FROTTAGE The Anal Sex Debate at GayToday

Teddy's response was hardly conciliatory in turn. Although he did drop some of his anal supremacist nonsense, he made a big play of his mainstream media credentials, continued to deny the health risks inherent in anal sex, made some more outrageously specious comparisons, this time between anal and eating cake among others, tried to ignore my critique of the cultural issues by claiming that "pleasure doesn't need a salesman," and redoubled his false and egregious attack on me as an alleged oppressor of that long-suffering minority, the buttfuck boyz.

Should that anal sex culture continue unabated, it will mean that, as happens today, many men will never have the chance of finding their true sexual path, but instead will be forced by cultural and peer pressures into the confining world of the anal tyranny; that the psychologically disastrous and outmoded culture of tops and bottoms will remain damagingly dominant in gay male life; and that men into frottage and other nonanal forms of sex will continue to be denigrated and discriminated against in their own community.

And, I believe, somewhere down the line there will be a new epidemic, probably worse than AIDS. That's because anal sex is a vector for disease, and today the rapidity of travel spreads disease at superhuman speed. At some point, we in the gay male community have to acknowledge that the universe is an unforgiving place, and that to expose a vulnerable part of our bodies to every pathogen that may come tripping down the garden path is, ultimately, suicidal.

Bill Weintraub greatly surprised me with his anti-anal-sex letter, and most especially with this: "I believe, somewhere down the line there will be a new epidemic, probably worse than AIDS. That's because anal sex is a vector for disease, and today the rapidity of travel spreads disease at superhuman speed. At some point, we in the gay male community have to acknowledge that the universe is an unforgiving place, and that to expose a vulnerable part of our bodies to every pathogen that may come tripping down the garden path is, ultimately, suicidal."

Most people are unaware that the cliche' "air we breathe" is a thick soup of bacteria and mold and yeast spores and free-floating viruses, every type and sort of microorganism. The notion that the anus is somehow more "vulnerable" , as Weintraub writes, than the other body parts listed above is medically unsound. Is penetration of the anus by a latex-sheathed penis any different than penetration of the anus by a latex-sheathed physician's finger -- as during the important digital rectal exam for prostate abnormality? No.

In direct contrast to Mr. Weintraub, I strongly feel that anal sex is what he criticized as, "..the truest and most powerful expression of male 2 male sex." Anal sex involves vulnerability, all right, but of a different sort. For the passive partner, it offers the opportunity to offer a delicate, sensitive, and normally-taboo part of his body as an avenue for erotic pleasure. For the active partner, anal sex is an opportunity not only to revel in the sensation of that warm, tight, moist orifice, but also to show skill and consideration and the desire to please his partner.

I know some are turned-off by anal sex because of longstanding prejudices that the anus is somehow "dirtier" than other body parts. Others are turned off by the initial discomfort. Well, when you kiss a man with your open mouth, you're licking together two areas that are FAR "dirtier" than the anus! A tiny speck of feces can't hold a candle, danger-wise, to the rich stew of pathogens breeding madly between even the most thoroughly-brushed teeth. And the initial discomfort is usually caused by impatience and/or inexperience, combined with the fact that all of our mommies spent two to four years teaching us how to keep that little hole tightly-shut except when we wanted to have a bowel movement in an acceptable place and time. It takes more than two minutes to relearn all that training in reverse! But it can be done and it is done, with great regularity and intense enjoyment, by millions of gay men including myself.

Anal sex, in my view, is and has always been the ultimate expression of gay male sexuality. If Mr. Weintraub is willing to argue the point based on factors other than as a "vector for disease," which is a largely-spurious claim, and abandon the notion that the anus is somehow more "vulnerable" than the other body parts and organs I discussed, I'd be delighted to continue the discussion. But right now all I'm hearing is a man with some serious hang-ups about anal sex, and several fallacies offered to defend those hang-ups.

Editor:

Teddy Snyder trivializes the dangers of anal sex in his letter criticizing Bill Weintraub (Pen Points, March 19). Snyder says the ass hole is no more susceptible to bacteria and viruses than "the mucous membrane lining of our mouths, tongues, and noses."

Not so! The fluid in mouths, tongues, and noses is saturated with natural antibodies that attack pathogens. But it's exactly opposite with your bowels -- they're saturated with pathogens that can attack the body.

The body's main protection against contamination from its own bowels is a thin membrane on the bowel's inner surface. It's far more delicate than the skin on your hand.

