So, butt sex. In a recent posting on Jezebel, Hugo Schwyzer notes that heterosexual anal sex is now more popular – or at least more prevalent — than ever. According to one study he cites, some 40% of women age 20-24 report that they’ve tried it.
Obviously, many women love love love it – check out Toni Bentley’s engaging if possibly a little too enthusiastic buttsex memoir The Surrender if you don’t believe me. But Hugo wonders if some women are getting pressured into it. And it’s a reasonable concern, especially now that more straight guys have come to expect anal sex as a regular part of sexual relationships. Indeed, Hugo quotes a couple of young women who say that, yes, guys are constantly trying to cajole them into going to “5th base.”
The blogger Scallywag is having none of it.
Fending off anal sex? Really? Are we as men to believe that? If truth be known it is often and still remains the prerogative of women who she will have sex with (as much as a man may attempt to influence her decision) let alone anal sex. That a woman is somehow forced to accede to this demand strikes me as presumptuous and lacking in the understanding that as much as men often control the financial shots of a relationship (but that too is changing) it is often women who decide if and what type of sex will occur or not (otherwise it would be rape).
Uh, yes, I would hope that women always, not just often, would decide who they have sex with, and what kinds of sex they have. Same for men. That’s the way consensual sex works: everyone involved in it gets veto power. Otherwise, it would indeed be rape.
Scallywag, I would recommend that you go back and read the basic rules of sex before engaging in any more of it, much less something as advanced as anal.
As for Hugo, well, after asking that good question, he wanders off into some weird paternalist nonsense about anal sex being
yet another manifestation of the pressure on young women to focus on performance rather than on their own pleasure. … Perhaps the greatest incentive to do anal is the chance to prove the all-important capacity to endure pain. … [F]or most (certainly not all) young women, pleasure doesn’t seem to be the point.
You know, if anal sex hurts, you’re NOT DOING IT RIGHT.
Also, some people enjoy pain as a part of their sex life, at least when it’s inflicted safely and consensually. Sex is a messy and complicated thing, and you’re not going to get very far in understanding it if you project your own preferences and assumptions onto others with rather different preferences and assumptions about sex.
Hugo goes on to complain further about what he sees as the “sheer physical hurting that young women are expected to endure in order to meet the contemporary cultural ideal.” Somehow in his mind this includes not just painful waxing and the model-thin beauty ideal (a real issue, obviously) but also … sports:
Girls play more sports (and suffer more overuse injuries) than they did two decades ago. … On the soccer field or in the beauty salon, this generation is expected to prove its toughness as none before … .
Really? Maybe girls and women are getting more involved in sports these days because they, er, want to? And because they have more opportunities to get involved in sports these days because of, you know, feminism?
It’s one thing to worry about people – male and female – being pressured into conforming to social ideals or into sex or specific sex acts they don’t want. But it’s another to assume that girls’ and women’s choices are never really choices because patriarchy! Assuming that girls and women are playing more soccer, or going to “5th base,” mostly because they’re being pressured to is really kind of, well, assy.
On that note, enjoy this song about butts and coconuts.
WARNING: Do not actually put coconuts up your butt. For safe anal play, only use objects with a flared base. I cannot emphasize this enough.
I’m afraid “if X is Y then you’re doing it wrong” doesn’t solve the problem here though. A lot of what both young men and young women consider “normal” sex, from watching either porn or even just Hollywood movies, really does hurt the woman (and maybe the man too – I’ve heard tell of toothy head and yanking hand jobs, but I’ll leave it to others to comment).
I had the misfortune to have a lot of piston-like poundings resulting in ripped tissues & a bruised cervix before I got enough experience and confidence together to call a stop to that – and even then, you don’t know if a guy is going to do something “wrong” until you let him do it, however much you talk it over maturely to begin with. And when you don’t have the experience and confidence to talk it over maturely ahead of time, you’re also probably not best placed to make any negative comments on his performance mid-coitus.
So I don’t think Hugo is being particularly paternalistic in warning of young women suffering unnecessary pain during sex they don’t really feel in control of; at least from my position of someone who used to be one of those young women, he’s bang on target.
I grant you the sports thing is weird.
This is the best post you’ve ever written.
Women having anal sex is like blackface for gays. You don’t have prostates, ladies, and it doesn’t feel good for you, so stop fucking pretending it’s something you want.
Maybe Hugo (Dumbass, PhD) should be less concerned about women “proving their toughness” with manicures, and more about men “proving their toughness” by shooting each other dead.
Fucking prick.
It’s still the best post ever written, though, because buttsecks is hilarious.
OK, wait. I actually agree with him that there’s a lot of pressure on younger women to do anal even if they don’t want to, based on what women in their late teens/early twenties I know have to say about it. But sports? More girls playing soccer is a sign that we’re pressuring young women and rejoicing in their pain?
I think he needs to lay off the alcohol-free eggnog.
Hey Arks? Maybe women should be the ones deciding whether they like it or not. How do you know know that they are all just pretending to like it?
Okay, I guess I do agree that some women are being pressured to engage in anal sex. Of course, men are also pressured into doing things sexually, even by feminists (see: Jill from Feministe’s post about how men NEED TO GIVE ORAL or they are “misogynist”). This is not a gendered problem.
Then he goes totally off the rails, of course, with his thing about SPORTS!
