This story was originally published on January 21st, 2016. I didn’t have an orgasm until I was nearly 20 — and I certainly didn’t know much about squirting. When I’d have intercourse, there would be little spurts of fluid that came out of me, but I assumed it was pee and I would be very embarrassed by it and hold it in. I thought squirting was just a porn thing — a snazzy trick only special women were able to do, like how only certain people can curl their tongue into a clover.Shortly after I became orgasmic, I remember perusing a porn website and seeing a pop-up that advertised an educational series on squirting. I figured it was some marketing ploy, but being curious, I clicked on it anyway and watched the first video. A friendly, faceless male voice welcomed me as diagrams and cross sections of a vulva faded in and out. “Most women can squirt!” he assured me. I still wasn’t convinced.When I was 21, I began working at a sex toy shop in Manhattan. The job required me to spend two weeks in training, where I learned things about sex that I had never even heard or imagined before. When we got to the subject of squirting, my ears perked up, and since I had a real teacher as opposed to a random internet video at my disposal, all my questions came pouring out.I learned that squirting is another term for “female ejaculation.” It can happen during orgasm or separately from it. The bad news is that since reliable research about human sexuality is actually quite sparse, there are a lot of things about it that we still don’t know about squirting — like why it only happens to some women, or exactly what it is. (I could spend all day debunking squirt myths , because there’s an awful lot of them.)