If this membrane is scratched or roughened, pathogens in the bowel can easily invade the rest of the body and cause serious infection. In the case of a tear, death can result very quickly. These differences between the bowel and the mouth explain why it's much easier to contract AIDS from anal sex than oral sex.

These differences almost mean that even a little discomfort or pain in anal sex is a big warning to stop, pronto. Snyder's cavalier attitude toward pain is completely misguided ("initial discomfort is usually caused by impatience and/or inexperience").

Let's not kid ourselves. Anal sex is extremely dangerous, far more dangerous than vaginal or oral sex. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't practice it. Rather, we should avoid the sort of denial that Teddy Snyder has fallen into.

Let's frankly own up to the dangers of anal sex. If we practice it, we should take the steps necessary to protect ourselves. That means, at the very least, using a condom and avoiding all drugs, which can mask injury when it's about to occur. It also means going very slowly and stopping immediately if any pain or discomfort occurs. This precaution, in turn, means that people who get a thrill out of pain would do will to avoid anal sex entirely.

Sincerely,

Arthur Evans

However, Mr. Snyder chose, somewhat misleadingly, to focus on the medical aspect of my letter, and to ignore that part which dealt specifically with the non-medical but equally destructive effects of the cultural domination of anal sex in the gay male community, making instead the sort of statements for the supremacy of anal sex that are typical of gay men seeking to defend anal's cultural dominance. In doing so, I feel, he muddied the waters and even obscured some things he had to say about what anal means to him that are quite valuable, and worth listening to.

The first is disease. Mr. Snyder asserts that anal sex carries no more risk than many human activities, including, for example, kissing or breathing. That's demonstrably false. While it may be true that there are airborne diseases that are occasionally lethal, none that I know of, unlike HIV, kill 95% of the people they infect. And while there are of course safe ways to have anal sex, the fact is that in the last 30 years we have seen epidemics of syphilis, gonorrhea, genital herpes, intestinal parasites, hepatitis B, and finally HIV break over the gay male community. Although some of these can be transmitted orally or through genital-oral contact as well, the primary mode of transmission for the last three is unprotected anal sex. And it is also the last three which have been, without question, the most serious and most damaging.

I believe we have to learn from this history. Clearly anal sex, which involves blood, feces, semen, and the mucousal linings of the distal urethra and the rectum, is a vector for disease, and to say, as Mr. Snyder does, for example, that the alveoli are more vulnerable than the anus is to seriously beg the question. My concern is that once there is a cure and/or a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, we will see a return to the frenzied unprotected anal promiscuity that characterized the late 1970s and early 80s in the gay male community, and that made a strident comeback during the barebacking debacle. Such an episode of unrestrained anal sex would provide an opportunity for yet another pathogen or pathogens to enter and devastate our community.

Of course we may be lucky. The pathogens that appear may be less lethal than HIV or more easily dealt with by medical science. But they may not be. We may encounter instead diseases that make HIV look like a bad cold. That's why in my letter I urged the community to proceed thoughtfully and cautiously, and to make its watchwords "Never Again." If we don't do that, if we forget our history, sooner or later we will be forced to relive it - a truism, but one to which we are not immune.

For it's one thing after all for an individual to say that for him personally anal sex is most meaningful. But when one says that anal sex has always been the ultimate expression of gay male sexuality (for, presumably, everybody) one is flying in the face of ample historical and cultural, including contemporary, evidence to the contrary, and is simply espousing the views of a dominant gay male culture which, I believe, derives in turn its core beliefs from the patriarchy in which we all live.

The fact is that the dominant anal sex culture oppresses m2m men who don't like anal sex. It denigrates and belittles their sexual choices. It forces some - I suspect many - into having forms of sex that they don't want and that are foreign to them. It is, I have argued elsewhere, psychologically destructive to many. And it seriously distorts the view that gay teens, young gay men, and nongay people have of gay male life, by making it appear that anal sex is the be-all and end-all of every gay man's existence.

Finally, Mr. Snyder suggests that I, like others who don't treasure anal sex, have "hang-ups." Once again, it's common for men who are into anal to say this, just as 30 years ago it was common for heterosexuals to accuse all gay men of having "hang-ups" about vaginal sex - both are expressions of a cultural hegemony. The heterosexual version says that men who are gay are afraid to penetrate women. The homosexual version says that men who are gay but who don't like anal are afraid of being penetrated.

