What do you think you know about sex? Better question: What do you think you don't know about sex? With all that's out there, facets you can't even fathom? Do you know about female ejaculation?

Jane Fader didn't.

The discovery (not firsthand, mind you) of female ejaculation, left the then-philosophy major's brain as twisted as after-sex bed sheets. She was thusly consumed by the subject.

Amongst other subjects — teledildonics, mismanaged rape kits, local rap — she writes openly about orgasms and female ejaculation, and the distinction between the two at janefader.com. In the past year, blending doctoral studies with dildo reviews in fine blogger fashion Fader's made a name as a maven of social media, as well as a sexpert of sorts. While her website draws a community of commentators, she's been a noted local tweeter, and the most-watched video on her YouTube channel tops 170,000 views.

She's plucked a few notes as an activist but also as an unlikely rap video vixen, a gig that once backfired, she says, when "some 22-year-old art school motherfucker with a bad teenage mustache put my tits on the Internet."

Fader's uncannily candid when it comes to talking about sex and lust. She's bookish and beautiful, and as silly or sultry as she wants to be. Her face makes amazing gestures, speaking with her words. The Jane Show, a recent photo exhibition by Jef Bourgeau at the Detroit Museum of New Art that featured portraits of Fader showed this and more.

We sat with Jane to talk about love, lust, and sex — all related to her studies before leaving a psychology doctoral program at Wayne State University. And, of course, we talked squirting. Here's the interview:

Metro Times: The micro-funding website Kickstarter has been responsible for helping fund numerous l projects locally and around the country. What would your Kickstarter project be?

Jane Fader: It'd be for funding the female ejaculation documentary! I've researched it for so many years; wrote so many papers about it; have just thought a lot about it. Sometimes people get excited — titillated — when I talk about it. Then, half way through the conversation, I realize they have no idea what I'm talking about. At least outside of academia. In school, people do listen, but you have to put it like, "Female ejaculation is when the female prostate is stimulated and glands fill with a fluid that comes out the urethra ..." Outside of academia, I can just say, "I'm talking about squirting, dude!"

MT: You're really enthralled by this.

Fader: I was in the second year of my master's studies at Wayne State University, I was 22, just about to be 23, and I had never had an orgasm. The weird thing was that I hadn't ever considered that I hadn't had one. Sex felt good. Felt fine. But when I was 20, I was in a production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses playing the virgin, Cécile and like the entire cast got pregnant, except for me. And all these girls were saying how they never felt like having sex, and I was like, "I don't feel like having sex either!" And I was about to be married.

MT: Ok, orgasmless, Dangerous Liaisons, married, not pregnant. I'm with you.

Fader: So someone was like, "Wait, you've never had an orgasm?" That question sank in my head for a year. It became more apparent in my life. My friends started to make a big deal of it and it became a constant topic of conversation. "Hmm, Jane's never had an orgasm." My best friend just took me out to buy a vibrator. It took a while — but I had an orgasm.

MT: Is that a right of passage of some sort, the going to buy your first vibrator? Like when a young rocker's first guitar or a budding stoner's first bong?

Fader: You know what? I guess it is, she just took someone else last week. It totally was for me.

MT: You had a revelation of, literally, orgasmic proportions?

Fader: For sure! I got really into orgasms. I started thinking about where my thoughts on orgasms came from, researching how they're represented in film, just digging through books. One day I came across an article about female ejaculation, and it came with explicit instructions; pictures and everything. I read it and couldn't comprehend. I thought I was reading about orgasms. I had never heard of female ejaculation and here was this 20-page history of it, from Aristotle all the way up.

MT: Female ejaculation from Aristotle to where?

Fader: Toronto. I went online right away and looked up the author of the article and found that she was a professor at York University and gave these talks. So I drove up to Toronto and went to one of her workshops and, well, that entire semester it was all I could write about. I went on to write my thesis on it and then continued from there into my doctorate program. It wasn't that I was fascinated by female ejaculation, it was more about how I was thinking about this new knowledge. Here existed something hadn't even existed as something I could choose to want to know or not want to know about. You gotta wonder how many things there are that exist but that your mind just cannot fathom. Like walking into a room and seeing your husband fucking someone and you're just shocked because you could never even want to fathom what that might look like. I'm guessing it's something like that. It just wasn't available to me. That's why I kept returning to it.

MT: With all of this examination and consideration of female ejaculation, what were you trying to get at?

Fader: I don't know — I still don't know.

MT: Yet this is obviously your life's work.

Fader: I think so. I've never ejaculated. [Scientifically, she thinks any woman can, she just hasn't so far.] There's just so many more layers to unwrap yet.

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