Anal sex. Bet that got your attention. It is something that is persistently taboo in our society. It’s consistently portrayed as something funny, something strange, something gross. I myself have all of these emotions when considering anal sex as an act. But the stigma is also preventing us from talking about it and from actually learning about it. So, in my quest to talk seriously about all of the things that make me uncomfortable, let us all delve into the topic of anal penetration.
If you have managed to reach the weird parts of the internet, you may have stumbled upon the first part of anal sex that makes even me, with all of my familiarity with the topic, cringe. The anus is where we poop, and poop is something that none of us relish dealing with. There are plenty of horror stories to be encountered about people, thoroughly unprepared ones at that, ending up with poop all over the place and in very uncomfortable places. To avoid such outcomes, anal sex takes preparation and cleaning, making sure that everything Because our culture thinks of sex as something that simply occurs and cannot be planned, the idea of planning any amount of time around sex is foreign. How could one set aside a day and time to have sex? How could we actually prepare for something that is supposed to passionately happen in the moment?
However, even if we have absolutely no desire to engage in anal sex in the future, more preparation towards sex is something everyone can benefit from. While it might seem odd to plan out a sex schedule, it would actually be helpful for those of us who have little time on our hands. We could feel reassured that there was time that we had already put aside to be with our partner in an intimate way and any mismatch in timing could be mostly worked out simply by an agreed schedule. Then we would also be evaluating how we felt about a sexual encounter beforehand just naturally, and we would have ideas in mind about what we wanted to do and what we were feeling turned on by.
Anal sex is entirely natural and normal and can be very enjoyable for people. But not only that it is also potentially extremely helpful for some people because everyone has a butthole. That is to say that it can be a very uncharged area for people to experiment with. Coming from a standpoint of someone who experiences dysphoria, though granted top and not bottom dysphoria, anything to minimize it is an essential part of my life. For people who do have bottom dysphoria, not engaging with their given genitalia can be a huge relief. It is something that does not come attached with too many preconceived notions of gender and what gender can be for the precise reason that it simply cannot be prescribed to one gender or another. For a person struggling to exist as a different gender than the one prescribed to them, sex can be a hazardous activity full of gendered stereotypes that are hard to ignore. Sex acts that are outside of this zone can provide welcome relief. The problem is that we are often so wrapped up in the genitalia that people might have that we stop trying to work around it and simply avoid it.
We need to talk about this. We need to talk about how uncomfortable we are talking about these things, because people are suffering from the stigma around it, people who do enjoy it but find that their practices are seen as disgusting when they are just as natural as any other sex act. We need to actually be honest with our partners about things that we want and things that we find unappealing. And we need to not shame people for sexual practices everyone could actually learn from and could really help future partners. It is exceedingly hard and exceedingly awkward and I will not pretend that I find myself any more capable than anyone else to discuss these things. What I do know, though, is that it starts with simply talking to yourself. Ask yourself what you want and why and try to be honest. Ask yourself why you might find anal sex funny or weird or disgusting and where that might come from. Then figure out how you can undo that because people suffer from that stigma. Because at the end of the day, sometimes you just need to figure out how you feel about your butthole.
