A deep dive into America’s final sexual frontier: the ass.

On January 11, 1997, I passed a folded note forward to Rozz Marshall from the back row of Coach Schaeffer’s ninth-grade biology class. The note was the sixth or seventh in a series of attempts to audibly gross out the other person while we were supposed to be quietly reading or whatever.

For my turn I wrote a single word: analingus. It worked. In response to Rozz’s retch-laugh, Coach Schaeffer took the note and prepared to read it aloud to the rest of the class. As his mouth silently held the shape of the word’s first syllable, the color drained from his face and his eyes left the scrap of paper for a spot somewhere in the middle distance above my head.

Eighteen years later, to the day, Allison Williams’s character on Girls bent over a sink and let that guy with the beard stick his tongue up her ass. America shrugged. Of the surprisingly few next-day reviews that mentioned the rimjob, most decried the scene for attempting to cash in on the supposed “shock value” of a sex act that had already been thoroughly incorporated into the mainstream sexual repertory.

“Butt-eating isn’t particularly risqué ground anymore,” chided Jezebel. “Girls is actually behind the rimming curve,” snorted the London Evening Standard. “Hardly shocking,” belched the New York Post. How did salad-tossing, the most depraved sub-fetish of the oldest and most vilified sexual taboo in Western civilization, become so commonplace that three of the most sexually conservative mouthpieces in media could find watching it happen to a major actress terribly banal?

2014 was described as “Year of the Rear” and “Year We Reached Peak Ass.”

2014 was variously described as “Year of the Butt,” “Year of the Ass,” “Year of the Booty,” “Year of Eating Booty,” “Year of the Rear,” and “Year We Reached Peak Ass” by every major blog and newspaper on the internet. Listicles, thinkpieces, thinkpieces about thinkpieces, and link roundups cited twerking, reams of song lyrics and music videos glorifying the posterior and its tasty innards (among them “Anaconda,” Nicki Minaj’s female appropriation of “Baby Got Back,” Beyoncé’s ass-smacking mantra “7/11,” Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea’s “Booty,” Big Freedia’s twerking tutorial “Explode,” and Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass”), Q&As with sexperts, personal accounts of their friends’ and coworkers’ backdoor experimentations, and a widely-linked cellphone photo of a woman getting her ass eaten in the parking lot of a Detroit Lions game as evidence that the Annum Anum was fully upon us.

Despite representing the first time in a major U.S. film or TV show that a woman was depicted receiving consensual anal pleasure as actual pleasure and not as a form of sadistic torture or the setup for a shit joke, the internet wasted no time dogpiling on Girls for the mortal twenty-first-century sin of presuming its kitchen-sink rimjob a sexual milestone in a culture already several miles up the road. Essentially, the show’s crime was a calendrical error, airing more than a week after the collectively agreed upon “Year of the Butt” came to its end.

Though you’d think someone in online media would’ve allowed for how long it takes a television show to go from script to the tube, in internet time ten days is eons. The inhumanly fast online news cycle permits just enough time once a story breaks for a blogger to copy and paste the original reporting into their platform and punch it up with a couple of jokes or a “hot take” before hitting “publish,” or risk being scooped again by the next story.

If you want to see the hivemind-esque groupthink this kind of haste produces, just click on the top hashtag on Twitter news and count the number of identical headlines. Aside from making the web insanely boring to read, this instantaneous echo chamber can turn a niche theory or concept into a universally-accepted human law faster than you can Google the meaning of reification.

This is exactly what happened with Year of the Ass. If you discount all the top-N lists o’ links, retweets, and near-verbatim rephrased articles or “recaps,” there were about five original pieces at the heart of 2014’s buttmania. That’s all it took to whip the U-S of A into an anal frenzy.

If the leader of the free world is willing to have his ass licked, the rest of the free world can’t be more than a little behind.

