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 agree with you. I find most of it to just be gross, even if there’s nothing particularly offensive about it.
Someone once asked me what my problem was with porn and, assuming I was being some sort of prude, said “What? It’s natural. What’s not to like?” My response was that pooping was also natural, but that I wouldn’t want to watch videos of people doing that either. Although in retrospect it’s actually a little worse than that. Most porn has the same effect on me that watching a video of someone eating while they were pooping would probably have. I just really, really don’t want to see it.
***
That said, I have a gay friend who made a compilation of the goofiest scenes from some of the gay porn he’s come across, and I was laughing so hard I was crying. I imagine there’s plenty of harmless and silly straight porn, I’m just not gonna go looking for it.
An Arks Christmas.
“Hey, grandma is here.”
“That bitch, she trapped poor grandpa into supporting her by offering to have anal sex with him even though she didn’t like it.”
*Christmas carols on the radio*
“Mary was a whore! She followed Joseph around all the time, leaving a slime trail from her gaping vagina. Bitch.”
*Cousin arrives, start talking about how she broke up with her boyfriend and hasn’t been seeing anyone lately*
“That’s just like a woman, to refuse men sex just because. We shall occupy her stupid whore vagina! Dad, why are you giving me that look? You’re a mangina.”
Mary was a whore. Cuckolding your husband with God is hypergamy at its most extreme.
That’s the best comeback you can come up with? Try harder, please.
Trying to post but my wordpress account seems to be in mod.
Arks, the clitoral nerves can run from the tip of the clit, round the vaginal opening and towards the anus. Women may indeed receive physical pleasure from anal if their clitoral nerves run towards that point. And heck for other reasons too.
http://mosex.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/the-internal-clitoris/
MRAL-anal can be done without messiness. Enemas are advised if you are worried about that, condoms and so forth.
Brandon-yes. Lube is god/desses gift to great sex in general.
Mary didn’t actually cuckold Joseph, God just planted the Son of Man in her like a cucumber or something. Remember, God is junkless.
I agree that its paternalistic to just assume that women are engaging in certain activities (sports, anal sex, etc.) because of patriarchy, and therefore they are not legitimate choices.
At the same time, I understand what he’s saying about anal sex… I mean, look at the pressure that women face to engage in threesomes with their boyfriend and another woman, especially if they have made it evident that they are at least somewhat physically/sexually attracted to women. A lot of men with bisexual/bicurious girlfriends will pressure them for a threesome, when the reverse is not true for bicurious/bisexual men with girlfriends. Hell, just look at the ads in the “women seeking women” on Plentyoffish, or other dating sites.
A threesome with two women is a straight man’s ultimate fantasy. And even though some women might have that fantasy as well, it would be a mistake to claim that all these MFF threesomes that are happening are because straight/somewhat straight women are not trying to please their boyfriend. A lot of women also have fantasies of engaging in MMF threesomes, but its very unlikely that their boyfriend would comply with that.
I just think that women are engaging in sexual activities that they wouldn’t otherwise engage in, and this is partly because of patriarchy. The same cannot be said of men.
Maybe Joseph was watching and enjoying it. Some guys are into that.
Stephanie: It’s… a bit reductive to say that a MFF threesome is a straight man’s ultimate fantasy, isn’t it? There are lots of straight guys who hate threesomes, or don’t mind them but don’t care for them particularly.
I think that pornified sexuality hurts both men and women, actually. :/ Women feel the pressure to be the Ultimate Sexbot Girlfriend, with her ass hair bleached and ready for threesomes and public sex. And men feel the pressure to be the Ultimate Sexbot Dude, with a big penis that gets hard when they want and comes exactly when they want, and who wants the threesomes and the public sex and all. And, you know, that’s great for people who want all that. But it works out poorly for the guy who really wants to be tied up and beaten, or to be pegged, or even just to have missionary-position vanilla sex with a girlfriend he loves. All of those are viable choices too, and it doesn’t work out well for ANYONE to feel like they have to be Ultimate Sexbots in order to be sexy.
Someone earlier wondered if there are a lot of men who secretly aren’t into prostitution or porn, or whatever. I think there are, but I also think that for a certain group of men, prostitutes and/or porn are the only option available to them, and it’s better than nothing. I am only 19- and have only really been attracted to girls for 5-6 years- and even so, I really, really want some physical contact with someone. I won’t say I’m desperate, because I’m not, but I want it very much. A 30 year old in my position? I can’t even imagine what that would be like, and I can totally understand just “settling”.
I do think that men are pressured to engage in sex acts, often at the behest of women. The classic one is, of course, the perception that men ALWAYS WANT IT in the first place. I will give Hugo a certain level of credit for writing about this, though he’s still an asshole.
Actually I think my biggest issue with the whole pornification thing is that it tends to put all the focus on sight and take it off of the other senses, and I don’t think that works out well for a lot of people in the sense that they end up doing things that look awesome, and are then confused as to why they don’t feel particularly awesome. A lot of things that feel awesome aren’t particularly telegenic.
Cassandra, word.
Porn bores the hell out of me, for reasons not entirely clear – it’s not like the fantasies in my head exactly have any more plot. Every now and then I’ll find some kink stuff that does it for me, but that’s rare. I agree that people who learn about sex through porn end up with some odd ideas about what Sex Is Supposed To Be. I also know a lot of dudes with average or slightly larger than average penis sized who are convinced they’re really small because the majority of adult male penises they’ve seen have been in porn.
