A Man2Man Alliance Policy Paper
by
With special thanks to
the brave and stalwart Frot men of Heroic Homosex and The Man2Man Alliance
who have lived seemingly alone with this knowledge all their lives
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"An anus is not a vagina" is a phrase often used by openly gay physician and well-known gay medical writer Dr. Stephen Goldstone.
For example, in a brief Q and A about anal fissures which appears on his GayHealth.com website, Dr. Goldstone observes, "Clearly an anus is not a vagina, and the tissue is more sensitive to injury during sex ..." [34]
It's a telling remark from a man who, in his advice columns, on his website, in his book The Ins and Outs of Gay Sex, and in his ano-rectal surgical practice, is a leading proponent and supporter of anal penetration -- that is, an analist.
Throughout this essay, I refer frequently to Dr. Goldstone's writings.
That's not because he's the only analist on earth.
To the contrary, because the culture of anal penetration is a dominant culture among gay men, there are literally tens of thousands of analists; and some of their writing can be found in our Man2Man Alliance policy paper Multipartnered Pansexualism or Heroic Love, which includes excerpts from people as diverse as safer-sex educator Dr. Tom Coates, pornographer Paul Morris, syndicated gay advice columnist Dan Savage, openly gay AIDS anthropologist Doug Feldman, the staff at NYC's Gay Men's Health Crisis, and ordinary gay "men into anal."
Nevertheless, Dr. Goldstone's work is very useful, because he's both an analist and a physician. And as a physician, his statements are at least somewhat constrained by truth; for example, while he advocates for anal, he also sets out all the risks inherent in the act.
Of course, he consistently tries to put the most positive spin he can on the dismal realities of anal penetration.
And it's just that discordance, between the ideology of anal penetration and the scientific realities of the ano-rectal cavity, that makes his work so striking.
Thus, on GayHealth.com, as in his other writings, while noting that "an anus is not a vagina" and that anal is "the highest risk sex act [sic] that men who have sex with men can perform," Goldstone consistently advocates that men engage in anal penetration, consistently passes up opportunities to discuss alternatives to anal penetration, and has refused repeated requests by the Alliance to put up a page on frottage and other far safer and more pleasurable alternatives to anal penetration.
And although he acknowledges that not all gay men do anal, he asserts that gay men who don't do anal have "baggage" -- that is of course, pyschological baggage, of the sort that gay men were commonly said to have had vis-a-vis women four decades ago. [68]
Moreover, not content with propagandizing unceasingly among gay men in favor of anal, Dr. Goldstone encourages straight-identified men to explore what he calls "anal stimulation," as can be seen in this Q and A on GayHealth.com:
Wednesday, April 24th 2002
Q. Is it normal for a straight male to enjoy inserting dildos in his ass? Does this mean he has bisexual tendencies? I am certainly enjoying it, but I only have pleasure having sex with women.
A. More and more straight men are finding the pleasures of anal stimulation. It clearly feels good and just because you like it doesn't mean you are gay. If you enjoy the feeling you get from anal stimulation but don't find yourself fantasizing about men then you are probably straight. [33]
That's what we mean by an analist.
Goldstone's unceasing promotion of anal, accompanied by his denigration of men who don't do anal, is what marks him as such: an enthusiastic and unthinking supporter and promoter of the anal status quo.
Yet when you consider, as we will, all the damage done by anal penetration -- damage which Dr. Goldstone describes in great detail and which he presumably encounters daily in his ano-rectal surgical practice -- you would think that as a physician he would discourage his patients from engaging in the act.
That's how doctors treat smoking after all -- tell their patients it's dangerous and discourage them from doing it.
But when it comes to anal, Dr. Goldstone, as we'll see, does quite the opposite.
Dr. Goldstone is not the only physician with an anal axe to grind whose work we look at in this paper.
The other is John R. Diggs, Jr., also an MD, who's written an article titled "The Health Risks of Gay Sex." [19]
By "gay sex," however, Dr. Diggs doesn't actually mean "gay sex" in the sense of the many varieties of sex between men whose primary erotic focus is other men.
Nor does he mean "gay sex" in the sense of sex between men who are straight-identified but also have sex with other men.
Rather, what he means by "gay sex," is anal penetration, whether by penis, finger, or inanimate object; and anal fellatio -- that is, oral-anal contact.
Which of course is what gay male analists mean by "gay sex."
There's a reason that Dr. Diggs, like the analists, has chosen to define gay sex as anal in both its penile- digital- dildoic-penetrative and oral-anal combinations and permutations:
Which is that he's written his paper at the behest of a group calling itself, innocuously, the Corporate Resource Council (CRC), but which is acutally a religious-right front which bills itself as "family- and faith-friendly" [16] and whose primary function appears to be pressuring corporations to not extend domestic partner benefits or other forms of recognition to their gay employees.
In order to do that and not seem unspeakably churlish, the CRC and Dr. Diggs, these self-styled friends of God and humanity, have to make it appear that by denying domestic partner benefits, corporations are actually doing their gay employees a favor, which is of course discouraging them from being homosexual and thus improving their health.
Are Dr. Diggs and the CRC, which is obsessed with the "homosexual agenda," homophobic?
Well, as Woody Allen would say, only by the dictionary definition, which defines homophobia as "an irrational fear of and anxiety about homosexuality and homosexuals"; and "the political and cultural manifestations of that fear."
Dr. Diggs, of course, disagrees.
He says that as a practical matter, homophobia is defined by homosexuals and their defenders as "any opposition to or critique of gay sex" [21] ; which means that anyone who's critical of anal sex is a homophobe.
As someone who has indeed been called homophobic for both opposing and critiquing anal penetration among gay men, I see his point.
But, like Dr. Goldstone, Dr. Diggs is here, as elsewhere, engaging in spin.
For the term "homophobia" has a definition and use quite separate from the critique of anal penetration, and Dr. Diggs, like his unwitting analist allies, knows that perfectly well.
And while it may be homophobic to disparage homosexuality, it is not homophobic to critique anal penetration, which is not a uniquely homosexual practice, and certainly not the practice of the majority of men who have sex with men.
Truth is, however, that while both the anti-anal Dr. Diggs and the analist Dr. Goldstone spin their material, Dr. Diggs, in general, doesn't have to spin as hard as does Dr. Goldstone.
Because Dr. Goldstone is trying to defend what is in fact indefensible, and the effect of so doing is to give his work a truly Orwellian feel, as in black is white and war is peace and anal is dangerous but you should do it anyway. [87]
Dr. Diggs doesn't have that problem, and his presentation of the health risks inherent in anal penetration is on the whole straightforward, accurate, and independently verifiable.
For example, says the doctor,
...
The potential for injury [during anal penetration] is exacerbated by the fact that the intestine has only a single layer of cells separating it from highly vascular tissue, that is, blood. [2] Therefore, any organisms that are introduced into the rectum have a much easier time establishing a foothold for infection than they would in a vagina. The single layer tissue cannot withstand the friction associated with penile penetration, resulting in traumas that expose both participants to blood, organisms in feces, and a mixing of bodily fluids. [2]
Which is *exactly* right.
But wait, the analists will say: this is a fundie physician casting aspersions on our "gay male" holy of holies, anal penetration.
Actually not.
That passage is based on an article by Jeremy Agnew titled "Some anatomical and physiological aspects of anal sexual practices," which appeared in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1985. [1]
Agnew's is an excellent summary of the health risks of penile-anal penetration, neglecting only this detail, which, fortunately, Dr. Goldstone fills in for us:
[emphasis mine]
Taken together, these two passages so helpfully limned by Drs. Goldstone and Diggs present a vivid picture of the flimsy and easily traumatized ano-rectal tissues, bathed in a mix of blood, fecal pathogens, and semen, and doing their best to absorp the damaging and deadly infectious agents which they contain.
That is the medical reality of anal penetration.
But, please note, it's the reality of anal penetration, not of homosexuality per se.
Which is why Dr. Diggs, like others who serve the religious right, gets into trouble when he starts to over reach himself by conflating all things "homosexual" with the ill effects of anal penetration and promiscuity.
For example, he claims that gay men have greatly shorter lives on average than straight men.
While gay men who participate in anal penetration and thus expose themselves to diseases like HIV / AIDS and hepatitis may have shorter life spans, gay men who avoid anal will live just as long as their heterosexual peers.
Similarly, Dr. Diggs claims that gay men show higher rates of psychiatric illness, and asks whether homosexuality is caused by, or is the cause, of psychiatric trouble.
In point of fact, as Dr. Diggs must know, homosexuality was removed from the list of psychiatric disorders more than 30 years ago, and researchers looking at psychiatric problems among gay men uniformly attribute them to societal homophobia and oppression, and to an internalization by gay male culture of homophobic thinking.
Truth is, that without anal penetration, Diggs doesn't have a case, since "men who have sex with men" who eschew anal and limit their partners suffer few to no ill effects due to the way they have sex -- Frot and mutual masturbation are, in particular, almost risk free.
Something which I know very well, since I've been a sexually active gay man for more than 30 years, and have never suffered either an STD nor a mechanical problem attributable to the way I have sex.
And although promiscuity increases risk, the practices of Frot and mutual masturbation are so inherently benign that even promiscuous gay and bi men rarely suffer any ill physical effects from these two acts. [84]
The reality then is that neither homoseuxality nor homosexual behavior per se are problems to their practitioners or society.
Rather it's anal penetration and promiscuity which create difficulties for men who have sex with men -- as they do for men who have sex with women, and women who have sex with men.
In point of fact, then, both Drs. Diggs and Goldstone conflate "homosexuality" -- what contemporary culture refers to as "being gay" -- with anal sex.
That's why Dr. Goldstone thinks it's okay to call his website GayHealth.com, while focusing exclusively on the ills caused by anal penetration and not even mentioning Frot.
Because clearly, to him, as to Dr. Diggs, gay and anal are synonomous.
But they are not.
As you read this essay, keep in mind that men like the analist Dr. Goldstone and the anti-gay Dr. Diggs have chosen to confuse a sexual orientation -- towards members of one's own sex -- with an erotic focus on the anus.
As such, they are good representatives of their respective cultures -- the one analist, the other religious right.
But not of the truth.
And that is the difference between we men of the Alliance and those of the analist left and the religious right.
We are committed to telling the truth, not only about anal penetration, but about men who have sex with men.
They are not.
And it is their on-going and indeed reckless disregard for the truth which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of men everywhere.
Preface: A Tale of Two Doctors
...the anus is a delicate mechanism of small muscles that comprise an "exit-only" passage. [2]
The colon's main function is to absorb water from the liquid waste that leaves your small intestines so that by the time it reaches your anus it is solid material.... It is this heightened absorptive capacity that makes your rectum so good at trapping STDs. [35]
The Man2Man Alliance has been consistently critical of the central place of anal penetration in gay male culture and sexual practice, and critical of anal penetration itself.
Some people, gay and nongay, have asserted that our critique of anal penetration amounts to "disrespect" or being "judgmental" of men who participate in anal.
That is not so.
All we do is tell the truth about anal penetration.
That the truth about anal penetration is overwhelmingly negative and indeed dismal is not our doing -- it's just the truth.
In this Man2Man Alliance policy paper, we examine three aspects of anal penetration -- biological, psychological, and ideological -- objectively and dispassionately.