As I have written, and as have other men on my website, it's not that I fear anal invasion or anal sex. It's that it doesn't interest me, it doesn't me turn me on, it leaves me cold. In order to please my partners, I have been, at various times in my life, fucked - a fair amount. It didn't frighten me. It simply bored me, and so I faked it - that is, the enjoyment of it. When it was over, I was unfulfilled, and I still wanted to rub cocks. The fact is that on my own I never think about anal sex, and I never fantasize about it. The only time the matter comes up, and unfortunately it happens a lot, is when someone like Mr. Snyder starts telling me about how superior and ultimate a sexual choice anal sex is. So I ask Mr. Snyder to hear what I'm saying. I don't like anal sex. I never have. It has nothing to do with fearing it, any more than my disinterest in women is a cover for fear of the vagina. It is simply that anal sex doesn't turn me on. It's meaningless to me. What I love and adore and have always believed to be my erotic destiny is cockrubbing, bone on bone frottage. Cockrubbing is at the core of my sexuality and is essential to my being.

I have called for a debate in the gay male community about the future of sex. I welcome Mr. Snyder's voice and participation in this debate. I hear what he is saying about the value anal sex holds for him personally. I ask him in return to hear what men who are not and have never been interested in anal sex and instead value frottage and other forms of phallus-to-phallus sex have to say. To us, our form of sex is as true, as pure, as powerful, and as ultimate an expression of m2m sex as anal is for him. What we are seeking to create is a gay male community in which choices are equally honored, and in which no one is denigrated for doing what they love. We ask Mr. Snyder to join us in that quest.

I am responding to Mr. Weintraub's call for a debate on the anal-sex issue with one important caveat -- I do not think an arena such as Gay Today's "Pen Points" is an appropriate venue for such debate. As a member of the editorial board of a major mainstream suburban daily, I joined with the rest of that board in upholding a blanket ban on "replies to replies" on the Letters page. Allowing an open-ended debate turns a forum for public opinion into a private hissy-fit for the few parties interested, and that is not the purpose of an opinion forum.

Having that out of the way, let me begin by stating that I have had all kinds of sex with men, and I have had oral and vaginal sex with a couple of women. Mr. Weintraub charges that I am a defender of "...anal's cultural dominance." Not at all. I am defending the right to have an opinion on anal sex which differs from Weintraub's, and which moreover is the opinion of the majority or it would not be, by his own admission, culturally dominant.

Or are we to believe, instead, that secret ambassadors of the clandestine Ass Fucking League are whispering their anal propaganda in the ears of gay youth? That there is some covert mission to elevate anal sex to dominance, against the will of the majority?

The truism of Occam's Razor needs to be applied to this debate -- the simplest explanation is inevitably the correct explanation. And the simple explanation for Weintraub's anti-anal stance? By his own admission, he doesn't like it personally: "...it doesn't turn me on, it leaves me cold," he writes.

If a crusader went around declaring the "cultural tyranny" of serving cake instead of pie at birthday celebrations, based upon his own distaste for cake, we would all have a hearty laugh at such lunacy and then move on.

But when a glib writer elevates a matter of individual preference to the status of an oppressive offense against the gay community, we accord him the respect of hearing his views and responding to them on the merits. The results came in long ago: so sorry you don't like cake, Mr. Weintraub, but the vast majority of the rest of us do, and we're going to go right on serving it up happily at birthdays. That is not an oppressive decision; it's simply a majority view. You go right ahead and eat pie, instead, and we'll all be happy -- until you start insisting that because YOU don't like cake, WE must give it up to avoid "oppressing" you.

Weintraub is entitled to hold a minority opinion, and no one including myself would argue against his right to hold that opinion.

Disagreement is not oppression. No one is going to force Mr. Weintraub to have anal sex if he doesn't want to. He, however, wants the majority of gay men, who do enjoy anal sex, to reject it. And he uses various arguments, some utterly specious and others highly questionable, to force the majority to accept his view. Exactly who is doing the oppressing here?

I empathize easily with Weintraub's dilemma. I have never enjoyed sucking cock, an admission that is likely to get my Gay Card revoked. And I have always been a bit annoyed that cocksucking plays such a large role in gay sex, because I don't much like it. But I am hardly going on a mission to free gay men from the cultural tyranny of cocksucking simply because I don't care for it! I do what everyone else does, and Mr. Weintraub should be doing -- enjoying the form of sexual expression he personally likes, and leaving others free to do the same.