I can kind of see where Hugo is coming from with the anal sex stuff – I was pressured into anal when I was younger in a really nasty manipulative way. It wasn’t presented to me as a deal breaker, but the price of saying “no” was way, way to high. That said – I do know women who enjoy anal quite a bit, and Hugo Schwyzer’s condescending tone does come off as just…ick.
And I don’t think this is a phenomenon restricted to anal sex, as others have pointed out. In general, as a culture, we are TERRIBLE at sexual communication, and I think people are often put in a position where they feel like they really need to perform for their partner in an unhealthy not-okay way.
Re: Dan Savage’s pegging comment. I don’t think that “Sure, you can have anal sex with me if I can peg you first” is generally the thing to do – the quid-pro-quo model for sex kinda freaks me out for a handful of reasons too – but I can understand it as a useful thing to say when someone is acting entitled.
I actually used the “Sure, let’s try anal, but since it was your idea let’s try it on you first!” tactic on a boyfriend once. He immediately realized where I was going with it, ie that I didn’t actually want to peg him, I was just illustrating what an entitled jerk he was being by being pushy about it. He sulked for a while, but did stop bugging me about it.
The sulking part got him dumped.
Sulking is not sexy.
@ozymandias42
I knew someone was going to comment on the “ultimate fantasy” part. I shouldn’t have said that. What I did mean though was that its a major fantasy among straight men, and a lot of men feel entitled to it if they have a bisexual girlfriend (just think of the jaw-dropping, eye-popping reaction many straight men get when they find out a woman they are attracted to is bisexual). Even if they don’t have that sense of entitlement, they will tend to pressure their girlfriend into it. The same does not happen when a woman has a bisexual boyfriend.
Also, I think that a lot of the women that are pressured by their boyfriends are not even bisexual, but they are straight–and at most, bicurious. I cannot even imagine a straight guy engaging in a threesome with another man because of pressure from his girlfriend.
And of course I agree that porn hurts men too (“patriarchy hurts men too”). However, I don’t agree that men are just as likely to be pressured into sex acts that they are not that into by their female partners.
I struggled with my sexuality for a long time, and after about a year of serious soul-searching I came to the conclusion that, while I prefer men, I am attracted to women too. When I shared this revelation with my (mostly male) group of friends, the two most common reactions I received were 1) disbelief, because I was clearly making it up to make me more attractive to men, and 2) several invitations to join them and their girlfriends for threesomes. Thanks, friends! :-/
I don’t know a lot of men who have this problem, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
My current beau definitely did. And he’s actually a bit on the larger side, and was still a virgin at 23 when we met so he had some rather strange ideas about what he thought sex should be like. It took months of reassuring him that he was fine, great really, before he believed me. And even longer for his performance anxiety to go away. I think he’s “cured” now though 😀
This is also why I no longer make small penis jokes. (Even though I’m immensely embarrassed admit how long took me so long to figure that out .)
I actually went to Wiki penis size for him for proof that he was totally normal. At some point I came across the term micropenis and was mortified. Really? That’s what they called it?
Arks:
I don’t particularly like it much, and have never initiated it myself, but a girlfriend of mine really liked it, and gave every impression that it felt extremely good.
And she wasn’t remotely the type to “fucking pretend it’s something you want”.
Stephanie: Statistically, about a third of survivors of unwanted sexual contact and coercive rape are male, so you’re right it’s not as common, but it’s still a fairly significant percentage. But I wasn’t talking about that; I was talking about the way people internalize society’s ideas of How Sex Should Work, which I do think affects all genders.
Ugh, biphobia sucks. As a female-assigned pansexual, I’ve definitely experienced the “ooh, threesomes” reaction. :/ I mean, I’m poly and I actually do like threesomes, but it’s a bit wearisome to be fetishized and to have people assume things about me because of my orientation. On the other hand, it does give one an excellent way of determining assholes rather quickly…
I almost wonder if slash has made the converse more common… that’s a kind of gender parity I don’t like.
Ozy, why do you feel the pressure to be the super-awesome hypersexual chick down for anything?
I remember that internal pressure.
I was kinda hoping shit like that had changed for younger women.
I think it’s gotten worse. I assume most people get out of the “there’s something wrong with me if I don’t look and act like a porn movie” phase sometime after they start actually having sex, but in the interim things can get really awkward.
That is so fucking old Nom. Not even a witty comment? Christ.
Women, especially feminists, assign far too much symbolism to anal sex. They assume it’s some sort of power play when AFAIC it’s just the guy putting his peen in the other hole. 😛 The booty is the most beautiful part of the female form. I exclusively date women with big butts(think sirmixalot). I can understand if you’re a wimminz, you’ve tried, and don’t like. But I think there’s this psychological stigma that goes along with buttsecks that straight women have been conditioned with. “its gay” , “its dirty”, “its porntastic” or even “patriarchal”……GAW! What a bunch of pr00ds.
Might I add: While some women clearly won’t alow a peen in the back door…. Another thing I’m a big fan of is tossing her salad. Do any women here enjoy that or have tried it???