For more than five years we've asked the proponents and practitioners of anal penetration to refute our arguments -- objectively and dispassionately.
They've not been able to do so.
Instead, they've censored us in the gay press and on the internet wherever they could and made personal attacks on me and other Frot Men. [76]
Neither tactic alters the reality of anal penetration, a gruesome pseudo-sexuality and meaningless miasma of disease, domination, and pain which is literally fatally flawed.
What are the biological realities of anal penetration?
The first and most significant is that the anus is an organ of fecal excretion soley.
It has no erectile nor any other sort of genital tissue, and clearly did not evolve nor was designed to be part of any sexual act.
From these facts flow two of the most salient characteristics of anal penetration:
1. That there is virtually no physiologic pleasure to be derived from the act for the person penetrated; and
2. That during penetration the anus is extraordinarily vulunerable to both pathogens and mechanical damage.
The first point -- the absence of pleasure -- we'll discuss in The Psychology of Anal Penetration.
For now we're concerned with the second point: that when used "sexually," that is through the forcible insertion past the anal sphincter and repeated thrusts of a man's erect penis, leading to and culminating in ejaculation, the anus and rectum are exceptionally vulnerable to injury.
As a result, anal penetration is the single most effective transmitter (or vector) of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) known.
For example, among "Men who have Sex with Men" (MSM), anal penetration is the primary mode of transmission of HIV, the pathogen which causes AIDS; at a minimum, 94% of all MSM HIV transmission is due to anal penetration.
(The only other significant MSM HIV vector is oral sex, which at most is responsible for 6% of all infections [36] -- most observers believe the actual number for oral is lower, and the number for anal correspondingly higher. [54] )
Indeed, studies of serodiscordant heteroseuxal couples, in which the man is HIV+ and the woman HIV negative, have demonstrated that a woman is 10 to 20 times more likely to seroconvert -- that is, acquire HIV -- through anal penetration than she is through vaginal intercourse. [40]
Which means that in terms of disease, and compared to vaginal or any other form of sex, anal penetration is uniquely dangerous. [39]
The reasons are not mysterious.
There are huge differences in the structure and biology of the anus and vagina.
The vagina evolved, or was designed, to be penetrated; structurally and physiologically it's beautifully adapted to its role and is, in terms of both disease and physical damage, well-defended.
The anus, by contrast, despite its gritty excretory function, is quite delicate and was meant to serve as an exit only; structurally and physiologically, it is, when penetrated, *defenceless.* [2]
Thus, the walls of the vagina are relatively thick, elastic, and resilient, designed to accomodate the male's erect penis and withstand its vigorous thrusts, not just its caressing and rubbing, but its battering and ramming too.
Those same thick walls can actually stretch sufficiently to accomodate the birth of a child.
Supported by a network of muscles, and supplied with its own natural lubricants, the vagina's mucous membrane is a multi-layer epithelium which was built not only to handle the friction of sexual intercourse but also to ward off potential immunological damage which might be caused by semen and sperm. [20]
The walls of the anus and rectum, by contrast, are thin and of very limited elasticity.
Indeed, the mucosal lining of the anus and rectum is single-celled, extremely delicate and very easily damaged during penetration, allowing for direct entrance to the bloodstream of any number of pathogens which might be present in the insertive partner's pre-ejaculate and ejaculate; or on his skin or in an open sore on his penis or fingers; or on the surface of an inserted object such as a dildo.
In addition, the presence of fecal material -- and there is no way to completely rid the anus and rectum of that material prior to penetration -- insures that even more pathogens are available to wreak various sorts of havoc.
These central facts bear repeating: The exceptionally fragile anal lining, thinner and less substantial than an onion skin, as Agnew observes, "cannot withstand the friction associated with penile penetration, resulting in traumas that expose both participants to blood, organisms in feces, and a mixing of bodily fluids." [2]
Thus there are three ways in which pathogens are transmitted by anal penetration:
1. Through direct contact with blood, contact created by tears in the ano-rectal mucosal lining.
2. Through contact with the mucosal lining of the anus and rectum of the anally receptive partner; through contact with the mucosal lining of the distal urethra of the insertive partner; and through contact with the mucosal lining of the foreskin of uncircumcised anally insertive partners. [4] [58]
3. Through the spread of fecal material.
The following sexually transmitted diseases (STD) are vectored or transmitted through anal penetration and anal-oral contact:
Note that of these diseases, HIV types 1 and 2, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis and gonorrhea are either universally fatal or potentially so.
That's 6 out of 20, or 30% -- not great odds.
In addition, the diseases vectored through oral-anal contact -- shigella, salmonella, giardiasis, and amoebiasis -- are notoriously difficult to treat.
The diseases vectored through direct contact with blood are particularly dangerous.
They include:
HIV/AIDS -- HIV Type 1, HIV Type 2
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the virus that causes Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The virus infects cells within the immune system and weakens it. Once the immune system is weak enough, other infections called opportunistic infections start to attack the body and can cause death. Although there are now life-prolonging treatments, AIDS is still considered a universally fatal disease.
While anally receptive men ordinarily acquire HIV through direct injection of ejaculate into the blood, anally insertive men who are uncircumcised can acquire HIV simply through pathogen contact with the mucosal lining of the foreskin. [4] [58]
And anally insertive men who have sores on their penises due to other STDs such as herpes or syphilis can acquire HIV through blood, fecal material, rectal secretions and other pathogen sources contacting those sores. [6]
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis B has an acute and chronic phase. Acute hepatitis can cause nausea, loss of appetite, stomach aches, jaundice (yellowing of the skin), and dark urine. If severe enough, it can cause confusion and death. Most people have a limited infection and fight it off within a few months, developing an immunity. However, some people become carriers of the disease and remain infectious. Some of these carriers will develop chronic hepatitis (5-10% of people infected with hepatitis B), which can lead to cirrhosis (scarring of the liver), liver failure, liver cancer, and death. [6]
Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C is similar to hepatitis B in that it has an acute and chronic phase. The difference is that about 85% of people who have acute infection will eventually develop chronic hepatitis. The symptoms for acute hepatitis C are similar to the ones for hepatitis B, except there may be more fatigue, muscle aches, and headaches. The consequences of chronic hepatitis C are the same as for chronic hepatitis B, which is more serious with more people progressing to chronic hepatitis with hepatitis C. [6]
Then there are the diseases transmitted through pathogen contact with ano-rectal and urethral mucosa, and the mucosal lining of the foreskin:
Herpes (Herpes Simplex Virus or HSV)
There are two types of herpes, namely HSV-1 and HSV-2. HSV-1 used to be oral herpes and HSV-2 used to be genital herpes, but with the increase in oral sex, HSV-1 has been found around the genitals and HSV-2 have been found around the oral region. The herpes virus travels along nerve roots and causes damage to the nerves. This damage also causes pain along the areas these nerves innervate. When active, they can cause blisters filled with infectious viral particles. These will eventually dry up, crust over, and leave scabs and possibly even scars. When the virus becomes dormant, they remain in the body within the nerve roots until a stimulus activates them to multiply again. [6]
Syphilis
Syphilis is a highly contagious bacterial STD. Transmission usually occurs during vaginal, anal or oral sex when syphilitic sores (chancres) or patches come into contact with slightly abraded skin or mucous membranes. Left untreated, syphilis can progress from painless ulcers to a rash, heart disease or memory loss, and death. While penicillin is a highly effective treatment, it cannot reverse damage already done by the disease. Anal penetration is an extremely efficient way to transmit syphilis, and has played an important role in a number of recent MSM syphilis outbreaks. [43] [50]
Syphilis has been called "The Great Imitator" because so many of the signs and symptoms resemble other diseases. The primary stage of syphilis is usually marked by the appearance of a single sore (chancre), although multiple sores may develop. The chancre is usually firm, round and painless and appears about three weeks after exposure at the spot where the syphilis bacteria entered the body. Left untreated, the chancre heals in 3-6 weeks, but the infection may progress to the secondary stage of syphilis. The secondary stage starts when one or more areas of the skin break into an itch-less rash. Additional symptoms of secondary syphilis may include fever, swollen lymph glands, sore throat, patchy hair loss, headaches, weight loss, muscle aches and fatigue. Tertiary symptoms include incoordination, paralysis, numbness, gradual blindness and severe confusion. [52]
Chancroid
Donovanosis (Granuloma Inguinale)
Gonorrhea
This is an infection caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae. When symptomatic, it usually causes burning on urination due to spread of the bacteria to the penis. While curable with antibiotics, if left untreated it can cause additional complications, including blood poisoning and death. [6] [75]
Chlamydia
This is an infection caused by the bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis. When symptomatic, it is similar to a gonorrhea infection. However, men who are infected are only symptomatic about 50% of the time. Like gonorrhea, it is also curable with antibiotics, but will cause other complications if left untreated. [6]
Lymphogranuloma Venereum (LGV)
LGV, which is closely related to the STD chlamydia, causes painless genital lesions at first. If untreated, lymph nodes around the sex organs begin to swell, leading to symptoms like fever, decreased appetite and malaise. In men who are anally receptive, the disease can strike the rectal area, leading to a variety of unpleasant gastrointestinal symptoms.
LGV is rare in the West, but common in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. While treatment with an antibiotic called doxycycline wipes out the disease, doctors worry that the symptoms of the illness make it easier for men to transmit and become infected with the AIDS virus.
Dutch officials first noticed an LGV outbreak in the city of Rotterdam in December 2003. Most of those infected reported having unprotected anal sex and taking part in fisting [the insertion of the fist into the anus and rectum]. Men at highest risk also tended to be HIV-positive, members of the leather community and active partiers [that is, men who participate in a combination of drug use and promiscuous sex, often in dance or sex clubs where multiple partners and group sex are the norm]. [22]
Human papilloma virus (HPV)
HPV causes genital and anal warts [6], and anal [56] [23] and cervical cancer [10] [65]; and has been implicated in oral cancer [18], and cancers of the head and neck. [12]
HPV is primarily spread by skin-to-skin contact with an infected person or by contact with body fluids contaminated with the virus. This means that most cases of genital HPV are acquired through sexual intercourse in heterosexuals and anal penetration in MSM. Male circumcision appears to be somewhat protective against penile HPV. [15] [8] Transmission of HPV via genital touching and via inanimate objects may also be possible, but the risk of infection from these activities has not been well documented. [49]
According to a report in the New York Times, anal cancer risk, a consequence of HPV infection, is 30 times greater among men who are anally receptive than among the general population. [64]
While a recent study found that 57% of HIV *negative* anally receptive gay men were infected with anal HPV. [14]
Clearly, being anally receptive puts men at great risk for HPV, including the strain of HPV which causes anal cancer. [14]
Finally, there are the many diseases which are spread via fecal matter. Fecal matter contains many different types of bacteria as well as viruses. The following are some of the diseases that can be spread via fecal/oral routes:
Hepatitis A and B
If a person is infected with these viruses, they can shed viral particles in their fecal matter and infect the person who ingests the virus. Although these diseases are not spread only through sex, anal sex promotes the spread of fecal matter, leading to the increase in risk of spreading disease. The consequences of hepatitis A and B include liver damage and diarrhea. Hepatitis A is rare in the United States and can be prevented through vaccination. Hepatitis B is extremely dangerous in pregnant women. [6]
Shigella, Salmonella, Giardiasis, Cryptosporidium, Microsporidia, and Amoebiasis
These diseases are vectored through oral-anal contact and are notoriously difficult to treat. [60]
In addition, as we discussed above, if fecal material and / or rectal secretions have contact with blood, mucosa, or open sores, any viruses or other pathogens in the excretia will be transmitted.