Anal sex is not culturally dominant because of gay men being "...immersed in a gay male culture that has inculcated that message for more than 25 years," as Weintraub writes. No one has, or needs, to propagandize an activity which the vast majority finds highly pleasurable. Pleasure does not require a salesman.

Arguing against pleasure -- especially against specific expressions of pleasure on the spurious assertion of oppression, psychological damage, and danger to public health -- emphatically DOES need a salesman. Temperance leader Carrie Nation, for example, and her cohorts who helped bring about the miserable experiment we call Prohibition. The Pilgrim fathers who deemed only male-dominant, heterosexual vaginal sex within the confines of wedlock to be acceptable pleasure -- and who hanged, whipped, branded, or imprisoned those who broke that rule. The homophobic psychiatric community of yesteryear which subjected gay men to brutal electroshock therapy and massive doses of psychotropic drugs, in an attempt to "cure" them of indulging in a specific expression of pleasure. Some sales pitch, huh?

The world would be a lovely place if we could each order it according to our personal wants and desires. But we can't. We can and should make decisions for ourselves. We cannot and should not force our individual tastes on others. Yet that is precisely what Mr. Weintraub wants to do, and we are supposed to calmly acquiesce to his demands because he claims to be a victim of our oppression. If Weintraub thinks frottage, or "cockrubbing" as he terms it, is the most marvelous expression of gay sexuality in existence, then by all means he should practice it. I, and the overwhelming majority of other gay men, have a different opinion and are as entitled to our view as Mr. Weintraub is to his. How I express my sexuality, and what I consider to be the most-fulfilling expression of sexuality, is no one's business but my own. And if I want a self-appointed savior to direct my life and the conduct thereof, I can already choose from any number of oppressive televangelists who want to free me from the cultural tyranny of thinking for oneself. I do not need to add Mr. Weintraub, whose conduct and tactics are identical with the televangelists, to that already-lengthy list.

If you don't like taking it up the ass, don't do it. It's that simple. But please, Mr. Weintraub, kindly cease preaching that as an oppressed victim of the cultural tyranny of anal sex, you are right and the rest of us are wrong. You aren't entitled to make that decision for anyone but yourself.

And now, having had my say, I am going into the bedroom to be fucked up the ass by my partner of sixteen years -- all this talk of anal sex has my butthole just itchin' for a good romp!

Teddy Snyder begins his response by telling us that he works for a "major mainstream suburban daily." That perhaps explains his ease at playing fast and loose with the truth, as he did in his first letter, in which he breezily and misleadingly dismissed the many health hazards associated with anal sex, managing, in so doing, to get his medical science ass, as it were, backwards: he told us that the mouth was more vulnerable to pathogens than the anus, when the reality is just the opposite - the mouth is full of naturally occurring antibodies that fight disease, while the thin muscousal lining of the anus is covered in pathogens that can attack the body should there be even a slight tear in the delicate membrane.

Remarkably, this time around, Mr. Snyder once again asserts that statements about anal's "danger to public health" are "spurious." What killed those half million gay and bi men Mr. Snyder? What are all those pricey condoms and expensive lubricants for? Not an airborne pathogen, and not one transmitted by kissing. The answer is HIV - which thrives on anal sex.

In a mass culture like ours, anal sex is now and was even before AIDS a danger to public health. And it will continue to be, so long as people like Mr. Snyder deny that basic truth. His blithe disregard for such a murderous reality should set off alarm bells in everyone.

Of course Mr. Snyder's in denial about the psychological damage done by anal sex too, completely ignoring questions I've raised about the top-bottom bitchboy mancunt pussypunk culture. Maybe he doesn't mention it because he recognizes the ugliness of that part of gay life, and the fatigue gay men feel about being forced into these roles which have nothing to do with the social realities of the 21st century.

So, following up on his cavalier dismissal of the health and psychic hazards inherent in anal sex in mass society, the guy who told us that anal sex is no more dangerous than slicing a tomato, or that pain during anal intercourse is rare and inconsequential, now claims that anal sex dominates gay male life because gay men like it and have always liked it, and that nobody forces men who don't like it to have it anyway. It's just like eating cake he says. Some people like pie, but most people like cake.

That's an interesting analogy. When was the last time someone you knew had cake stuffed up his rectum? Or was told that he was immature or not truly gay cause he didn't want it there? Or got a fatal disease from just a little too much cake in the wrong place?