A brief history of anal sex in the West for those of you with rusty memoryholes: Ass-fucking was invented by Orpheus as a way to combat his grief over the loss of his lover Eurydice and her vagina to Hades. He taught it to the Thracians so he’d have someone to do it with; they in turn taught it to the Minoans; the god Zeus picked it up from the later Cretans; and next thing you know folks were humping rumps all across Ancient Greece, Phoenicia, and the Fertile Crescent.

In Athens, the philosophers of Plato’s Academy used anal sex to bond with their young male students, and the hookers of Solon’s brothels used it as birth control. In Rome, everyone of repute reamed each other because the Greeks did it and because fucking young boys supposedly cured wrinkles. Then Christianity took over and the party a posteriori was over.

Homosexuals and noted deviants such as Gilles de Rais, the Marquis de Sade, and Aleister Crowley kept the practice alive, though they did so under the risk of extremely harsh anti-anal laws, which often prescribed the death penalty for repeat offenders, whether they were pitchers or catchers. Finally, in the 1960s and 70s, Britain decriminalized consensual buggery, the United States began gradually repealing their sodomy laws, Marlon Brando slid his buttered dong into Maria Schneider’s caboose, and the aversa Venus began its restoration to the pantheon of accepted bedroom behaviors.

While’14 may have been the Year Butt Broke (I am frankly appalled I’m the first one to come up with that), the seeds for these salad-tossing days were sown in the preceding decades.

Buried in the footnotes of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky is a reference to her taped deposition that reads: “They had oral-anal contact as well.” Somehow the fact that the President of the United States received a rimjob in the Oval Office was lost amid the ballyhoo over the regular oral sex, the jizz stains on Monica’s dress, and Slick Willy’s use of a cigar as an improvised extramarital aid. Perhaps reporters overlooked it, or their editors found the more luridly described blowjob and disappearing-cigar trick a better sell. Perhaps America, like Coach Schaeffer, simply wasn’t ready to deal with the mental image of a tongue going into an asshole — especially hers into his. Regardless of its omission from the public discourse, if the leader of the free world is willing to have his ass licked, the rest of the free world can’t be more than a little behind.

Over the next few years, Sisqo’s “Thong Song” rode the rising tide of that undergarment’s popularity, Dan Savage coined the terms “pegging” and “santorum,” and “ass to ass” went from an ad-libbed line in the nightmarish climax of Requiem for a Dream to something guys on SomethingAwful.com wrote as a non sequitur joke.

In 2001, the magazine I would soon intern at published “The VICE Guide to Anal Sex,” which focused exclusively on rectal congress between straights (given that gays were already “masters of the sport”). The article was far and away the most visited page on the VICE website for more than a decade, finally losing its top slot to the 2014 documentary The Islamic State, since apparently ISIS are the assholes we’re most interested in fucking these days (sorry).

All these ass-oriented blips of pop culture were just signposts in a burgeoning shift in American sexuality. Between 1992 and 2010, the percentage of straight women in their early twenties who not only had tried anal sex, but were willing to admit so over the phone to a surveyor from the CDC, went from 16 to 40 percent. Male numbers likewise spiked, at least for giving if not receiving, and his-n-hers analingual tutorials started cropping up in hetero institutions like Playboy and Cosmopolitan. The love that dares not speak its name was being name-dropped by some of the least-daring publications in America.

Anal sex and a more general predilection for bum-bums belong to a subtype of sexual fetishes called partialisms. This is where someone gets off on any part of the body that isn’t the genitals, as opposed to, say, a ball gag or getting spanked in a diaper — those are just fetishes.

Freud laid out his theory for the origin of fetishism in a 1927 essay called exactly that: “Fetishism.” Basically, when a boy sees his mother’s vagina for the first time, the fact that it isn’t a penis makes him terrified of losing his own penis. “Probably no male human being is spared the fear of castration at the sight of female genitals,” Freud wrote. “For if a woman had been castrated then his own possession of a penis was in danger.” In order to curb that chilling possibility, the boy unconsciously identifies something else as his mom’s penis and that becomes his fetish: pubic hair, women’s shoes, a rectal thermometer — sky’s the limit.

