Forty-four percent of men and 39 percent of women had engaged in straight anal sex, a leap that seems nothing short of impressive. By the time the CDC again posed the question in 2006-2008 to 13,495 people between the ages of 15 and 44, heterosexual anal sex was more popular than ever. By 2005, those numbers had risen significantly: 35% of women and 40% of men between the ages of 25 and 44 said they’d had anal sex at least once. In 1992, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of people age 18 to 59 found that just 20 percent of women and 26 percent of men had tried anal sex. The shift, in both attitude and practice, is likely an outgrowth of the fact that anal sex has steadily been making inroads with heterosexuals over the last two decades. Even considering these numbers are likely underreported, as are nearly all admissions of cultural taboos, it suggests that straight men are getting their butts licked, or desperately hoping to get their butts licked, much more than we’ve been led to believe. (Another 24 percent had been anally fingered.) More recently, a 2012 Esquire poll of 500 men found that 12 percent secretly wished they were getting more anilingus. Twenty-four percent had performed anilingus on their female partners, while a healthy 15 percent had received it. A 2008 study of more than 1,400 heterosexual American men found that among those who had experienced heterosexual anal sex, giving and receiving anilingus was fairly commonplace. The idea that ass play somehow makes you gay, and not just a human who has a staggering number of nerve endings down there, is a notion that dies hard, yet it seems to be receding ever so slightly. It’s this ultimately misogynist and homophobic take on rimming that sits in our collective cultural subconscious, and at the socialized root of so much straight male discomfort around being on the receiving end of a tongue up the bum. Through the lens of heteronormativity and patriarchy, anilingus is for everybody-that is, as long as the bodies being acted upon are female. If asses are just newfangled knottier vaginas, the act of having your ass licked is innately one of feminization. Set aside, briefly, the pervasive hangups about butts that are seemingly separate from, but almost certainly subconsciously intertwined with gender and sexuality that they’re dirty, smelly, and even sinful sites, making anilingus an act so deviant that even Alfred Kinsey never studied nor referred to it. That says an awful lot, culturally, about what kind of ass play is and isn’t viewed as fully okay. And porn star Asa Akira declared in an interview that, “Culturally, ass is the new pussy.” The most quoted lyric from Nicki Minaj’s hit “Anaconda” is about a dude who “tossed salad like his name Romaine.” In an episode of “Broad City,” Ilana nonchalantly mentions that “anal is on the menu.” Trey Songz echoes the sentiment on the track “ Cake,” a song all about eating “cake.” The precious moment between two unidentified Detroit Lion fans who decided a public parking lot was the perfect venue for ass eating was captured in a photo that went viral. What took us so long? After hardly being spoken of publicly for the last few centuries-or the decade and a half since Charlotte confessed to performing it on "Sex and the City"-anilingus has finally became a featured player in pop culture. “Come on, just try it / And lick, lick, lick!” Nearly 300 years before Desi buried three-quarters of his face in Marnie’s ass on this season’s premiere of "Girls," Mozart was already foreshadowing our cultural embrace of anilingus, aka rimming, ass munching, salad tossing, and to bring things fully up-to-date, “eating cake.” The music is by lesser-known Czech composer Wenzel Trnka von Krzowitz, but the lyrics are pure Mozart: “Lick my ass nicely / lick it nice and clean,” the canon jauntily proposes. Titled “Leck mich im Arsch,” which literally translates to “ Lick me in the ass,” it’s the sort of song that might be referred to as a “bawdy ode” or a “ribald verse,” and consists almost solely of the repeated request that we all get real familiar with the business end of Mozart’s anus. With anilingus currently in so many editorial spreads and on the tip of so many tongues, it bears noting that Mozart wrote a song about eating ass. This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
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