Fact is, fecal material is dangerous, and human beings are universally taught, at an early age, to avoid contact with fecal material. [27]
Yet it is *impossible* to avoid contact with fecal material during anal penetration.
Fecal material is *always* present during and after anal penetration
In addition, following anal penetration, the anally receptive partner has to have at least one and usually more bowel movements, which leads to more contact with fecal material.
And the use of "personal lubricants," a necessity during anal penetration, means that afterwards these leak through the anal sphincter, carrying with them fecal matter.
Moreover, over time, the anal sphincter stretches, and leakage of rectal secretions and other fluids from the ano-rectal area is the result. [53]
Rectal secretions are particularly dangerous.
For example, it's been found that the concentration of HIV in the rectal secretions of HIV + MSM is higher than in their blood or semen. [81]
Thus, the anus is not a vagina, and penetrating the anus brings with it severe health risks, both infective and mechanical.
Notes Boston's Fenway Community Health,
The anal region is a relatively unprotected area of the body. Both the anus and rectum have a soft membrane that can tear relatively easy. Tears around the opening of the anus called fissures can happen which are rather painful. These tears can also lead to bleeding. In addition, this damage increases the risk of getting a sexually transmitted disease (STD). [6]
And there are other ills as well, as indicated by this list of questions taken from Dr. Goldstone's GayHealth.com website:
(You can see them for yourself, along with Dr. G's answers, by clicking on this link and scrolling down the page.)
Is a nerve in the anus dangerous?
Should I worry about bumps on my anus?
I love rimming, but how safe is it?
My dildo makes me bleed.
Can Kegel Tighten My Anus?
Worm in my stool?
White bump on my anus?
Anal bleeding, and my doc is no help!
Finding the pleasure spot in my partner's anus...
Safe to douche twice a week before sex?
Did anal sex cause ulcerative proctitis?
What can I do for anal warts?
Health concerns associated with pinworm?
Gooey discharge after anal sex. Help!
Big lump on my anus.
How can I clean myself out before anal sex?
Is it safe for men to use tampons?
Extreme pain after using a dildo. Help!
I can't get rid of parasites in my stool!
Do I have to worry about anal cancer?
Clean bowels?
How can I tighten my anus?
Will poppers and a sex club relieve my pap pain?
Lumps, swelling and painful bowels.
Did my dildo cause anal inflammation?
Diarrhea, bloody discharge and an aching groin?
Unknown growth in anal/rectal area
Do I need surgery for my anal tears?
Can regular douching damage my colon?
Can you give me douching directions?
Is it safe to use a butt plug for 8 to 10 hours a day?
How can I prepare for anal surgery?
What is the horrible pain in my rectum?
Is it safe for my SM Master to give me enemas with wine?
Colonoscopy and anal cancers
Lumps around my anus. Anal warts?
Why can't I control my butt muscles?
Pain after anal sex.
Why can't I ever get clean after I go to the bathroom?
Why did I bleed during a bowel movement?
Is it safe to stick a bottle up my butt?
What is causing the pain when I go to the bathroom?
What kind of doctor can give me an anal pap smear?
Is sex causing my anal leakage?
What will relieve my rectal pain?
Is my partner too large for anal sex?
Should I avoid sex prior to my gender reassignment surgery?
Do anal warts look like anal tags?
Pain when I poop.
Do you think I have colon cancer?
I had sex for the first time and now I am in pain. Help!
I don't feel pleasure now. Did surgery damage my prostate?
Do I need to get a rectal exam?
Why is wiping painful?
Why did I find blood in my stool?
Mucus covering my stool. Normal?
My anus is tight.
Losing control with my dildo.
Pain during anal sex. STD?
Do you recommend enemas?
Where is the prostate?
Something hard is in my anus.
Quite a price to pay for, as Chuck Tarver puts it, maintaining the anal sex norm. [63]
The number of pathogens vectored by anal, the ease of transmission, the seriousness of the diseases which they bring about, and the ubiquity of fecal material, validate two of our central, and oft-repeated, critiques of anal penetration:
1. that it's dangerous:
because it's a vector and an extraordinarily efficient one for virtually every MSM STD, including more than a few which are fatal;
and a leading cause of mechanical damage to the anus and rectum; and
2. that it's dirty, because it involves direct and intimate contact with fecal material.
Those two points are indisputable -- which is why no one disputes them.
Indeed, Dr. Goldstone himself says repeatedly that anal is "the highest risk sex act that men who have sex with men can perform" -- and he elucidates:
Anal sex is the highest risk sex act two men can perform -- and not just because of HIV. Most sexually transmitted diseases (STDS) can pass between partners during close skin-to-skin contact when a penis rubs against your anus -- and vice versa. Infections travel both ways.
...
News flash: an anus is not a vagina. Your anus is only 1 to 2 inches long and connects to the rest of your colon. The colon's main function is to absorb water from the liquid waste that leaves your small intestines so that by the time it reaches your anus it is solid material.... It is this heightened absorptive capacity that makes your rectum so good at trapping STDs.
...
The anus has two sphincter muscles, the internal sphincter and external sphincter, which control your bowel movements. These muscles are bands that surround your anus and rectum. Your internal sphincter is actually a part of the colon wall and is an involuntary muscle -- which means you can't control it. This is the sphincter that relaxes to let out your bowel movements and gas. Your external sphincter is under the skin of your anus and is a voluntary muscle. You tighten it to keep from having a bowel movement at inopportune times. It also contracts reflexively (and out of your control) when something approaches your anus from the outside. Therefore, no matter how much you want your partner inside you, your muscle will contract to keep him out. ...
Another important difference between a vagina and an anus (or "mangina" as some men like to call it) is that it will not self-lubricate; you need to use a water-soluble lubricant (no Crisco, please!). In addition to damaging condoms, oil-based lubricants can block your anal glands and cause infection. Many oils, including hand creams, also contain perfumes which can irritate your skin and cause dermatitis.
Technique
Sex between men; sex between women and men: Because of the high risk of passing STDs during anal sex and foreplay, place a condom on your partner as soon as his penis is going to come in close contact with your anal area -- even if he isn't going to penetrate you. Put a lot of lubricant on your partner's condom-covered penis and on the outside of your anus. Beware of the "two finger stretch" to get ready for him because this can tear your sphincter muscles easier than his penis. ...As soon as the head of his penis pushes against your anus, the internal and external sphincter muscles contract. You will feel a sharp pain. Stay there! Within 30 to 60 seconds your muscles will relax. You can then safely sit the rest of the way down on him. Move up and down a few times and by then your muscles will be sufficiently relaxed so you can go to any position you want. Do not stimulate your penis while you are trying to take your partner. This also sets up a strong reflex that contracts your sphincter muscles even tighter.
...
Hygiene
No matter how hard you try, your anus will always be an anus. You can't sterilize it. You can, however, gently wash the outer skin with a moist cloth or pad (try Tucks) to remove any fecal residue stuck to your skin. Avoid wet toilet paper or tissues because they flake and leave behind annoying bits of paper. If necessary, try to move your bowels prior to sex. I do not advise enemas or douching, which may increase the risk of HIV transmission. Enemas -- even if they are just plain water -- irritate the lining of your colon and make it easier for HIV to get in or out. The motion of the sex toy, your partner's hand or penis also stimulates colon contractions. Frequently you won't evacuate the entire liquid enema before sex, and the remainder is forced out during sex by increased colon contractions, making a bigger mess than the one you took the enema to avoid.
...
Complications
Bleeding: most often from a hemorrhoid of fissure (tear). If you see blood, stop. Most often the bleeding stops quickly. Do not have anal sex again until you stop bleeding with bowel movements. If you have hemorrhoids, experiment with different positions to see if you can tolerate one better than the other. Many men find that when the receptive partner is on his stomach, his hemorrhoids experience less swelling and bleeding.
Pain: Pain during anal sex most often results from your sphincter muscles going into spasm or from a tear. You can tear the sphincters or your delicate anal lining (a fissure). If it hurts, stop anal sex. Try treating your fissure conservatively with stool softeners, sitz baths (warm soaks) and hold off having sex until you are healed. STDs can often be present with pain in your anal area but the pain usually doesn't begin until several days after sex. Pain that begins during or immediately after sex usually results from a fissure or sphincter injury.
Perforation: A true tear through your colon wall is a very rare complication of anal sex. A penis is pliable and does not have the strength to rupture your colon. A toy, on the other hand, can cause serious damage - especially if it is long. Your colon makes a sharp bend to the left, approximately eight inches up. A penis can bang against this turn and you might notice a sharp pain in the pit of your stomach. It usually won't push through. A hard toy can push through and when it does, you are in a life and death situation. You feel intense pain and must get right to a hospital. Delay and the bacteria can spread throughout your abdomen. This type of infection (peritonitis) can take your life.
Incontinence: Incontinence is an inability to control your bowels or gas. If your anal sex is pain free, your muscles should be fine and you don't have to worry about this dreaded complication. Those who enjoy fisting or large toys can permanently overstretch their sphincters and are at increased risk for incontinence in later life.
STDs: Anal sex is the highest risk sex act that men who have sex with men can perform. Virtually every STD can pass between partners during anal sex, and for most, penetration isn't necessary and a condom may not protect you. STDs are harder to diagnose when they are inside your anal canal and not on your penis. STDs commonly passed during anal sex include: HIV, herpes simplex, gonorrhea, syphilis, molluscum contagiosum, crabs, human papillomavirus (HPV), hepatitis, and chlamydia. MEN: Put a condom on early -- as soon as you anticipate contact between the anus and penis. Remember that fingers and toys used during foreplay can also carry STDs between partners. A condom doesn't cover the base of your partner's shaft, his scrotum or pubic hair -- these are all places where STDs can lurk or land.
HIV Risk
Anal sex is the highest risk sex act two men can perform.
This is also true for a woman if she's the anal receptive partner with a man. Your risk increases dramatically in proportion to the number or partners you have and if your sex is unprotected (whether you are inserting or receiving). One medical study published in 1987 found that anal sex with one partner increased your chances of catching HIV by three times -- five or more partners increased it 18 times. [35]
[emphases mine]
Given this long list of STDs and mechanical damage, and having considered all the ways in which the anus is not fit to be penetrated, why do gay men persist in anal penetration?
To answer that question, we need to understand the psychology of anal penetration, and the relationship of that psychology to the dominant ideology within gay male subculture.
In order to understand the psychology of anal penetration, we need to understand first that the physiological ability of the ano-rectal area to experience sensation of any sort is extremely limited.
Once again we turn to Dr. Goldstone of GayHealth.com:
http://www.gayhealth.com/templates/105951422497313563898100003/network/ask/index.html?record=246
Finding the pleasure spot in my partner's anus...