Recognizing that few fetishes were phallic enough to make for a good surrogate penis, Freud hypothesized that often the last thing the boy saw before the traumatic vulva would take the role. This would explain the preponderance of foot and leg fetishists — since they would have probably been looking up from the floor — as well as panty lovers, since she might have been taking those off. And, of course, the ass is right there next to the horrible gash, so why not? Why wouldn’t an ass be your mother’s dick?

Since the advent of mass media in America, each generation has developed a collective fetish so monolithic and ubiquitous it can define the era itself.

The 1930s and 40s were resolutely a Leg Age, as exemplified by the meaty thighs of the Fleischer Brothers’ Betty Boop, the camera’s lascivious tracking shot of Barbara Stanwyck’s bejeweled ankle in the opening of Double Indemnity, and the stockinged gams of Betty Grable which accompanied bomber crews over Europe and the Pacific in formation with other leggy nose-cone pinups. Even just using leg slang like “gams” or “stems” immediately dates the speaker to this 20-year window.

This chaste fixation displaced the freewheeling sexual libertinage of the previous Jazz Age era amid the general deprivation of the Great Depression and Second World War, and also paid homage to scientific advances in the field of making stockings. Given the censorious strictures of Hollywood’s Hays Code, it was also pretty much the most you could ask for on-screen.

As the war ended and the Baby Boom began, America entered a breast phase, making icons of mammary queens like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Vampirella. (Rural America, forever a late bloomer compared to its citified cousins, eventually discovered Dolly Parton in the late sixties.)

This busty celebration of prosperity came to an abrupt end with the British Invasion of titless wonders like supermodels Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. In 1966, the year Twiggy hit big, Rat Packer Frank Sinatra (once hitched to hour-glass goddess Ava Gardner) married 21-year-old Mia Farrow, she of the pixie haircut and pre-adolescent figure, giving an A-list imprimatur to A-cuppers.

The 1970s and 80s belonged to the bush. Hair in general served as a conduit for sexual energy in these hirsute decades, from the androgynous coifs of the male glam scene and later female dom-boys like Annie Lennox, Pat Benatar, and Gozer the Gozerian; to the fertile muttonchops of John Holmes and Freddie Mercury; to the feathered locks of Farrah Fawcett — possibly the most masturbated-to woman in U.S. history.

While thick and peaty pubes remain a niche fetish and signifier of a sexual golden age for “Bring Back the Bush” zealots, it’s easy to forget from the vantage of our dystopically shaven THX 1138 future that in the very recent past pubic hair wasn’t an obstacle to the female genitalia, it was the female genitalia. Hence the triumphant and decidedly non-fetishistic cry of the Tri-Lambs in Revenge of the Nerds, “We’ve got bush!” The bush was the real thing, the whole package, a slight linguistic displacement for the vagina but not a Freudian one. Or at least it was until Sharon Stone uncrossed her legs and inaugurated the 1990s: the Age of the Cunt.

A decade so consumed with its own place at the supposed end of history that “Hey, it’s the nineties” entered common parlance as a resigned take on “Everything is permitted,” the 1990s was the perfect period for the country’s collective sexual pathos to complete its anatomical odyssey and come to rest at the actual organ involved in intercourse. Whether being used as a presidential humidor, a justification for the severing of John Bobbitt’s penis (can’t insert what you don’t have!), or the battlefield for the national debate on abortion, scant time passed when we weren’t talking about someone’s pussy. It’s almost post-historical in its own right; after all, if a fetish is a replacement for the vagina, can a vagina even be one? Freud’s stages of psychosexual development end with the genital stage for this very reason.

As the millennium turned and pube styles went from the bikini wax to the Brazilian to the full shave, celebrity crotch shots went from scandalous to simply what happens when you get out of a car. In a culture this comfortable with the cunt, where to go for transgressive thrills? Round back. Or as James Joyce’s mother put it, “The hole we all have… [down there].”

