another male sex fantasy.

Haerdle charts female juices from the earliest explanations in the erotic writings of China and India, to interpretations of the fluids by physicians, philosophers, and poets in the Middle Ages and early modern period, to their denial, contestation, and suppression in late nineteenth-century Europe. As she shows, the history of ejaculation and squirting is a history of women, their desires, and the worship and denigration of the female body, as well as the cultural concepts of pleasure, sexuality, procreation, the body, masculinity, and femininity. By examining the fantasies and fears that have long accompanied them, Juice restores female gushes to their rightful place in our collective understanding so that they can once again be recognized, named, and experienced.CONTENTS
Author’s Note ix
Preface xi
1 MULBERRY TREES AND JADE WATER: FEMALE JUICES IN TEXTS FROM EARLY CHINA 1
2 WATERS OF LUST AND LOVE: FEMALE JUICES IN ANCIENT INDIAN TEXTS 13
3 FIRST COMES PLEASURE, THEN PROCREATION: THE FEMALE SEED FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE MODERN AGE 27
4 EJACULATION AND POLLUTION, WET DREAMS, AND JOY FLOW 65
5 ANATOMY REVISITED: G-SPOT, VAGINA, AND CLITORIS 101
6 “IN CONTROL OF EJACULATION”: SUPERHEROINES OF FEMALE EJACULATION 135
EPILOGUE 163
Acknowledgments 173
Image Credits 175
Notes 177“[This] eye-opening history sheds light on how women’s sexual pleasure has been the site of controversy and contestation for millennia, and the overview of contemporary research enlightens […] Readers will be captivated.”
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

"This book on orgasmic juices is a deep pleasure."
—The Boston GlobeStephanie Haerdle is the author of Not Being Afraid Is Our Job! Circus Riders, Animal Tamers and Other Female Circus Performers and Spritzen: Geschichte der weiblichen Ejakulation (the German edition of Juice, first published in 2020).



Elisabeth (Liz) Lauffer is a German-English literary translator based in the US. In 2014, she won the Gutekunst Prize for Emerging Translators. Her other translations include The Art of Naming by Michael Ohl and The Radical Fool of Capitalism by Christian Welzbacher (both MIT Press).