Wednesday, April 4th 2001
Question
When a guy performs anal sex with another guy, what are the sources of pleasure for the guy who's penetrated? Is there a spot in his ass that pleases him when touched? My lover wants to know if there is such a spot and how he could reach it before we engage in anal sex (we haven't tried it yet). Thanks...
Answer
Most of the nerve endings that sense pleasure are at the outside of your anus or within the first two inches. The rest of your rectum and colon do not have nerves that sense pleasure. While many guys will disagree with me, there is no physiological basis for most of the pleasure you derive higher up in your colon. There is definitely a psychological pleasure. Your partner's penis can stretch your sphincter and pelvic muscles, but again these are in the lower four to six inches of your rectum. When you have an orgasm, these muscles will contract against his penis and this might heighten the pleasure of your orgasm. Take care and enjoy. [32]
Like much of Dr. Goldstone's often Orwellian discussion of anal penetration, this answer is revealing.
To begin with, he limits, sharply, the area which is capable of sensation:
"Most of the nerve endings that sense pleasure are at the outside of your anus or within the first two inches."
He then adds, flaty, "The rest of your rectum and colon do not have nerves that sense pleasure."
And that's it.
That's the end of this leading, openly gay, ano-rectal surgeon's exploration of the physiologic ability of the anus to, in his words, "sense pleasure."
There's no mention of richly sensorially-endowed genital tissue -- because there's none there.
Nor is there any mention of erectile tissue -- because there's none there.
Just the suggestion that there might be nerve endings which "sense pleasure" on the exterior of the anus or "within the first two inches."
Yet even this statement begs the question: what does the anus actually sense? Is it "pleasure," or something else?
In fact, we all know what the anus can sense, because we experience it daily when we move our bowels.
And what we experience is not pleasure.
To the contrary: most often what we feel, when we're aware of the ano-rectal area, are varying degrees of fullness.
Sometimes too we experience an urgent need to move our bowels; and sometimes those bowel movements are painful.
So while the anus is able to detect the presence of bulk fecal matter, and in effect monitor a bowel movement, that's not remotely the same as experiencing pleasure.
Nor is the feeling of "relief," or more properly, emptiness, we experience after a bowel movement even remotely the same as the pleasure we feel during and after genital sex.
Because that experience of the relative absence of fecal material is not the same as pleasure, sexual or otherwise.
Furthermore, the anus is not able to tell the difference between bulk fecal material and an erect penis, or a dildo, or any other object.
All the anus can tell you is whether there's material inside of it and whether it's being penetrated.
Indeed, Dr. Goldstone makes that very clear when he says, "The motion of the sex toy, your partner's hand or penis also stimulates colon contractions." [35]
In other words, the ano-rectal area responds to the presence of an erect penis or other foreign object the way it responds to the presence of fecal material: by attempting to get rid of it.
So: even that small section -- according to Goldstone, the exterior of the anus and the first two interior inches -- which can experience something, does not experience anything resembling genital or any other sort of pleasure.
Rather, all it can detect is fullness, emptiness, and, to a limited extent, the motion of material past the anal sphincter itself.
Dr. Goldstone continues:
The rest of your rectum and colon do not have nerves that sense pleasure. While many guys will disagree with me, there is no physiological basis for most of the pleasure you derive higher up in your colon.
[emphases mine]
That too is a very revealing remark, because it's common for anally receptive men to claim that not only can they feel their partners' penises deep in their rectums, but that they can also feel their partners' warm ejaculate when it's shot into their rectums.
In reality, they can't.
So what is it they experience?
According to Dr. Goldstone, it's "a psychological pleasure."
What, in this context, does that mean?
The only reasonable answer, given that the "rectum and colon do not have nerves that sense pleasure," is that the pleasure they feel is imaginary.
To repeat: anally receptive men imagine they feel pleasure.
When in truth, all that the anus can tell them is that it's being penetrated, and that there's an object inside of it.
It is the brain of the anally-insertive man which interprets that information, identifying what is inside of him as an erect penis, and in effect telling himself that such penetration is pleasurable.
Is it?
The reality of anal penetration is that the anal sphincter consistently resists penetration and experiences such penetration as pain.
Once again, Dr. Goldstone: "As soon as the head of his penis pushes against your anus, the internal and external sphincter muscles contract. You will feel a sharp pain. Stay there! ... Do not stimulate your penis while you are trying to take your partner. This also sets up a strong reflex that contracts your sphincter muscles even tighter."
Anal penetration therefore is not pleasurable -- it's painful.
Assuming that the initial pain of penetration abates (which Dr. Goldstone claims it will, without mentioning that for many men it does not), what the anus and rectum then feel is the fullness of penetration.
And that's all.
In short, what the receptive partner feels is ano-rectal distension -- not genital pleasure. [86]
Why do anally-receptive men -- who are usually gay-identified -- tell themselves that what they're experiencing is pleasurable?
Because of the symbolic nature of anal penetration, and the way in which it mimics penile-vaginal sexual intercourse:
During male-male anal penetration, the male being penetrated takes on symbolically the role of the female in penile-vaginal intercourse, and imagines that what he's feeling in some way resembles what she feels.
But it does not.
The differences between anal penetration and penile-vaginal sexual intercourse are profound.
As we've seen, during anal penetration, even when consensual, the insertive male must force his way past the receptive male's anal sphincter, giving the act from the start something of the aura of rape.
Once the insertive male is inside the receptive male's ano-rectal cavity, his erect penis is in an area which is unable to experience pleasure.
Thus while the thrusting of his penis inside the anus and rectum are pleasurable for the insertive partner, they convey no physiologic pleasure to the anally-receptive male.
Instead, what the receptive male is aware of is the pain of penetration, fullness in his anal area as the ano-rectal wall and muscles are attacked and abnormally stretched, and the repeated violation of his body by the insertive male's violent penile assault.
note the expression of pain
During consensual penile-vaginal sexual intercourse, by contrast, not only does the vagina readily admit the penis, but the woman experiences intense and orgasmically overwhelming pleasure as the richly sensorially endowed walls and erectile tissues of her vagina are repeatedly and fervidly stimulated by the male's exuberantly copulative thrusting, carressing, and, above all, rubbing of her genitals.
note the shared expressions of ecstasy and bliss
To repeat, the anally-receptive male experiences none of that, not only because there is no genital or erectile tissue in his anus, but because the ano-rectal tissues have no physiological ability to experience pleasure of any kind.
During penile-vaginal sexual intercourse, then, both man and woman experience the unique and ultimately orgasmically overwhelming sensations of direct and mutual genital and erectile tissue stimulation. [77]
During anal penetration, only the insertive male experiences that stimulation.
The receptive male experiences some pain and little else.
Which is why receptive men are so seldom erect during penetration.
As one of our warriors points out:
If being a bottom is so great then why is it in pornos when the bottom is getting fucked he barely has an erection (the universal sign of male sexual PLEASURE). It's either Half-Mast, flopping around, or a cold water dick. The directors in porn films try to hide this by letting the bottom "Cup" his dick in his hand or pretend he's jacking off, with the whole of his dick in his fist. When there is that rare full salute it's usually because the bottom is jackin like a maniac to keep it from going down. The rest is clever editing to hide the fact that the man below isn't really getting any pleasure.I really wanna know how many "Bottoms" can maintain a full erection while they're being fucked. Because it's already tough enough for the tops to maintain one with their dick stuffed in a hole full of feces.
That's correct.
Anal is inherently dysphoric.
Thus the need for the receptive male's brain to interpret the experience as a sexual one and pleasurable -- even when it is neither.
And thus the need for the receptive partner to think of himself as a sort of female correlate.
That's why, in the language of anal penetration, the insertive partner will often refer to himself as a mancunt, a bottombitch, and /or a pussyboy, and to his anus as a "mangina," while men who are promiscuously anally-receptive commonly refer to themselves as sluts and whores.
So: the psychology of anal penetration is one in which during the act, and inevitably afterwards, the man penetrated thinks of himself as a sort of female, a pseudo-female, engaged in what is a pseudo-heterosexual act.
There's an insertive partner and a receptive partner, a dominant partner and a submissive partner, a masculine partner and a pseudo-feminine partner, a top and a bottom, a butch and a femme, a butch and a bitch.
That psychology is inescapable, and is what accounts for the high levels of effeminate behavior among gay men.
Furthermore, because the act is not intrinsically pleasurable, and indeed is painful, the receptive partner, in order to maintain the fiction that his anus is in some way a vagina, must constantly lie to himself about what he's actually feeling -- which means he has to deny the reality of the enormous disparity in pleasure between what he's experiencing and what the man penetrating him is enjoying.
And make no mistake: that disparity is real.
If being penetrated anally were as pleasurable as "bottoms" claim it is, and if the anus had the capacity to sense pleasure which gay culture attributes to it, then being anally receptive would be *inherently* pleasurable, and all men, regardless of sexual orientation or anything else, would find it so.
But they do not.
Few nongay men ever go near anal penetration.
And even among gay men, as we'll soon see, most men, rather than choosing both roles, elect to be either a "top" or a "bottom."
Yet if being anally receptive were inherently pleasurable, wouldn't all men seek that pleasure?
And if being anally receptive generated pleasure which in some way was analogous to that of the insertive partner's gential pleasure, wouldn't all men seek that too?
The reality is they do not.
Being penetrated anally is a learned behavior -- not inherent -- and at best an acquired taste.
Most "bottoms" will tell you that their first experience of anal was not pleasurable, and that they had to learn to tolerate penetration.
No "top" ever says the same, because he experiences genital stimulation, without pain, the moment he inserts his erect penis into the anus.
So the disparity in pleasure is vast, and it is real.
And no amount of analist propaganda can change that reality.
In addition, both partners have to be in denial about the presence of fecal material, including the odor of fecal material, which is of course unavoidable (Goldstone: "No matter how hard you try, your anus will always be an anus. You can't sterilize it... If necessary, try to move your bowels prior to sex.... The motion of the sex toy, your partner's hand or penis also stimulates colon contractions.... etc." ); and, in order for there to be any pleasure, they have to be in denial about the terrible element of danger they've invited into their lives (Goldstone: "Anal sex is the highest risk sex act that men who have sex with men can perform. Virtually every STD can pass between partners during anal sex, and for most, penetration isn't necessary and a condom may not protect you....").
What's more, generally speaking, and unless the encounter is explicitly sado-masochistic, both partners are in denial about the huge power difference between them.
There's a polite fiction, in that regard, that the passive partner is controlling the encounter.
|
But anyone who's taken part in anal penetration knows that in reality the insertive partner, simply by virtue of anatomy, is in control, and basically uses the anus and rectum of his partner for his own genital pleasure -- a warm moist hole which ultimately serves as a sperm depository.
Indeed, it's difficult to avoid doing that, since the biological impulse for the insertive partner, once penetration has been accomplished, is to move rapidly towards orgasm and ejaculation, maximizing his pleasure and excitement on the way, even if doing so means that he effectively brutalizes his partner.
Taken together, these factors -- effeminization; denial of pain and the pretense of pleasure; severe inequality in sensation; denial of the fecal realities; denial of the danger of disease; and the thuggish, virtually rapine use of the bottom by the top, all while maintaining the lie that the partners in penetration are equals -- account for the many destructive effects of anal penetration in gay male life and in the lives of gay men.