While the trajectory of this 90-year parade of mass partialisms seems like a linear progression from a repressed society to a healthy open one (it even follows the middle-school base system in order, all the way to today’s fifth base, or extra innings, or whatever they called it where you’re from), it only does so from a straight-male perspective. Freud wouldn’t have had a problem with this as he believed only men could develop fetishes (women need to have a penis to be afraid of losing it), but he’d have a bone to pick with us now. Not only is anal fixation a full two steps backward from the mature resolution of the genitals on his psychosexual schema, it’s open to guys and gals. The ass is the only erogenous part we both have (except technically the legs — a vein Bugs Bunny already mined to death).

As the millennium turned, celebrity crotch shots went from scandalous to simply what happens when you get out of a car.

To accept the ass as a sex organ, first you have to accept that it’s there at all. Sir Richard Burton (the nineteenth-century explorer, not Liz Taylor’s husband) once postulated the existence of a “Sotadic Zone,” a sort of butt-fucking belt starting along the Mediterranean coast and gradually expanding as it passed east through Asia and onto the Americas, in which pederasty and hetero anal were an accepted part of the indigenous      culture. (All of North and South America are in the Zone, but only for their native inhabitants, although mayyyyybe also the Spanish.)

Based on my own travels, I’ve formulated a geographical continuum of rectal squeamishness where the farther you move from East to West, likewise terminating in America, the less comfortable people and cultures are with the function and very existence of their buttholes. So you go from Japan, where they take such delight in defecating that they build computer-toilets to make their tushies feel even better; to India where, as Ghandi noted, women will occasionally shit in a circle while talking to each other; to the Middle East where, outside of fancy hotels, you still wipe with your hand (remember, always the left) and a pitcher of water; to continental Europe where a bidet is a customary part of the bathroom hardware; to England where, even in medical situations and court testimony for sexual assault cases, they use the word “bottom”; to the U.S., where we’re so scared of our own assholes we wad up a softball’s worth of toilet paper to avoid the risk of touching it.

John Harvey Kellogg tried to cure America of its analphobia at the turn of the twentieth century when he determined that the colon was the “seat of human health” and prescribed enemas for pretty much any malady. And while we still eat breakfast cereal in his memory (in essence a daily fiber flush), you only have to look at how we advertise TP to see how far we have to go.

For the last 50 years, paper which we make and purchase exclusively to remove feces from our sphincters has been sold via cartoon angels sleeping in it, a puppy pressing an unspooled pile of it with its paw to gauge its softness, and a weird old pervert who hangs out in the bathroom aisle and admonishes young ladies for test-squeezing plastic-wrapped rolls of toilet paper before they buy it. It took a British ad agency to convince Charmin to phase out the demented Mr. Whipple in 2000 for a family of cartoon bears who actually use the product.

The cultural correlation between happy crapping and recreational enjoyment of the chocolate starfish may seem iffy, especially given countries like India and the Muslim world’s draconian punishment of sodomy and hard-nope stance on gays. The better part of these laws, however, were originally instituted by British colonialists like Burton, who, also like Burton, were gobsmacked upon their arrival at how free the locals were with their bottoms.

If you look at pornography from these regions, particularly amateur porn, you will rarely see a man go down on his lady without paying a visit round back. And as any girl who’s spent time single in Japan knows, they’re full-on assaholics, perhaps owing to the fact that that’s the only orifice they can depict without a mosaic.

So, back to the States, coupling those ass-wiping bears with the increasing sales of flushable wet wipes (so meteoric that the sewer systems of D.C., New York, San Francisco, and a bunch of other major cities have been crippled by their bogus flushability), the entry of Japanese toilet giant Toto Ltd. into the American market, and the fact that even our illiterate president has a bidet, and it should be no small wonder that “anal” is one of the fastest growing categories of porn. Even Gwyneth Paltrow’s ultra-bourgie website goop.com has published an instructional primer.