It's time for Mr. Snyder to drop these dopey and false comparisons and stick to the matter at hand: the physical and psychological damage done by the discriminatory and dominant culture of anal sex.

This time around Mr. Snyder does appear to have let go of his claims of anal supremacy - which is wise, because they can't be sustained. Instead though, he trots out the singularly panglossian argument that gay men are into anal sex because they want to be into anal sex. It's inherently pleasurable he says. That's why the vast majority does it.

In other words, God is in his heaven, and all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Of course that doesn't explain the men on my website, or the many sites like it that have sprung up on the internet, whose members don't like anal, and who have stated, bravely and for the record, that analists have cajoled, jollied, pressured, physically maneuvered, and sometimes date-raped them in order to get them to perform that same anal sex act that "everybody likes."

The real question, which I've brought up repeatedly and which Mr. Snyder is of course unwilling to address, is what does it mean to like something? Why do we like what we like? And why do we want what we want? Are our likes and dislikes inborn, or are they a product of the various cultures in which we live?

The answer, which Mr. Snyder should know as well as anybody else, is that in our species most behaviors are not innate but are a matter of culture. On the whole, people in the modern world understand that, and accept that in food or fashion or the type of car we drive, culture has led and conditioned us. We readily admit that culture dictates behavior, and that our tastes can be even be consciously shaped by others, that, despite Mr. Snyder's glib statement that "pleasure does not require a salesman," throughout the world a vast industry, advertising, exists for no other purpose than to do just that - sell us on what's pleasurable, make us desire things and act in ways we might not otherwise.

So we all understand that both our likes and dislikes and our behaviors themselves are culturally determined.

Is that true of sexuality too? Of course it is. Although as in every other aspect of human life there are biological roots to sexuality, the way we express ourselves sexually is culturally determined. We know that's true because there are fashions and shifts in sexual behavior as in everything else human, shifts that are far too rapid to be explained by genetics or some other inherent biology.

So for example, as Jack Nichols and others have pointed out, and contrary to Mr. Snyder's assertions of anal's unwavering popularity, in the 1950s oral sex was dominant among American gay men, and anal sex was looked down upon.

Similarly, in the 1890s, according to Toby Johnson, there's almost no evidence of anal venereal disease among tramps or hobos, a group notorious for homosexuality that was well studied by public health officers.

Among the archaic and classical Greeks, too, sex between men and youths was supposed to be inter-femoral, a sort of phallus to skin contact. And I think the vase paintings support a contention that there was phallus to phallus frottage as well. Both the Greeks and the Romans considered oral sex, homo or hetero, disgusting - which, in an era that lacked soap, it may have been.

Other cultures have favored still other forms of non-anal m2m sex. The Azande, for example, a sub-Saharan African tribe, mandated belly rubbing between pederastically-paired males - a fact that was well-documented by anthropologists.

And Hincmar of Rheims, a Carolingian abbot, complained specifically of "rubbing," not anal or oral, sexual behavior among monks in his order.

So there are shifts in the ways human sexuality and specifically m2m sexuality is manifested over time and space, just as there are shifts in what's defined as "preferred" sexually.

What's more, human sexuality cannot be divorced from the rest of the culture or subculture in which it occurs.

So, for example, when I came out, in the early 1970s, no one sex act reigned supreme among gay men. That's not surprising, since the counter-culture was in full flower and "do your own thing" was on everyone's lips. But by the middle of the decade, I could see that a change was occurring among gay men, a cultural shift, in which standards were being imposed for appearance and sexuality.

It's not unusual, following a revolutionary era such as the period from 1965-75 had been, to witness a conservative reaction, and that's what I saw. Gay men, like the rest of America, became more conservative. In came the clone, hyper-masculinity, and anal sex, which, because it's penetrative and hierarchic, seemed appealingly "straight" and mainstream. Anal sex became the defining m2m act, and all gay men got the message: You're not really gay if you don't fuck. That's one of the reasons there was an epidemic - that shift in behavior greatly facilitated the spread of HIV, which among gay and bi men, is transmitted anally 94% of the time.

And anal sex has remained dominant in gay male culture. Indeed, it's my reading that due to the epidemic and safer sex campaigns, there was an intensified identification during the 80s and 90s between anal and gay.

How is that identification conveyed or transmitted? Through cultural messages. Through pornography and novels and self-help books and sex ed programs and cinema and theater and TV and the gay and nongay press and of course, today, the internet. And, perhaps most importantly, through peer groups and peer pressure.