As one Alliance member succinctly observes
I have never wanted to identify as a bottom. But in situations where penetration was desired I could not top -- the idea is repugnant to me. So by default I tried bottoming from time to time. I've done it enough to know that it has no redeeming value, is not pleasurable, is messy and smelly, requires an unnatural amount of preparation, and basically serves only one person's interests -- that of the top. I'd go so far as to say that guys who are tops are some of the most selfish and controlling people around and that self-declared bottoms have a horrendous problem with low self-esteem ...
I developed a theory years ago which I have not shared with many others for concern of rejection basically. But in this case I feel I am in friendly and receptive territory; I lived among many gay men in the city for 11 years and there was always talk about relationships and questions about why gay relationships so seldom lasted. Based on my own experience I theorized that they don't last because when two men engage in a relationship and their most intimate time together is actually an act of brutality and oppression then how can love and mutual respect possibly last? Anal kills relationships!
[emphases mine]
And, says another,
There's no male connection, no bond, just raw lust. It's not sex or love, it's violence and power. The problem is implied in the politically-coerced masculine/feminine roles.
Adds a third,
And it is SOOOOO easy to hear the negative connotation that "Bottom" has. EVEN THOUGH.... to play the anal game.... one can't BE A TOP, UNLESS THERE'S A BOTTOM. It's so clear to me that there must be BOTH for it to work. Yet, one is held in MUCH LOWER REGARD!!! How fucked up is that?
The answer is: very, and literally so.
Consider this chart:
|
Compare:
Erectile tissue Genital tissue Genital response Richly sensorially endowed Multilayered mucosal lining Immunologically defended Strong muscular walls Self-lubricating Stretches readily Resists injury Meant to be penetrated Welcomes penetration |
Vagina Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes |
Anus No No No No No No No No No No No No |
Given these massive differences between the anus and the vagina, and the consequent huge disparities between anal penetration and penile-vaginal sex, what are we to make of gay male culture's obsession with anal?
Much analist discussion of the "pleasure" in anal references the proximity of the anus to the genitals, and suggests that when penetrated, the anus somehow picks up pleasure from the nearby genital area.
Let's think about that for a moment.
Suppose you have a friend who's a famous chef at a four-star restaurant, and he's prepared for you a wonderful dinner.
He's placed that dinner in the center of a large serving platter.
On the periphery of the platter, he has, somewhat perversely, put old, cold, oatmeal.
And some of the sauces from his wonderful main course have started to leach, in greatly diluted form, into that oatmeal.
Which would you eat?
The cold oatmeal with its occasional hint of watered-down flavors?
Or the delicious main course?
Of course, for this analogy to be apt, we'd have to add that the oatmeal was painful to swallow and choked you with every bite;
likely contained pathogens which would make you very ill and which could kill you;
and was known to cause mechanical injury to the digestive system.
In the case of our imaginary meal, this is a no-brainer.
We know we wouldn't go for the oatmeal.
Yet this is what "men into anal" do.
They are, physically, when they make this choice, in the groin.
They can choose between the source of the most wondrous earthly pleasure human beings can know -- the genitals; or the anus, an organ of fecal excretion, built to be an exit-only mechanism and which has no genital or erectile tissues.
It's the cold, tasteless, pathogen-ridden, easily infected and mechanically damaging oatmeal of this analogy.
Yet analists elect "anal stimulation" over pure genital sex.
That's irrational.
Bizarre.
Senseless.
Arguably insane.
There's no reason to do it, other than to produce a poor fascsimile of heterosexual intercourse.
Suppose gay men were truly intergendered and intersexed, and had both vaginas and penises.
And of course anuses.
Does anyone think we'd be having this discussion?
Does anyone imagine that anal penetration among gay men would be other than a curiousity, a tiny, weird, fringe practice?
We know the answer, because, in point of fact, there are people on this earth who, though they don't have penises, possess both vaginas and anuses.
They're called women.
And women overwhelmingly choose vaginal intercourse.
Even though there's a great risk of pregnancy, which, given that most heterosex is not reproductive in intent, most women want to avoid most of the time they're having sex.
Women nevertheless choose genital sex -- because it feels great, wonderful, ecstatic, blissful -- rather than anal penetration -- which is degrading and painful.
When heterosexual couples do anal, it's virtually always at the urging of the male partner, and that urging is *cultural* in origin.
For example, UCSF epidemiologist Daniel Halperin, in his study of anal transmission of HIV among heterosexuals, which is most common in Latin America and the Caribbean, notes that in some Latin cultures, it's said that a man has not truly had a woman until he's penetrated her three ways: vaginally, orally, and anally. [39]
Clearly, the last two of those have nothing to do with reproduction or the woman's pleasure.
They are rather a way of possessing her, and the idea is for the male to own the woman completely by "having" her in those three ways.
This is not about pleasure.
This is about dominance, control, power, subjugation, and degradation.
It's an act which at its core is sadistic.
Which is why one of our Alliance warriors noted, apropos homosexual anal penetration, "There's no male connection, no bond, just raw lust. It's not sex or love, it's violence and power. The problem is implied in the politically-coerced masculine/feminine roles."
Exactly.
These are politically- or culturally- coerced masculine/feminine roles, and that's all they are: roles, play-acting.
In sum, homosexual anal penetration is a poor imitation of heterosexual penile-vaginal intercourse which completely lacks not only the reproductive but the *mutually genital* essence of *sexual* intercourse.
And so quickly ceases to be about sex, and becomes instead about power and power alone.
While remaining the single most dangerous "sexual" behavior two people can engage in.
Yet gay men persist in the behavior.
Why?
Because there's an ideology underwriting and supporting it:
In our Man2Man Alliance policy paper Why Be Faithful?, we looked at the ideology which underlies gay male promiscuity, the secular belief system known to academics as "multipartnered pansexualism," and to the gay man-in-the-street as "promiscuous, anything goes sex."
We saw that this system views the combination of promiscuity and "sexual experimentation" -- that is, participation in a wide variety of acts defined as "sexual," even though most have nothing to do with genital sex -- as a social good, and encourages people, and particularly MSM, to have a wide range of sexual partners and experiences.
These experiences, which are sometimes and variously called raunch, kink, and sleaze in the gay male community, include such fringe practices as anal penetration, fellatio, oral-anal contact, the insertion of fists, dildoes, and other objects into the anus and rectum, the use of urine and feces during "sexual play," and various sado-masochistic activities, including the binding and beating of sexual partners.
And, as in any dominant culture, there are an enormous number and variety of cultural messages found in gay male culture which support these activities. [73]
Two of the most important are these gay male by-words: "Honor Diversity," and "It's all sex and it's all good."
Within this ideology, anal penetration occupies a special and indeed exalted place.
It's widely viewed as at once both the core and the most oppositional "queer" act, the homosexual behavior which defines the term sodomy, and which therefore best characterizes and is essential to this community of "sexual outlaws."
In reality, as we've seen, what anal penetration actually does is mimic the sexual behavior of the heterosexual majority, while robbing half of its participants of sexual pleasure.
Moreover, anal penetration is not unique to gay men; it's found among heterosexuals as well.
Nevertheless, anal penetration continues to play the central sexual role in gay male sexual life, with most gay men believing that an encounter which does not culminate in anal is deficient or lacking; and that true intimacy between men can only be achieved through the penetration of one partner by the other.
Thus the act is incessantly romanticized, elevated above all others, and marketed: presented as the highest and truest form of gay "sex," anal is discussed endlessly in newspaper and magazine articles, both in print and online; in sex manuals and other self-help books; and in low-, middle-, and high-brow gay male art, including novels, plays, television shows, legitimate cinema, and autobiography; and it is omnipresent, usually in sanitized and often romanticized form, in gay male graphic arts such as painting, in video pornography, and in literally millions of jpeg, gif, and bitmap images now available on the world wide web.
In addition, anal penetration is pushed incessantly by AIDS Service Organizations, other "Non-Governmental Organizations," and by their safer-sex educators through the social marketing of condoms -- known as "condom campaigns" -- which instruct MSM to "Use a condom every time, every time," they have sex, and which cost donors and taxpayers literally tens of millions of dollars per year.
As we would expect, anal penetration has a correspondingly great impact on social, cultural, and relational aspects of life in the gay male community as well, most apparently in the expectation that all gay men will self-define as either insertive or receptive anally.
Throughout gay male life, these two roles, known colliquially as "top" and "bottom," are ubiquitous. Virtually every gay internet dating site asks its users to identify as one or the other, and at parties and in bars and other social gatherings, one of the first questions a newcomer is expected to answer is which role he fills.
In order to understand how anal penetration achieved its present controlling and indeed dictatorial powers in present-day gay male life, we must first understand that the contemporary gay male community emerged from a revolutionary movement called Gay Liberation, and that Gay Liberation, like virtually all revolutionary movements since the Renaissance, sought to create a "new man," who would in key particulars be different from the human beings who preceded him.
Although Gay Lib, both as a coherent ideology and as a social movement, had ceased to be of consequence by the late 1970s, many of its ideas were picked up, if not well understood, by the gay male establishment and intelligentsia, which for more than thirty years has continued the attempt to construct a "new gay man," whose psychology and in a sense biology also are purported to be different from that of other, less evolved and advanced, human beings.
As I said, this phenomenon -- of the "new man" -- is common in secular revolutions.
For example the intent of the French revolution was to refashion humanity under the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity."
When Napoleon, having quashed, in the aftermath of the Terror, the first two of those, attempted to export "fraternity" to other countries, he ran into German, Russian, Spanish, and even Swiss nationalism, and the innate desire of men to rule themselves according to their own lights -- not someone else's.
Similarly, Lenin's "new Soviet-socialist man" was to live under the guise of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
Again, there were problems. People want to be able to keep the fruits of their labors and decide on their own whether and how they might be shared with others. So while they may and should have charitable impulses, they don't peaceably accept the seizure and forcible redistribution of their land and other property.
Thus when Lenin's successor Stalin decided to collectivize agriculture, he found that to do so he had to first kill hundreds of thousands of peasants who had been among the first to benefit from Lenin's land reforms.
In the case of the gay revolution, the idea was to fashion a new human being who would be, in large part, independent of biological sex -- that is to say, the sexual differences which characterize men and women and which are usually referred to by biologists and other scientists as "sexual dimorphism."
The term "sexual dimorphism" simply expresses the fact that within many species, there are significant physical differences between males and females, many of which are obvious.
For example, among lions, males have a distinctive mane and are physically larger than females.
Lions therefore are sexually dimorphic.
Similarly, in many bird species, the males have brightly-colored plumage and often other indicators, such as combs or unique feathering, while the females are relatively plain in appearance. [9]
Among human beings, there are similarly readily-apparent differences.
Human males have broader shoulders and narrower hips than females; have a higher degree of muscularity and a lower degree of body fat; are, on average, taller and significantly stronger than females; have, again on average, coarser facial features and both facial and usually body hair as well; and of course do not have breasts, but do have external genitalia.
Human females, by contrast, have narrow shoulders and broad hips; a higher degree of body fat; are smaller and on the whole muscularly weaker than men; have finer facial features; are relatively free of facial and body hair; and have prominent breasts while lacking external genitalia.