The nation’s asses are prepped for entry.

My own initiation into the brown arts came in 1997, the same year as the “analingus” note incident, while fingering my goth girlfriend under the folds of her trench coat in the back row of our psychology class, as was our custom. In attempting to navigate the wrist-breaking route down the waistband of her buttoned jeans to her twathole (invariably about two inches further back than expected) my hand overshot its mark and came in touch with a dry, unfamiliar orifice. After scream-whispering the perfunctory “Wrong hole!” to me and everyone else in earshot, she caught the forearm of my hastily retreating limb and said, “Wait, that felt kinda good.”

A few weeks into our newfound anal antics, she tried to return the favor during a blowjob in one of our parents’ basements, jamming her unlubricated index finger into my ass with a speed and forcefulness shocking for the possessor of a vagina. It felt like she was using a Lego. Without weighing the issues of technique at play, I snap-decided that my asshole made a better egress than a point of entry.

It’s a weird thing as a straight guy to have your ass desired.

It took close to two decades from this false start for me to find another partner interested in reciprocal buttplay. During our second time in bed, I made the lucky guess of sliding my tongue unbidden into her spread ass and was met with an enthusiastically hissed “Yesssssssssssss.” From there we moved on to regular anal sex, which I realized in terms of pleasure was a far more bottom-oriented endeavor than I’d always assumed.

In one of his stories from Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote recounts a possibly (but hopefully not!) apocryphal hitchhiking trip in the 1940s or 50s during which he convinced an erstwhile straight country bumpkin to ream him in his pickup truck. The hick commented in flagrante delicto, “Well, I understand why this is fun for me, but I don’t see what you’re getting out of it.” Though I’d chortled derisively at this passage (it’s called the prostate, you boob), when it came to hetero buttfucking, I held a similarly provincial view.

Raised a Cobain-style male feminist in the “castrate rapists” heyday of the sexually progressive 1990s, anal seemed to me like exactly the kind of unfairly one-sided sex act an unenlightened male would bully his partner into and which a girl would only volunteer for to gratify masochistic cravings stemming from previous trauma, or as a “favor,” underscoring the transactional nature of the sexual power dynamic and the female body’s role as commodity. (For years I had the same college-boy problem with blowjobs — thanks a lot, Kurt.)

Watching a woman groan and writhe in genuine pleasure from my cock up her keister was a political revelation as well as an anatomical one. The proximity of the anal canal to the back walls of the vagina makes for a sort of internal dry-humping complemented nicely by the balls clanging against the clit from behind. Also, once you’ve cleared the opening ring of anal muscles, the inner ass is large enough to comfortably accommodate most sizes and shapes.

The other edge of this sword, however, is that without a source of friction past the sphincter, it can be incredibly difficult to come. It’s like trying to jack yourself off with a cock ring. Oftentimes I’ll pull back until the ring is squeezing that wrinkly, hypersensitive patch of leftover foreskin under the head and just sorta micro-thrust it right there until the orgasm starts.

One night, as the semen dripped quietly from my lady’s well-worked asshole onto the sheets, she turned her head and broke the post-concupiscent haze by saying, “Next time I get to do it to you.” Memories of the Lego-block finger-bang resurfaced for the first time in years, raising a slight alarm. But this was quickly drowned out by a rush of horny anticipation.

The novelty of the situation was arousing on its own, as was being able to apply the pleasure I’d watched her experience while getting reamed directly to my own derriere. And of course there’s that ultimate hetero transgression of going from the fucker to the fucked. Strangely, though, the biggest mental kink was the sensation of being objectified. Being physically penetrated was nowhere near as feminizing as submitting my body passively to another’s excitement, of allowing myself to become a piece of ass. It’s a weird thing as a straight guy to have your ass desired. The concept of a woman being turned-on by my ass to the point of wanting to put things inside it was as taboo a thought as her wanting things inside her own.

