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.
For what it’s worth, MRAL, I know a couple of men who don’t like porn. My husband is one. He especially hates strip clubs because he finds them manipulative. He says the guys who like them think that the strippers are really into them ( but only them, not the other customers) and he finds the whole thing sad. He’s 50, by the way. The other man is in his late 20’s (a former co-worker) and he didn’t said exactly why he doesn’t like porn, but he hinted that it was because he thought that when people watched too much of it, it made them bad in bed.
To be completely honest, and maybe this is kind of embarrassing, but I prefer pornographic stories, like, you know, erotic text, because it’s all a fantasy. I don’t really do that much either because, you know, it’s words, but it doesn’t actively disgust me like regular porn does. And also, every woman can be Scarlett! Crazy. People should do that more.
Om Nom,
Actually, the comments here have been fairly nuanced, if you’d take the time to read them.
@MSN:
Tried it. Made the man in question go brush his teeth afterward. Not because I had a dirty bum or anything it was just… ick. The way that licking a sparkly clean toilet would still gross me out. Kind of a mood killer, at least for me.
Same here. This particular ex also tried to pressure me into a threesome. While I am attracted to women as well, I could tell that this wasn’t about me. Damn, I’m glad this one’s an ex.
Actually, Nom Nom, the ex who pressured me into anal was more into the taboo aspects and porntascticality of it. But yes, we’re the prudes. Keep thinking that if you need to.
I would like to try the “ignore him and maybe he’ll eventually get bored and go away” plan on Om Nom Nom. I know not everyone here agrees with me on that, but I kind of wish they did, because I’m getting really tired of having to scroll past his drivel.
I just wanted him to know that not all feminists want our male partners to literally have brown noses ^^
Does he remind anyone else of an annoying little dog that won’t stop yipping at you? Because that’s what I picture every time I try to read any of his comments.
He is the Yorkshire terrier of commenters. He’ll pee on the rug any minute now.
Having re-read the article I find I have two problems with it. One is, like I said, the fact that he makes such a blanket statement about anal sex, with nowhere near enough evidence to back it up. I think that’s kinda gender-neutral for me. Even if it had been a female writer I would have found it ridiculous.
But the second thing I find is that, as a guy, Hugo brings absolutely nothing to the conversation with his article. If you decide to read him as not making an overly broad statement, his article boils down to “men are pressuring women into performing anal”, which is not some novel idea. i mean, it’s not even a solely feminist idea. The larger cultural narrative IS that men are going to be conning and convincing women into performing various sex acts, so it’s not even a novel idea to people that aren’t reading up on feminism. Atleast with a female writer we could have gotten a more personal and in-depth article on the pressure that these women face, rather than some dude spending a shitload of words to pass along common knowledge and then go on some bizarre side trip about female athletes in particular going through the same thing that male athletes go through
A bunch of stuff got held in moderation. I let it through but since most of them were a while back, I’m going to repost them now so everyone sees them.
MRAL, you’ve said before that the main reason Schwyzer makes you angry is that he writes like women are “worth more” than men. You used to identify this position with feminism; I don’t know whether you still do.
But what a number of people have already pointed out, is that Schwyzer’s position is anti-feminist. What you hate about Schwyzer is still patriarchy. He might be blaming men, but men are still stronger and more capable. Men are still the agents, the people who act and choose, whereas women react to what men tell them. He’s just venerating the fluffy-china-doll image of us he has, while someone like DKM despises it.
Hahahaha! Sorry, I and my strap-on have to disagree. While I’m not an expert (yet) I think I can do a pretty decent job, at least I’ve had no complaints yet.
Also I enjoy anal, a lot. If done right it feels fantastic and I can have orgasms from it (which is strange because I can’t from PIV sex).
MRAL said:
Ah, but somewhere out there is someone who gets turned on only because s/he knows there’s some fat dude in the director’s chair watching it all.
But actually, I agree; it’s obvious that in most porn the people on camera are just going through the motions, and that’s not very sexy. But sometimes you can find porn in which it’s obvious there’s some real enthusiasm there. (For anyone into BDSM, Kink.com does porn featuring people who really are into it.)
Or so I’ve, er, heard.
I didn’t read the thread but… Anyway, Merry Assmass, all!
Not Merry Christmass?
And a Merry Ass Year to all.
Shadow and VOIP: EXCELLENT comments!
I think part of the problem is few women who like anal are going to talk in depth about it in public, because doing so is like hanging a sign out that says, “Dudes with boundary issues: please leer at me and bother me and be really obvious about how excited it is for you to know of a Real Life Woman who puts penises in her butt.” So the conversations is dominated by women who don’t like it.
Amanda
(I don’t oblige in the don’t post through christmas ethic, it’s 12 and I’m happily taking some alone time), I’ll also be without a mass of family in the a.m)
I think what you have said is a crock of shit so to speak. I’m 44 years old, female, and have never had an issue in the last decade when it come up that ” I’m a gay man in a woman’s body”. I don’t go into details ever but people really aren’t that perplexed. When they are it’s easy they say something like “there is no way in heck you look like a guy”.
I’m a real estate developer, which means the majority of my business contacts and employees are men. Men don’t actually talk about details of their sex life’s compared to women, but they do talk about what they like. Most men like boobs, are happy if they can get boob, 25 years working with men and I would say 90% of them are interested in the boob.
In the 80’s when I was first starting out I would never had dared to voice my sexual preferences, but honestly since goth and grunge hit main stream I’m not going to say anyones shocked by anything anymore but you’d have to be pretty sheltered your whole life to be. Stay away from the extremely religious and your not going to shock anyone by being the girl that is into anal.
Also anal sex has been a deal breaker in relationships for me regarding partners no go zones. I expect no less from men. It doesn’t make either party wrong you just want different things that do not mesh.
There does have to be compromise, Kave and I have been pretty much 15 years and there are certain things that he won’t do that I enjoyed in previous relationships. But then there are certain things you could not live without.
Having said that with all the men I’ve been with in life I can only think of a couple where lack of anal sex would have been in anyway a deal-breaker.
I would love to do a woman in the butt, however I honestly wouldn’t push it. The only think I really insist on is that she wear buttfloss during the foreplay and let me play with her ass(slap, pinch, playbite) and maybe toss her salad(while she still is wearing the crackstrap mind you 😛
ANYHOW….I wonder if the way to get a woman curious about anal who has never tried and is recalcitrant to experiment is to get her a buttplug or some anal beads; along with a tube of K-Y jelly.
He can easily become the pitbull of commenters if you aren’t careful and mindful of him!!! 🙂
Yeah, Om Nom, we really appreciate you sharing your masturbation fantasies with us. We’re really impressed I can tell you.