This sexual dimorphism is so profound among human beings, that if we try, as a sort of thought experiment, to imagine men and women without these defining characteristics, we find that we cannot do it -- that our brains rebel at the notion of men and women who look exactly the same except for the presence or absence of external genitals. [31]
In recent years, sociobiologists have made a persuasive case that human sexual bimorphism is not limited to appearance and reproductive apparatus, but extends to behavior as well.
We now know that cross-culturally, men are significantly more violent and aggressive than women [46]; and also cross-culturally that men and women pursue different reproductive strategies, which account for many of the differences we see in male and female behavior.
For example, men universally judge the attractiveness of women based upon their youth and likelihood of bearing strong, healthy children; while women universally look for men who will be good providers for themselves and their children. [11]
Among human beings then, as among many other species, sexual dimorphism isn't just physical, it's behavioral as well.
And homosexuals, like heterosexuals, are human beings first and foremost, and as such subject to the ordinary laws of biology and psychology.
Including the laws consequent to sexual dimorphism.
That is a fact which the gay male establishment and its dominant ideology does not want to acknowledge.
Because according to that ideology as formulated in the mid-70s and still with us today, the new gay man will and does exist outside the previous normative male-female sociobiologic and sexually dimorphic paradigms.
Like heterosexuals, his sex act is be penetrative, though of course anally rather than vaginally.
But unlike heterosexuals and, traditionally, most homosexuals, the new gay man, who is thought of as "intergendered," will play both roles: he will be "versatile," that is, both anally insertive and anally receptive.
Thus expressing sexually what he is psychologically: neither male nor female but both.
And in the best sense: for, it was argued, he would combine the male's strength with the female's intuition, sensitivity, and capacity to nurture, and so would truly be a "new man," a new type of human being which is an improvement upon the old.
Of course, from the 1970s on, it was clear that the reality was far removed from this ideal.
By 1975, for example, the male-androgynous look, popular in the late 60s, consisting of long hair and natural or undeveloped body types, was no longer considered physically desirable, and gay men had entered, in force, the era of the hyper-masculine clone, heavily muscled and mustachioed.
Although today the mustache has been abandoned in favor of the clean-shaven and short-haired military look, the favored and overwhelmingly desired body type remains that of the hyper-muscled male. [85]
That is so despite the fact that, since the mid-70s through the present, it's been clear that muscled exteriors are no guarantors of masculinity, that they are more likely to mask an effeminate, and often bitchy, queen within than they are to accurately represent the externalization of some internal male ideal.
But at least those queens were anally versatile and so able to participate fully in the core rite of the new gay man: anal penetration.
At the same time, the question must be asked, was and is that rite truly revolutionary?
Revolutions are complex, and inevitably contain elements of the old culture as well -- elements which are invariably reactionary.
For example, the Russian Revolution idolized workers and peasants, which is why the hammer and sickle are on the Soviet flag; but truth is that most of those folks were far from having a liberal cast of mind.
Just as Stalin represented a return to an older, more typically Tsarist style of governance, so did the emergence of anal penetration as the defining gay male act represent a return to an older, pre-revolutionary idea of gay men, which saw them as a species of pseudo-woman, a sort of intermediate or third sex.
To repeat: In the case of the gay revolution, the emphasis on anal receptivity and its attendant effeminization actually played into the leading heterosexist and most reactionary lie told about men who have sex with men: that they're not really men, but a species of pseudo-women.
This lie, which dates from the nineteenth century and which has no basis in biological fact, has been incredibly destructive in the lives of all men who have sex with men, whether they self-identify as gay, bi, or straight.
Yet most of the gay leadership had actually, on some level, bought into that lie during the 70s, and saw no contradiction in maintaining it at the heart of the subculture.
The result, though perhaps predictable, was also terrible.
In his classic 1998 book Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, gay jounalist Gabriel Rotello pointed out how important that notion of anal versatility, which became extremely widespread in the mid to late 1970s, was in spreading HIV. [62]
If gay men had limited themselves to being either anally receptive or insertive, the virus would not have spread or would have spread very slowly.
Why?
Because in the US, where most men are circumcised and STDs like syphilis usually treated quickly, insertive partners are at far lower risk than receptive. [4]
But because a man could be and indeed was encouraged to be anally receptive on one occasion and anally insertive on the next, these "new gay men" became the perfect agents for the spread of HIV:
Able to acquire the pathogen from one partner while being anally receptive, and then transmit it to the next partner while being anally insertive.
Rotello's book is generally considered seminal in our understanding of why there was an HIV epidemic among MSM, and that's because Rotello delineated the way biology interacted with ideology to create the AIDS epidemic.
And that's something we must never lose sight of.
So: the first effect of the dominant ideology of anal penetration and its invention of the new gay man was a devastating anally transmitted epidemic which killed hundreds of thousands of gay and bi men -- including most of the first generation of gay liberationists.
Which is what we would expect to happen in a revolutionary situation: revolutions are notorious for eating their children, and the gay revolution was no different in that regard.
Nevertheless, the ideology of the new gay man is still with us, and while the worst effects of HIV / AIDS have been contained among most American MSM through the development of new and more effective treatments, the disease itself continues to spread [41], while the act responsible for its transmission remains core to the subculture.
Further, far from freeing human beings from the restraints of gender and sexual dimorphism, the dominant ideology or culture of anal penetration has had the contrary effect of simply demonstrating how inescapable the facts of our biological sex are.
For one thing, the revolutionary ideal of versatility has by and large been lost, and most gay men have reverted to self-defining as tops or bottoms -- that is, male or pseudo-female -- exclusively.
Which is what we'd expect.
For, as we've already pointed out, if being penetrated anally were inherently pleasurable, or even came close to the sort of genital pleasure experienced by the insertive partner, *all* men would insist on being penetrated -- no man would willingly forgo increasing his pleasure during sex if all it took was getting penetrated.
But even among gay men who participate in anal, a significant number define as tops and refuse to be penetrated.
They're more than willing to use someone else's anus as a vagina substitute and his rectum as an ersatz womb.
But they won't let themselves be used in that way -- striking and very cogent testimony to the dysphoria of anal penetration and the need of men to behave like men.
Moreover, it's apparent there's an inter-relationship between and among anal penetration, effeminacy, and gay male promiscuity.
Again, this is a notion which is anathema to the gay male leadership and its gender feminist allies.
Nevertheless, this is how it works:
As sexually dimorphic beings, we conceive of men as penetrative and women as being penetrated.
This is not simply a function of culture.
Rather, it's a function of our most basic biology, and that's how we experience it.
On a visceral, subconscious, and indeed inchoate level.
When a man is penetrated, the act, he feels, turns him into a pseudo-woman.
And he is effeminized by it.
This point the gay leadership will not accept.
They insist that men experience penetration as degrading only because a patriarchal culture tells them it is, and that with enough education or what is really indoctrination -- and at this point, the AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) and their "safer-sex" educators are the prime agents of that propaganda -- a man will understand that it's not intrinsically degrading to be penetrated.
That is nonsense.
It might not be nonsense if human sexuality was purely a function of culture.
But human sexuality is not purely a function of culture -- it's primarily a function of biology.
Of course culture shapes some of our expression of that biology.
But it cannot change the underlying biology, nor the essentially dualistic nature of the process.
And for that reason, men experience penetration as degrading.
That's why, in the ancient world, and no doubt in many places still in the contemporary world, victorious soldiers raped their male prisoners -- to degrade and humiliate them.
What happens among contemporary gay men, though, is in some ways worse, since those gay men are taught to be in denial about what has actually happened.
The reality of the experience, however, breaks through in effeminacy, in self-loathing language, and in self-destructive behavior.
Thus it's common, as we've discussed, for anally receptive men to refer to themselves as mancunts, bottombitches, and pussyboys -- and -- most significantly -- as sluts and whores.
Sluts and whores of course are promiscuous women.
And that's the role these men assume.
So: anal penetration leads to effeminization which leads to promiscuity which leads to more anal penetration.
And so it goes.
Over time, the behaviors feed into and reinforce each other.
Effeminacy, for example, is both consequent to and facilitates anal penetration.
While a degraded, effeminate self-image leads to more promiscuity.
Were the leadership correct that men can be taught to accept penetration and not experience it as being in variance with their masculinity -- we would not see this process.
But men cannot be taught that.
We've had thirty years, after all, of analist propaganda about the allegedly masculine glories of being penetrated.
And still anally-receptive men refer to themselves as bottom bitches and sluts and whores.
It's more than apparent, after three decades of this particular social experiment, that anal penetration is, for a man as for a woman, intrinsically degrading.
How about the opposite -- does a man have to penetrate in order to retain his sense of being a man?
No.
Masculinity is biologically innate.
And because masculinity is innate, gay-identified Frot men retain their masculinity without penetrating men or women; that is to say, they experience themselves -- and those who know them experience them -- as masculine.
And they are certainly not effeminized.
Which is not surprising.
Because by not allowing themselves to be penetrated, they keep themselves completely out of the penetration, effeminization, promiscuity loop.
Of course many Frot men are not gay-identified but are rather bisexual and/or straight-identified; these men have usually had an extensive history of penile-vaginal sexual intercourse, and have a strong masculine identification.
But even gay-identified Frot men like myself, with little or no experience of penile-vaginal sex, retain our masculinity.
It's not necessary, then, for men to penetrate in order to have a masculine identity.
Because that masculine identity is part of their biological make-up -- literally, their genetic code.
But being penetrated is without question destructive of masculinity.
In addition, many Frot men, though not all, and independent of "sexual orientation," are into the more combative and aggressive expressions of Frot; and are into actual combat sports such as martial arts or wrestling as well.
wrestling often has an implicit frot component
as does jiu jitsu
as does UFC-style grappling
as does less formal fighting
which in frot is openly expressed
Thus, it's not surprising that many Frot men have wrestling fantasies, engage in combat sports, and seek to incorporate some element of those experiences into their sexual lives.
However, and because there's some confusion on this point, the extent of the aggression preceding and during sex should not be overstated. When we say "aggression," we're referring to typically male rough-housing and good-natured wrestling which may precede the actual Frot, and some mild roughness attendant upon male muscularity and male-male sexuality during sex itself.
We do *not* mean any expression of dominance or submission, or any infliction of pain.
Virtually no Frot men are interested in "dom/sub" or sado-masochistic practices.
But many are interested in, to some degree, combining fighting and sex.
In the Alliance, we conceptualize that desire as "natural male sex aggression":
is our Man2Man Alliance phrase for the hormonally-mediated tendency of males to
In the male, both sex and aggression are mediated by testosterone, and the two frequently feed upon each other.
For example, it's been demonstrated that winning a fight raises the victor's sperm count.
And that successful completion of a military exercise raises testosterone levels in all soldiers in the winning squad.
So fighting both requires and often raises testosterone, and higher levels of testosterone increase sex drive.
Many other typically male activities, such as rough-housing and "horsing around," raise testosterone levels as well, and it can be argued that much stereotypically male activity, particularly in groups, has the function of raising testosterone.
Thus men are frequently involved in activities, including various forms of fighting, which increase testosterone levels, and it's not surprising that men frequently associate, in varying degree, fighting and sex.
Among Frot men, that association commonly manifests as an abiding interest in myth and superheroes; fantasies about combining fighting and Frot; and various practices which do just that.
