COSMOPOLITAN June 2015 139
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It seems like everybody is talking about
backdoor sex. Ta y Brodesser-Akner
takes a probing look at the bottom line
on a new national pastime
efore we plunge in, I’d like to be clear
on one thing I am a big believer that
we should all just do whatever we want
to do in bed. Have your threesome. Hell,
have your twelvesome. Wear that mask
your boyfriend bought you as a “joke”.
'on that &are Bear costume and get
busy. I’ll die for your right to do your
thing. (Well, I’ll march in support of it.
'eath seems kind of extreme for this.)
But I’ll be honest. When I read the
statistics on the rise in anal sex, I was
taken aback. Women are all of a sudden
having tons of it 0 per cent of us, ages
20 to 2, have tried anal sex, up from 16
per cent in 1 2, says a survey published
in The Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2010.
And 20 per cent of ladies in relationships
have had anal in the last three months.
Now, you should probably adjust for the
fact that people are more forthcoming in
this age of internet confession than they
were back in the early ’ 0s – perhaps
more people were having anal sex back
then than were willing to admit it.
Anal sex was happening, and it
was happening everywhere. It’s in all
that porn – in a 2010 study, researchers
watched 50 popular porn movies and
found 356 depictions, in 55 per cent of
the scenes, of men and women having
anal. The feminist Naomi Wolf talked
about how anal fissures – a tear in your
rectal tissue – comprised the biggest
problem seen at campus health services
on uni campuses she visited.
It was happening on mainstream
TV, too. There was that scene on Girls
where Adam tried to sneak in some anal,
followed by one on The Mindy Project
where 'anny just “slipped”, followed by
a cameo on The Affair. And more of my
friends were starting to open up about
their experiences. As I opened my eyes
and looked around, I saw that this was
no longer a fringe topic. Had I missed
the anal revolution"“Can I put it in your bum?”
asked the gentleman suitor of a young
woman I’ll call Ilene. That was during
her senior year of high school, when
they first started dating. She’d been a
virgin, but he’d done “everything”, so
his expectations were high. 'uring the
first month of their relationship, they
had vaginal sex. Soon after that, oral.
Then came the question.
“I was never interested,” says Ilene.
“I didn’t want to do it, and I didn’t want
to talk about it. But he would ask, ‘&an
I put it in your bum"’« every time.”
It seemed really important to this
guy, so Ilene finally agreed to do it. Her
friends told her to have a few drinks to
get her inhibitions down and so it would
hurt less. She did, and well«
“It was not enjoyable,” she says.
“We used lube and a condom, and tried
foreplay. But I could hold on for only
two minutes before I said, ‘I can’t do it’”
3rince &harming finished up with
some vaginal sex that night, and Ilene
spoke loudly and often about how awful
it had been for her. “But he kept asking.”
Eventually, he cheated on her, citing her
unwillingness to have anal as one of the
reasons. Would it shock you to know
that they broke up"
Then there’s 'anielle (of course
not her real name), a recent university
graduate. It used to be she could go to
a party, see how things went, then hook
up with a guy. Now, she’ll be getting
intimate, when suddenly “guys will just
go for it, and then try to pretend it was
an accident,” she says. “The times that
they’ve done it without my consent«
it’s very painful. <ou hear horror stories
of – this sounds so gross – accidentally
pooping. The whole concept in general
kind of turns me off.”
These young women were students
in the human sexuality class of 'ebby
Herbenick, co-director of the &enter >love & lust
ALL PHOTOGRAPHY BY JONATHON KAMBOURIS