For human beings ordinarily have to be taught about and initiated into sex. Whether in Polynesia or a sexually backward and sex-negative culture like our own, the more complex and penetrative forms of sexual behavior, like anal sex, have to be learned.

So despite Mr. Snyder's mocking statement about "secret ambassadors of the clandestine Ass Fucking League ... whispering their anal propaganda in the ears of gay youth," that, more or less, is what happens - except that it's neither secret nor clandestine: young gay men learn about anal sex from their culture and their peers and understand that they are expected by their peers and often their elders as well to be initiated into anal sex as they come out. It's common for gay teens to worry aloud about that initiation into anal sex, to say that they see it as a scary but apparently necessary rite of passage into adult gay male life, and to express fears about the pain and health risks of anal. Indeed, Peter Cummings, editor of XY, a magazine aimed at gay teens, has written specifically about the trauma that the identification of gay with anal produces among young gays attempting to come out. That tells us that anal sex is not at all "natural" to gay teens, but something that they learn about through cultural messages and that they themselves understand they will have to learn and adapt to.

So, as we can see, sometimes sexual pleasure does indeed need a salesman. That's particularly true of a "pleasure" like anal sex, which many people simply do not find innately pleasurable.

Despite what Mr. Snyder implies, then, anal sex is a learned behavior, and learning to have and tolerate, if not enjoy, anal is not like falling off a log - rather, for most, a period of psychological preparation and then acculturation and training is necessary.

In short, anal sex is an acquired taste, and one you're far more likely to acquire if your culture tells you to do so.

If anal sex is as culturally dominant as I say, why are there people like me, guys who don't like anal but are into frottage and other forms of non-penetrative sex? Based on the autobios I've collected on my website, frottage fantasies and sometimes experiences start very early in childhood, perhaps consequent to the discovery that penile friction against sheets or clothing is pleasurable, and are usually fully realized by the time the kid is 14. It's common for there to be an association between frottage and wrestling, sometimes as the result of childhood tussles that become erotic, more often through a connection that's imagined to exist between the sort of rubbing that men do in wrestling and the sort of rubbing they might do with their phalluses. And although sometimes the individual is initiated into frottage by another person, usually the frottage fantasies are pre-existing, independent of contact with an older or peer initiator or any sort of cultural matrices that might support the behavior.

That's one of the most interesting things about frottage - that, unlike anal, it seems to exist without cultural supports, and is usually thought of by the actors as something they invented for themselves.

That said, why don't these people move into the dominant anal sex culture as they grow older and come out? To understand that one has to understand the sociological concept of deviance, and the evolutionary role nonconformity plays in the survival of species. Put simply, in any culture there are people on the fringe, people who are less well or easily acculturated and more inclined to follow an inner vision. That makes sense in evolutionary terms, since conditions change and with them human needs. If everyone was perfectly acculturated, in other words, society would lack innovators who are able to adapt and show others the way when life pressures change. So, from an evolutionary perspective, deviance has survival value, and a species in which everyone was perfectly adapted to their culture could not survive.

We can see that among the current population of gay men. The guys on my site who are my age and lived like me in the epicenters of the epidemic in NYC, SF, and elsewhere survived because we wouldn't and couldn't adjust to the dominant culture.

So guys into frottage do not acculturate into anal sex, even under enormous peer pressure to do so. And this again is an important point. If, as Mr. Snyder seems to believe, there is some sort of biological imperative for anal sex, if it were hard-wired into our brains in a way that makes it innately pleasurable, we would all do it, just as we would all be heterosexuals if that were simply a matter of biology. But it's not.

That's what makes Mr. Snyder's use of Occam's razor, though perhaps an appropriately medieval tool for one of his inflexibility of mind, incorrect. For Occam's razor to apply, the explanation must be both simple and complete. If simplicity were the only criterion for the truth of a theory, universities would still be teaching that the sun circles the earth. But that geocentric theory could not account for the astronomical data collected by Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo. And so it fell.

Similarly, in matters of human sexuality, the simplest and most complete explanation is that although there are biological underpinnings for sex just as there are for other drives, sex is culturally determined. And that anal sex among gay men is culturally determined as well.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that there aren't people out there who enjoy anal sex and who practice it joyously and responsibly. But it does mean that many people - perhaps a majority, perhaps more - don't realize that they have a choice, that like so many other things human beings do, they engage in anal because their culture tells them they must - whether they like it or not.