A common "Fighting and Frot" fantasy imagines two warriors, two mythic figures, or two comic book superheroes, meeting in battle, wrestling or otherwise fighting in a way which progresses to cock combat, and finally, at the moment when, as Mart Finn has said, "fighting cocks become mating cocks," bonding sexually, emotionally, and spiritually through Frot.
Thus Frot men frequently combine a combat scenario with an extreme male-bonding scenario, in which fighting leads to passionate love-making and, ideally, a life-long union of warrior brothers and heroic lovers.
(For more about natural male sex aggression and the role of myth, see our very popular adult article Superheroes, Myths, and Wrestling Buddies, in our collection of autobiographical statements, Warriors Speak.)
In short, it's natural for men to be aggressive during sex, and crucial that both men have the ability to be equally aggressive.
Does that mild aggression play a role in our essentially masculine IDs?
Yes.
Men need to be, to some degree, aggressive, including sexually.
And there's no question that many Frot men get off on each other's aggression during Frot, and in particular on the sense of phallic fighting, which is heightened by the sensation of mutual phallic thrusting, even when there's no overt "cock combat."
Phallic thrusting is key to male sexuality.
*Mutual* phallic thrusting is key to the shared masculinity and shared masculine experience of Frot.
This is not complicated.
In anal penetration, there's an active and a passive partner: one masculine, the other pseudo-feminine.
In Frot, both men are equally active: both are equally masculine.
Both participate equally in the biologically-mandated phallic thrusting which is at the heart of male sexuality.
That shared thrusting, equally aggressive, equally combative, and equally male, is the masculine essence of Frot.
And that's the reason there's such a sharp cultural divide between Frot men and analists.
Because while both are "men who have sex with men," their mindsets, assumptions, and practice could not be less alike.
During anal penetration, the receptive partner ceases to be a man; and, over time, analism degrades his manhood.
In Frot, both men remain men throughout the experience; Frot *enhances* the masculinity of both partners.
That's why it's essential, in this culture war, for Frot men to defeat the intergendered, effeminist view of MSM.
Analist MSM take a literally perverse pride in the role reversals and effeminization of anal penetration.
Frot men totally reject effeminization and any notion of gender-bending.
Frot men are proud to be men -- they enjoy and indeed revel in their masculinity, and in their shared masculinity during Frot.
Here are five views of Frot by the noted Frot artist EROS V; notice how in each instance the experience is mutually genital and equally masculine for both partners:
Frot:
both men are being stimulated genitally
through their mutual phallic thrusting
Frot:
both men are being stimulated genitally
through their mutual phallic thrusting
Frot:
both men are being stimulated genitally
through their mutual phallic thrusting
Frot:
both men are being stimulated genitally
through their mutual phallic thrusting
Frot:
both men are being stimulated genitally
through their mutual phallic thrusting
Let's return for a moment to the two images of penetration we saw earlier.
I identify with the penetrator
In the first, male-male image, I identify exclusively with the insertive partner, the so-called top, and what I think of as his male energy.
I find his thrusts exciting and relate them to my own thrusting during cock2cock.
I don't in any way identify with the guy being penetrated.
He's clearly in pain, he's in a subordinate, subjugated, and submissive posture, and he's obviously being used by the insertive partner -- he's not erect, and there's no indication that he's experiencing any sort of pleasure, genital or otherwise, from the act.
In short, nothing about him is expressive of male sexuality.
In such a situation, and given the realities of sexual dimorphism, I'll always identify with the insertive partner -- because he's visibly and behaviorally male.
I identify with the penetrator
In the second, male-female image, I also identify exclusively with the insertive partner -- because he's a man.
And though this image isn't animated, if it were I would, as with the previous image, identify with the man's thrusting and relate it to my own thrusting during Frot.
And while I can appreciate that both partners are involved in a mutually satisfying sexual event, I feel no identity with the woman -- I don't have breasts, I don't have a vagina, and I don't want to be penetrated.
So: a point we make repeatedly in the Alliance is that men who have sex with men -- whether they think of themselves as gay, bisexual, or straight -- are first and foremost men.
And while a minority of those men appear to be almost exclusively homosexual throughout their lives, they too are still men -- they have an XY chromosome pair and all the sexually dimorphically male secondary sexual characteristics.
Only in their erotic focus are they different from other men and other MSM.
Yes, some of them are effeminate -- but that's a function of culture -- not biology.
And every gay man has seen that culture in action: guys come out, and become increasingly effeminate as they're acculturated into gay male life and gay male mores.
To repeat: gay men are men.
And psychologically, for reasons which, because they are grounded in biology, cannot be talked away, men do not cope well with penetration.
It degrades and effeminizes them and effectively corrupts them.
Unfortunately, a certain segment of the gender feminist community thinks it's good for men to be effeminized.
These people, whether they are men or women, regard masculinity as the root of all evil -- that is of violence, aggression, war, and oppression -- and think anything which makes a man less "masculine" is desirable.
That particular piece of gender-feminist ideology has a lot of currency in certain gay male circles -- particularly among academics, the sort of people who teach gender theory and gay studies in our colleges and universities.
And it filters down via the analist intelligentsia, who dominate the gay male media, into mainstream gay male culture.
But the reality is that it's not good for men, regardless of sexual orientation, to be effeminized.
Of course one might prefer that men be less warlike and aggressive under certain circumstances and human beings in general less oppressive of each other.
But encouraging men to be anally receptive is not the way to change those behaviors.
Rather, all that has been achieved by encouraging gay men to be anally receptive -- is an increase in the number of self-loathing, self-destructive, gay men.
Further, the emphasis on effeminization and anal receptivity, though often touted, as we've seen, as revolutionary, actually plays into the leading heterosexist and most reactionary lie told about men who have sex with men: that they're not really men, but a species of pseudo-women.
This lie, which as we discussed earlier, dates from the nineteenth century and which has no basis in biological fact, has been incredibly destructive in the lives of all men who have sex with men, whether they self-identify as gay, bi, or straight.
That the gay male leadership and intelligentsia actually work to maintain the principal lie told by the oppressor at the heart of their subculture is shocking, and is behavior not found in any other minority group.
The result is that the central act of gay male "sex" is a poor imitation of heterosex.
As I say, no other minority leadership would encourage that sort of mimickry at the core of the subculture.
Black leaders don't endorse hair-straightening or skin-lightening, nor do Jewish leaders encourage Jews to bob their noses or change their names.
Yet the gay male leadership does what amounts to the equivalent.
That's truly shocking.
We men of the Alliance have been much criticized for asserting that anal penetration is degrading -- but it is.
There's so much wrong with anal medically that if anal were not degrading, there'd be no reason to say so.
But as it happens, it is.
The ideology of multipartnered pansexualism, which among majority culture gay men is an ideology of multipartnered anally-penetrative pansexualism, continues to insist that men experience penetration as degrading only because it's defined that way, and that once patriarchal and other reactionary forms of thought have been done away with, all men will be "new gay men," cheerfully and willingly anally receptive.
Not so.
Men experience anal penetration as degrading for a number of reasons which are readily apparent, including the presence of fecal material, the presence of pain, the absence of pleasure, and the way in which insertive partners routinely use anally-receptive men as means of achieving orgasm -- brutally, and with little regard for the anally-receptive man's sexual and orgasmic needs.
In addition, however, for reasons of sociobiology and human sexual dimorphism, being penetrated violates on a visceral, instinctive, emotional, and inchoate level, a man's sense of himself as a man.
And though he may still be able to function in society, his self-esteem takes repeated hits during every act of penetration, which then emerge in self-loathing behavior.
For MSM, as for women, anal penetration is degrading.
And like the dirt of feces and the danger of disease, degradation is an inescapable reality of anal penetration.
In the introduction, I characterized anal penetration as "a gruesome pseudo-sexuality and meaningless miasma of disease, domination, and pain which is literally fatally flawed."
And that's what it is.
"Pseudo-sexual" because it's not a mutually genital activity, and because it turns the anally-receptive male partner into a pseudo-woman; and
Gruesome because of the constant presence of fecal material and the danger of disease; and because of the way the insertive partner dominates and uses the receptive.
As we say on our Definitions page,
This painful act of penetration of one man by another is far more about power, brutality, and domination, than it is about love or even sex.
As one Alliance member says, "There's no male connection, no bond, just raw lust. It's not sex or love, it's violence and power. The problem is implied in the politically-coerced masculine/feminine roles."
Those "politically-coerced masculine/feminine roles" in anal penetration, which are most commonly known as top
(for anally-insertive) and bottom (for anally-receptive), create severe power inequalities and a hieratic structure among men who practice anal penetration. See, in that regard, and to better understand the power relationships between insertive and receptive actors, entries on Dom/Sub, effeminacy, intergendered , top, and bottom.
And the act itself of course creates and spreads various sexually transmitted diseases, often fatally.
Paradoxically, it is because of one of those diseases, HIV / AIDS, that anal penetration has had such staying power at the center of gay male sexual practice and life.
For, at the outset of the AIDS epidemic, anti-gay bigots made a huge issue of the anal transmission of the disease; one very prominent right-wing editor and writer even went so far as to make the notorious suggestion that those who were HIV+ be tattooed with that information on their buttocks.
The gay male community responded by circling the wagons around anal penetration and MSM promiscuity, insisting that how any individual might have acquired HIV could not be up for discussion, and that only treatment and prevention -- provided that prevention did not interfere with sexual freedom -- were fit topics of debate.
These ideas quickly became articles of faith among those who had created and were staffing the nascent AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) and who were developing "safer sex" guidelines.
And so there developed over time huge organizations dedicated to protecting the right, as they saw it, of gay men to participate in anal penetration and other fringe sexualities, and to be promiscuous, provided they used condoms to prevent the spread of disease.
The so-called condom code thus came to dominate all discussions of sexuality in gay male life, and the ubiquity of the admonition, "Use a condom every time, every time" soon made it appear that every time a gay man had sex, that sex would include anal penetration. [63]
So it was that the gay male community, which in the late 1970s and still led at times by Gay Liberationists, had begun to question the prevalence of promiscuity and anal penetration, was by the late 1980s totally locked in culturally to the system of anal promiscuity which prevails to this day.
Anal penetration resulted in AIDS, and the ongoing reaction to AIDS re-inforced the prevalence of anal. [74]
The one change, which, from a revolutionary point of view, was actually a step backwards, was that the establishment stopped lionizing anal versatility, and increasingly large numbers of gay men defined themselves as either "tops" or "bottoms."
Usually the latter, since to many to be passive anally now epitomized the "new gay man" and sodomite, and since young gay-identified men in particular believed that their natural role was to be anally receptive.
By the late 1990s, then, the gay male community, which had been created by the revolutionary ideology of Gay Liberation, was, in its view of sex, remarkably rigid and close in its perceptions to those of Gay Lib's old bugbear, the Heterosexual Dictatorship.
One sexual act, it was proclaimed, defined gay men, and those who didn't participate, weren't truly gay -- they were emotionally immature, pyschologically damaged, and sexually incomplete.
Which is exactly how the Heterosexual Dictatorship had characterized homosexuals throughout the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Clearly this new Gay Orthodoxy was as oppressive to MSM who didn't like anal penetration as the old heterosexual orthodoxy had been to gay men in general.