I’m gonna come out of lurking just to answer Arks…I’m a woman who loves anal sex. Often prefer it, in fact. Because it feels good and gives me amazing orgasms. Yeah, I’m a bit of a masochist, and a little pain is part of the attraction. But I’m also the dominant in my relationship when we’re feeling kinky. My girlfriend fucks me in the ass because I tell her to. Just wanted to register my existence.
I’m still trying to figure out how he got from anal to soccer, actually.
Arks, as someone who’s not, personally, a fan of penetrative, anal sex I do recognize that lots of women enjoy it quite a bit. I mean, you seem to know a lot about anal. You know that there are a bunch of nerve endings totally independent of the prostate.
Why are you so resentful of men wanting to have sex with women and women with men? I sometimes get annoyed with the heteronormative default that informs so many discussions about human sexuality. I get that. But, your more humorous trolling aside, you seem so genuinely offended by the very idea that a lot of men and women enjoy having sex with opposite sex partners. A lot.
You’re as equally derisive of women’s arousal as you are their right to sexual agency. Why do you care? Are you upset that so many men don’t consider you a viable alternative to heterosexual sex?
Cassandra, he’s just an asshole who is running out of material after six months at GMP and Jezebel, so he’s reaching. For another example of this, see his bizarre “college affirmative action” posts.
Hugo is just an asswipe who is receiving too much attention, which I’m sure feeds his simultaneously narcissistic and self-loathing ego (I know, I thought it was an oxymoron too).
I think Arks is just pissed off that there are any men who enjoy doing anything with women, and any women who enjoy doing anything at all.
Bah humbug, dude. Sucks to be a misogynist.
BTW I’m firmly in the no buttsex for me camp, and I do think a lot of women don’t like it but do it anyway due to various external pressures, but the thing is, “most women say they don’t like this” is not the same as “no women like this”. And even if no women at all liked it, I’m still not seeing what that has to do with girls getting ACL injuries while playing soccer.
In terms of Hugo, he really does have this wierd sort of tone that’s part fatherly and part creepy older dude taking far too much interest in the sex lives of young women. That’s a big part of why a lot of us find anything he posts about his students creepy – he always takes this same tone. If any of my professors had talked to or about me like that while I was at university I’d have been seriously skeeved.
I agree with Hugo about “the anal ultimatum”. Many young women are pressured into having anal sex in order to please their boyfriends or partners. I am all for people doing it if they want to, but not all women are doing it because they want to. This is what bothers me. Hugo has a good point that the bar for women’s sexuality is rising, such as women being expected to shave down there and now being expected to have anal sex. It’s not a problem for women to do these things because they like them. The problem is people demanding they do them, and then women doing them reluctantly.
Hugo’s also right that pornography also gives some men unrealistic expectations that a small amount of spit is adequate lubrication. I feel sorry for women that are pressured into having anal sex without lube or any type of warm up just because that’s what their boyfriends saw a porn star do, and if she really loves him she needs to do what was shown in porn. Heterosexual sex shouldn’t be a contest of ‘How much pain will a woman endure to please her partner?’.
I think a woman should know it’s OK to demand lubrication for anal sex, it’s OK to never have it, it’s OK to stop giving a blowjob if her jaw hurts, and it’s not okay for someone to make her feel guilty for setting those boundaries. These seem to be the points I took from Hugo’s blogpost at Jezebel. I’m glad he said it, because when women bring these points up, we’re afraid we’ll be compared to Dworkin or be called prudes.
And women play sports, THEY ARE CLEARLY BEING OPPRESSED!!!!
Grade-A dickhead.
Yeah about the porn issue, though. You can always tell men who got their ideas about how to have sex mostly from porn because a. they’re terrible in bed and b. they seem to be following a script.
Also…how to put this? For me I feel like playing sports actually helped a lot in terms of making me more confident, assertive, etc. Not that I’m saying women should have to play sports if they don’t feel like it, but in my experience girls who do often get a major confidence boost out of it and a sense of their bodies as being for something other than decoration. Plus it tends to teach you how to have cooperative relationships with other women, and helps to channel competitive instincts into actual competition. I don’t see any way in which more girls and women playing sports isn’t basically a win for feminism.
Of course there are women who feel pressured to do anal. But there are women who feel pressures in to PIV intercourse. And there are gay men who don’t like anal.’and straight men who are ambivalent to receiving oral. And so on.
Human sexuality is complicated. Pressure is not necessarily coercion. Hugo may be striving for a tone of concern but is erasing sexual agency from women.
Worry about what your partner does and/or doesn’t like in bed. Generalizations of this nature are obnoxious.
A big part of why I didn’t play a lot of sports as a kid was that I felt it wasn’t something girls were supposed to do. Breaking down that barrier is a good thing, Hugo.
Personally, I think that if Hugasshole doesn’t have anything of value to say, he should shut his perpetually yawning trap.
Maybe middle-aged men shouldn’t be writing about the sexuality of young women. His tone is rubbing me the wrong way.
MRAL, you might want to re-think your participation in this thread. You’re getting assy.
MRAL, it seems like you’re letting yourself get pretty upset. You don’t like his work, cool; maybe you should step back from it for a while. Didn’t you want to start feeling better in your day-to-day life? Take it from someone who’s been working on her depression for quite a while 🙂 – it may be wise to stop seeking out the things that upset you.
It’s Christmas Eve! Go drink some hot chocolate or something. Much warmth from me to you.
Hugo has been labeled as one of the Boobz, though! Happy day! Also, I have nothing else to do.