And that's not right, and it's not healthy either. As a liberationist community, we should be encouraging people to discover and express their authentic sexualities, whatever they may be. So we need to create a culture that is truly tolerant, and that truly welcomes diversity.

Finally, what does it mean, other than that he's perhaps been in the suburbs too long, that Mr. Snyder has to adopt the Rush Limbaugh approach in his attacks on me - I'm the oppressor he says, a charge he repeats over and over again, the villain, the 21st century's version of Carrie Nation, an anti-pleasure televangelist type savaging poor defenseless misunderstood anal sex - claims that are particularly bizarre since I have stated repeatedly that I do not want to ban anal sex, and that I do not consider anal sex per se inferior to frottage - that it is rather the cultural domination of anal sex, and that tyranny's effects upon gay male life, to which I object.

The answer is simple: Mr. Snyder is a typical representative of a majority culture made anxious by minority claims that he knows, consciously or unconsciously, are true. Closet white supremacists - people like Dick Armey and Bob Barr and Pat Buchanan - do it all the time - smear the Black minority as racist simply for demanding their rights. Christians routinely do it to Jews who speak out against the destruction of the secular state - the problem is the Jewboys and their liberal press, they're the oppressors, trampling upon us poor downtrodden Christians, if it weren't for them everyone could enjoy their religion in peace and in the schools too.

The Nazis perfected this technique during their mass murder of the Jews, which they justified by claiming that the Jews were waging war against the German people. The reality of course was just the opposite. The tiny Jewish minority didn't even have weapons. The German majority was armed to the teeth.

And that's what Mr. Snyder is doing - he's blatantly and unconscionably reversing the power dynamic. Mr. Weintraub's the oppressor, the oppressor, the oppressor he keeps saying - not a reactionary culture of anal sex that forces men into a type of sex that's dangerous physically, debilitating psychologically, and denigrating to anyone who dares to say so. Yet it's Mr. Snyder who's chosen to aggressively defend that oppressive and dangerous culture - I wonder what that makes him?

Finally, Mr. Snyder seeks to control the debate itself, asserting that the letters column is not the place for it. Why not? What difference does it make where we have our say? And why does he have to be in charge of it? Once again, the answer is simple: the discussion itself makes him nervous. He's afraid of it. Like Rush and Pat and Dick and Bob, he can't really answer what we have to say. So he tries to shout us down and shut us out.

But we will not be silenced. There is a dominant culture of anal sex among gay men that is a danger to their well-being, physically and psychologically, and that oppresses men who don't like it or won't fit into it. That is going to change. We're not going to ban anal sex. But we are going to make the world a freer place.

So get used to it Mr. Snyder. Gay space will no longer be exclusively anal. If you want to be in that space, you're going to have to learn tolerance. And if you can't adjust to it, I suggest you and your partner stay in the suburbs and reminisce about the good old days, when anal was king.

I want to thank Chuck Tarver for his input to this response. Chuck shared with me his very effective critiques, based on both his communications expertise and his life experiences as an African American, of Snyder's letter.

For a really trenchant analysis by Chuck Tarver of the problem of communicating with a majority culture like the anal tyranny, read Plato's Cave.

In an effort to shape our message, I drafted a second response to Teddy Snyder:

It's easy to respond to a letter from Teddy Snyder because he so often says things the opposite of which he, and we, know to be true.

For example, in his first letter, Mr. Snyder asserted that anal sex was less dangerous than breathing. That's of course false. Nowadays, anal sex is among the most dangerous of all human activities, since it has the potential of exposing you to a disease that is 95% fatal. Not so with breathing, or kissing, or slicing a tomato, other examples of, according to Mr. Snyder, risky behavior.

This time around, Mr. Snyder argues that anal sex is inherently pleasurable, and that there's no cultural hard-sell involved in its seeming popularity, for, as he puts it, "pleasure does not require a salesman."

But of course that too is false. Human behavior, except for a few reflex actions, is culturally determined. Culture tells us (or sells us on) what's desirable, what's good, and what's pleasurable. Examples are virtually infinite. But we don't have to look to food or clothing or ethics or religion or other aspects of human life to find them. We can just look at anal sex, and see how culture shapes perception and experience.

Among some gay men, Mr. Snyder apparently included, being the receptive partner in anal sex, the so-called bottom, is deemed highly pleasurable. But among virtually all straight men, being a bottom is considered painful, dangerous, and demeaning.

