“It’s the black licorice of sex,” I theorized to Maya. Part of our squeamishness has to come from the polarizing nature of the act itself. Then again, perhaps the taboo isn’t truly busted until it has a “Lewinsky moment.” It took a presidential impeachment to bring frank discussion of oral sex into American living rooms anilingus has yet to land its breakthrough role. Some of the biggest sexual braggarts I know squirmed when I asked about butt stuff turns out the fastest way to get every straight man in a room to shut up is to shout, “Who likes rim jobs?” (Though I shouldn’t point fingers this is the first article ever to make me blush while talking to an editor.) Even as anal play becomes a common extension of genital play, nobody seems comfortable discussing it publicly-even though we seem to love talking about every other taboo we bust just as soon as we bust it. For a variety of reasons, people just get skittish when the subject comes up. That’s not to say that any of this is normalized, exactly. “Oral is the new sex, and rim jobs are the new oral,” a male friend proposed. (“If you are performing anilingus on a hairy guy, just part the hair with your hands.”) And while we’re familiar with the idea that anal sex is getting more and more common, a less talked-about side effect is the rise of “anal messing around”: The CDC reports that 44 percent of straight men and 36 percent of straight women say they have had anal sex, and an academic study found that 51 percent of men and 43 percent of women who’ve had anal sex have also participated “in oral-anal sex, manual-anal sex, or anal sex toy use.” And once the ass is in play, it’s more likely to get played around with: Half of straight men who’ve had anal sex, and one in ten who haven’t, report having inserted a finger up a sex partner’s butt in the previous month. Playboy published an essay on rim jobs last year, and Cosmo followed suit with a how-to guide a few weeks ago. That kind of “butt stuff” does seem to have reached a tipping point in straight culture, at least to judge from magazines devoted to conventional gender roles. (Consider yourselves warned, squeamish readers.) What we were talking about was heterosexual anal play-not treating the anus like the vagina’s pervier cousin, useful merely for penile penetration, but actually pleasuring it.
Oh, God, ‘anal messing,’ that sentence was gross, I’m sorry.”ĭefining our terms seemed important, since these are genres of sex that people get extremely touchy about, so to speak. You can touch my butt, but not the hole.” “It just reminds me of when I was little and would eat too much spicy food, and my mom would have to put Vaseline on my dumb little kid butt. She’d reunited with an ex after several years and was surprised to find his predilections had changed. “So is butt stuff a thing we’re all doing now?” my friend Maya Gchatted me one afternoon.