The first time I let my girlfriend fuck me was all right. The strap-on she used had a beige-ish harness which made it look like a piece of medical apparatus and not a black patent-leather sex toy that screams “Hey! This is a fetish! Looks at us fetishists here indulging in our fetish!” The business end was on the larger side, but she was liberal with the lubrication and put it in very s-l-o-w-l-y and deliberately, just like all the experts tell you. I liked the dull ache that pulsed through my lower pelvis, but mostly I got off on how much she was enjoying it.

The second time she fucked me, the dildo dinged my prostate and I came like a milk truck hitting a fire hydrant. Nothing I’d heard about the “male G spot” prepared me for this orgasm. It flushed through my whole torso and shot tingles down my limbs. Jizz exploded in all directions, not in the usual contiguous wads, but hundreds of little airborne droplets. A few made it to the ceiling. I’m not sure how long it lasted, but once I came down I wasn’t overtaken by the usual post-ejaculatory urge to nap; I was filled with a soft, vibrating form of energy that made me talk in a low, fry-heavy register, à la FM radio’s Delilah. I felt like I’d been rewired.

Before my sphincter had time to ungape, I was on the phone ready to share the gospel with my straight friends and trade notes with the gays. To my gasping dismay, almost none of my gay friends had taken it in their own rear. Even the most patronizingly debauched, anti-vanilla circuit queens were in awe of me — ME, a breeder. It was like the end of that “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” Monty Python sketch when the nosey perv goes, “What’s it like?”

Concerned that I’d befriended so many square queers, I checked the stats and learned that the percentage of homosexual men who do anal hovers around half or less. Even among those who do partake, there’s a disproportion of tops to bottoms that rivals Alaska’s ratio of men to women. I saw this for myself a few years later at Provincetown’s Bear Week at the tip of Cape Cod.

Beneath the deck of the Boatslip Inn, basically the town’s gay consulate, is a nightly cruise called the Dick Dock where even the most unsightly hunchback can get laid. When I walked through I witnessed countless blowjobs, handjobs, rimjobs, as well as full-anal twosomes, threesomes, and foursomes amid the shadows and the sand. The pièce de resistance, however, was a 28some that took up nearly half the dock’s space.

I should clarify: This doesn’t mean 28 cocks were up 28 butts. Most of the men were crowded in a tight semicircle facing the same way, tugging themselves and/or their neighbors as they waited for one of the THREE bottoms at the focus to open up. Because the easily-tearable skin of the anal cavity makes it the easiest route of transmission for the HIV virus, bottoms in the gay community were hit the hardest by AIDS. And while the crisis has mercifully abated since the nineties plague days, their ranks still haven’t fully recovered, whether by dint of lingering fear or the lack of veteran powerbottoms to mentor fresh charges.

When I got back from Ptown, one of my sluttiest gay friends called me and, in seeming parody of the call I’d made to him after losing my backdoor virginity, loudly gushed that he’d let a scruff date give it to him in the cake. My first conversion. 

Thirty years ago, the American public was so resolutely opposed to rear entry they considered a single photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe of a bullwhip lodged in a man’s muscular bottom ample justification to completely end federal funding for the arts. It’s a testament to how far we’ve come in three decades that what literary theorist Leo Bersani once described as “the seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” has gone from the climactic horror of William Friedkin’s Cruising to an accepted act of romance in mainstream media.

For practically the whole of Judeo-Christian civilization — ever since God torched Sodom and its presumably butt-loving sister city Gomorrah — there’s been no more benighted figure than the passive participant in anal sex. “To be penetrated is to abdicate power,” Bersani also wrote. “The rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal… of proud subjectivity is buried.” To voluntarily give up power, it should be said, is a different can of fish than having it taken, and requires having it in the first place.

Perhaps more than simply pushing this nation’s sexual boundaries out another base length, this generation’s anal craze has helped demolish the notion of sexual agency as a strictly masculine trait, and taught us that the greatest thrill doesn’t always lie in exercising control or authority over someone else’s or even your own body, but in relinquishing it.

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