If the act were inherently pleasurable, as Mr. Snyder claims it is, everyone would experience it that way. In reality, though, one's experience is determined by the culture, or, in this case, the subculture, to which one belongs: confirmed bottoms think anal sex is the cat's pj's, the rest of the world thinks it's awful.

Among straight men, there's a dominant culture that says that anal sex is bad and you must not do it. Among gay men, there's a dominant culture that says that anal sex is good and you must do it.

Two different messages, both equally powerful to those hearing them. Neither of them, in and of themselves, correct.

How do those messages get transmitted? Among gay men, messages about anal sex are transmitted culturally: through pornography and novels and self-help books and sex ed programs and cinema and theater and TV and the gay and nongay press and of course, today, the internet. And, perhaps most importantly, through peer groups and peer pressure.

So despite Mr. Snyder's mocking statement about "secret ambassadors of the clandestine Ass Fucking League ... whispering their anal propaganda in the ears of gay youth," that, more or less, is what happens - except that it's neither secret nor clandestine: young gay men learn about anal sex from their culture and their peers and understand that they are expected by their peers and often their elders as well to be initiated into anal sex as they come out. It's common for gay teens to worry aloud about that initiation into anal sex, to say that they see it as a scary but apparently necessary rite of passage into adult gay male life, and to express fears about the pain and health risks of anal. Indeed, Peter Cummings, editor of XY, a popular glossy magazine aimed at gay teens, has written specifically about the trauma that the identification of gay with anal produces among young gays attempting to come out. That tells us that anal sex is not at all "natural" to gay teens, but something that they learn about through cultural messages and that they themselves understand they will have to learn and adapt to.

So sometimes sexual pleasure does indeed require a salesman. That's particularly true of a "pleasure" like anal sex, which many people simply do not find innately pleasurable.

Despite what Mr. Snyder says, then, anal sex is a learned behavior and an acquired taste, and it's a taste that you are far more likely to acquire if your culture tells you to. What's more, learning to have and tolerate, if not enjoy, anal is not like falling off a log - rather, for most, a period of psychological preparation and then acculturation and training is necessary.

Further, because of the power of culture in human life, it is impossible to separate a sexual act from the culture in which it occurs.

That's why I have said repeatedly that it's not anal sex per se, but the dominant culture of anal sex which at present is the problem. Did anal sex mean the same to the ancient Greeks as it does to us? No. The mechanics of the act may have been the same, but its meaning was far different.

So context matters. At present we have a context of disease, which is not merely a consequence of biology but also of culture and technology, and too a cultural context in which homosexuality is associated with effeminacy, cowardice, and promiscuity. In such a context, anal sex is problematic, since those who by choice or through pressure are "bottoms" will almost certainly buy into homophobic stereotypes. That is why we see the bitchboy mancunt pussypunk parodies of femininity associated with anal sex.

That doesn't mean we should ban anal sex. What it does mean is that there are aspects of gay male life and specifically anal sex that we need to look at very closely; and that we cannot, as Mr. Snyder wants us to, treat them as sacred cows or pretend that there are no problems where problems abound.

What would happen if we changed the cultural messages about anal sex, and if we specifically stopped telling people that if it's not anal it's not gay?

Gay male life would improve. There would be more choice. People would not feel compelled to have anal sex - it would be something freely chosen. Those who didn't wish to participate in it would no longer find themselves denigrated. And there would be less disease, because the compulsive element in anal sex would be gone.

Finally, what does it mean that Mr. Snyder has to adopt the Rush Limbaugh approach in his attacks on me - I'm the oppressor he says, a charge he repeats over and over again, the villain, the 21st century's version of Carrie Nation, an anti-pleasure televangelist type savaging poor defenseless misunderstood anal sex - claims that are particularly bizarre since I have stated repeatedly that I do not want to ban anal sex, and that I do not consider anal sex per se inferior to frottage or any other form of m2m sex - that it is the cultural domination of anal sex, and that tyranny's effects upon gay male life, to which I object.

Finally, Mr. Snyder seeks to control the debate itself, asserting that that the letters column is not the place for it. Why not? What difference does it make where we have our say? And why does he have to be in charge of it? Once again, the answer is simple: the discussion itself makes him nervous. He's afraid of it. Like Rush and Pat and Dick and Bob, he can't really answer what we have to say. So he tries to shout us down and shut us out.