Thus my construction The Buttfuck Dictatorship -- a new form of sexual tyranny, with its own ideology, which had replaced the old hetero tyranny. [70]
To see that tyranny in action, we need only visit once again with our old friend Dr. Goldstone.
As is typical of tyrannies, Dr. Goldstone's thinking is often Orwellian.
As in "white is black" and "up is down" and "war is peace."
On Dr. Goldstone's GayHealth.com, what gives the site its Orwellian feel is the way he consistently and persistently promotes anal penetration while warning, as we've seen, that it's the "highest risk sex act men who have sex with men can perform." [35]
Note too, the way he says, "an anus is not a vagina," and then refers to the "mangina, as some men like to call it," [35] thus effectively negating his first statement and smoothly conflating the anus and the vagina.
Why would Dr. Goldstone say what he does?
It could be because he's an ano-rectal surgeon and makes money off of anal and its many discontents.
But there are many medical specialties and many ways for doctors to make money.
It's more likely that Dr. Goldstone chose to specialize in ano-rectal surgery because he's a true believer in the right of men to be penetrated, and that in establishing GayHealth.com and writing his book and many advice columns, he's simply, in Joseph Campbell's phrase, "following his bliss."
What's interesting however, is that -- and this is where the dominant culture's and analist's censorial impulses kick in -- he's not a true believer in the right of men to hear about other, less dangerous forms of male-male sex.
In other words, though he may think of himself as such, he's not a true sexual liberationist.
I know, because for more than two years -- starting in 2001 -- I and other men of the Alliance have asked him to put up a page on frottage.
He wouldn't and he still won't; go to his site and look -- there's no page there.
And although he acknowledges that not all gay men do anal, he also pushes anal among nongay men [33] , and asserts that gay men who don't do anal have "baggage" -- that is of course, pyschological baggage, of the sort that gay men were commonly said to have had vis-a-vis women four decades ago.
Goldstone's unceasing promotion of anal in the name of sexual freedom, accompanied by his denigration of men who don't do anal, is what marks him as an analist: an enthusiastic and unthinking supporter and promoter of the anal status quo.
Multiply media mavens like Dr. Goldstone by the tens of thousands, and give their words the power of peer pressure, and you have a dominant culture -- one which is every bit as wrong-headed and dictatorial as the "straight" culture it replaced.
Clearly then and to repeat, as it emerged, this new Gay Orthodoxy became as oppressive to MSM who didn't like anal penetration as the old heterosexual orthodoxy had been to gay men in general.
As it still is.
But it's axiomatic that wherever there's oppression, there's resistance, and sure enough, by the end of the 20th century and after almost 30 years of analist rule, Frot men began to rebel.
I published my first and seminal piece on the cultural tyranny of anal sex in 1999, and followed it with a widely-read article in October 2000 in which I coined the terms "Frot" and "Buttfuck Dictatorship," thus setting out the two cultural forces which would now clash.
In response to an upwelling of grass-roots support and autobiographical accounts confirming my description of the Frot man experience, I opened my first Frot site in October of 2000 on MSN; and a year later followed it with Heroic Homosex, a site dedicated not only to ending the cultural tyranny of anal penetration, but to destroying the promiscuity and effeminacy which have become entrenched beside it.
Finally, in order to accomodate the large numbers of bisexual and straight-identified MSM who had begun to embrace the movement, I founded The Man2Man Alliance, a coalition of gay, bi, and straight-identified Frot men who reject anal penetration, effeminacy, and promiscuity.
Now let me make clear that though I was the founder of these and various other sites, including Frot Club and Heroes and FrotMen.org, our work has actually been a collaboration among many guys, including Don Frazer, Chuck Tarver, Mart Finn, Benn Stockpeck, David McQuarrie, Luke Shelton, and Robert Loring -- and literally thousands of others who contributed to the conversation about anal and Frot by posting on our Personal Stories message board and/or corresponding with us by email.
So the Frot Movement is an authentic grass-roots movement, formed in response to oppression.
And although the Alliance has encountered stiff opposition from both the analist left and the religious right, its ideas continue to make inroads into the majority cultures, both gay and straight.
Nothing -- culturally -- lasts forever, and there's no reason to believe that the cultural domination of anal penetration is immune to that reality.
The death of that culture is just a matter of time.
It's the goal of The Man2Man Alliance to hasten the end of the anal hegemony, and insure that it's succeeded by an MSM culture which honors Masculinity; prizes Fidelity; and recognizes Phallus-on-Phallus for what it is: the natural, complete, and mutually genital expression of our most ardent and intimate Man2Man sexuality.
September 23, 2005
© All material Copyright 2017 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.
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9. Beeheler, B. M. (1989). The birds of paradise. Scientific American 261(6):117-123.
10. Bosch FX, Manos MM, Munoz N, et al., for the International Biological Study on Cervical Cancer (IBSCC) Study Group. Prevalence of human papillomavirus in cervical cancer: A worldwide perspective. J Natl Cancer Inst. 1995;87:796-802.
11. Buss, D. M. (1994). The strategies of human mating. American Scientist 82(3):238-239. See also Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human innate preferences: evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12:1-49.
12. Cervical Cancer Virus Linked to Some Head and Neck Cancer. (2001, May 10). Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
13. Chin, J, MD, MPH. Clinical Professor of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. (2002). Understanding the Numbers and Basic Epidemiology of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic. Poster presentation to the 2002 Taiwan International Public Health Workshop.
14. Chin-Hong PV et al. (2004) Age-specific prevalence of anal human papillomavirus infection in HIV-negative sexually active men who have sex with men: the EXPLORE study. J Infect Dis 190 (on-line edition).
15. Circumcision, condoms reduce risk of genital warts. (2004, October 7). Reuters Health.
16. Which begs the question, whose faith and whose family? Corporate Resource Council. (2002).
17. Dahir, M. (2003, February). A New Gay Plague? POZ.
18. Day, M. (2004, February 25). Oral sex linked to mouth cancer. NewScientist.com.
19. Diggs, J. (2002). The health risks of gay sex. Corporate Resource Council website.
20. Adapted from Diggs, J. (2002). The health risks of gay sex. Corporate Resource Council website, p. 3.
21. Diggs, J. (2002). The health risks of gay sex. Corporate Resource Council website, p. 6.
22. Dotinga, R. (2004, May 13). Obscure STD cases reported in Europe.
PlanetOut Network.
23. Dotinga, R. (2002, March 5). Study: 1 in 3 gay men have incurable STD. Gay.com / PlanetOut.com Network.
24. Drumright, LN. MPH; Gorbach, PM. MHS, DrPH; Holmes, KK. MD, PhD. (2004, July). Do people really know their sex partners?: concurrency, knowledge of partner behavior, and sexually transmitted infections within partnerships. Sex. Transm. Dis.; 31, 7.
25. Evans, Arthur. (2003, February). Personal communication.
26. For more about transactional vs interactional sex, see Mart Finn's CockToClock on The Man2Man Alliance.
27. See, for example, Fox, M; Rhoads, B. (2003, May 4). SARS Virus Can Live for Days in the Stool and Urine of Patients. Reuters.
28. Freeman, G. (2003, February 6). Bug-chasers: the men who long to be HIV+. Rolling Stone Magazine.
29. That's why we have warned, for more than four years on our dating message board, Frot Club, that "if men into frot become as promiscuous as men into anal have been, frot will lose its innocence and joy and become yet another vector for disease."
30. For a discussion of reciprocal altruism and its role in male-bonding, see Ghiglieri, MP. (1999). The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, pp 186-190.
31. Ghiglieri, MP. (1999). The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, p 13.
32. Goldstone, S. (2001, April 4). Finding the pleasure spot in my partner's anus.... GayHealth.com.
33. Goldstone, S. (2002, April 24). Is it normal for straight men to enjoy anal stimulation? GayHealth.com.
34. Goldstone, S. (2003, July 25). Is a fissure causing my pain during anal sex?
GayHealth.com.
35. Goldstone, S. Anal sex. GayHealth.com website. Not dated.
36. Gottlieb S. Oral sex may be important risk factor for HIV infection. BMJ. 2000;320:400
37. Green, EC. (2003, March 1). A plan as simple as ABC. New York Times.
38. Green, EC. (2003). Rethinking AIDS prevention. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
39. Halperin, DT. (1999, December). Heterosexual anal intercourse: prevalence, cultural factors, and HIV infection and other health risks, part I. AIDS Patient Care 13 (12):717-730.
40. Halperin, DT, Shiboski, SC, Palefsky, JM, and Padian, N. (2002) High level of HIV infection from anal intercourse: a neglected risk factor in heterosexual AIDS prevention. Poster presentation at the 2002 XIV International AIDS Conference in Barcelona.
41. HIV / AIDS Statistics. (2004, July). National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. See also Yee, Daniel. (2005, June 13). More Than a Million in U.S. Lives With HIV. Associated Press.
42. Hooper RR, Reynolds GH, Jones OG, et al. Cohort study of venereal disease. I: The risk of gonorrhea transmission from infected women to men. Am J Epidemiol. 1978;108:136-144.
43. Internet Use and Early Syphilis Infection among Men who have Sex with Men: San Francisco, California, 1999-2003. MMWR 2003 December 19; 52:1229-1232. [If you follow the link, note the number of partners the infected individuals had had.]
44. There were many news reports about this phenomenon, which baffled researchers and physicians. See for example, James, JS. (2003, February 7). Anti-biotic skin infections spreading among gay men, also in prisons. AIDS Treatment News, Issue #388; Torassa, U. (2003, February 1). Bacteria resisting drug treatment infection outbreak elsewhere appears among gay men in S.F.. The San Francisco Chronicle.; Dahir, M. (2003, February). A New Gay Plague? POZ.
45. Klausner, J, MD. Kissing and mutual masturbation. Medical sex advice column on Gay.com. Not dated.
46. Konner, M. (1982). The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, p. 109.
47. Mann JR, Stine CC, Vessey J. The role of disease-specific infectivity and number of disease exposures on the long-term effectiveness of the latex condom. Sex Transm Dis. 2002;29:344-349.
48. Medical Institute Advisory. (2004, March 11).
49. Medical Institute Advisory. (2004, May 27).
50. Medical Institute Advisory. (2004, July 1).
51. List adapted from Medical Institute Advisory (2004, March 11).
52. Syphilis. (2004). Medical Institute for Sexual Health.
53. Miles, AJG, et al. (1993, March). Effect of anoreceptive intercourse on anorectal function. J of R Soc of Med. 86:144-147.
54. Page-Shafer K, Shiboski CH, Osmond DH, et al. Risk of HIV infection attributable to oral sex among men who have sex with men and in the population of men who have sex with men. AIDS. 2002;16:2350-2352.
55. Pinkerton, JP. (2004, August 6). As the AIDS Bureaucracy Cashes In, the Prospect of a Cure Dims. Los Angeles Times.
56. Poletti PA, Halfon A, Marti MC. Papillomavirus and anal carcinoma. Int J Colorectal Dis. 1998;13:108-111.
57. Rauch, J. (2004, August 15) Imperfect Unions. New York Times.
58. Reynolds SJ et al. Male circumcision is protective against HIV-1 but not other common sexually transmitted infections in India. (2003). 41st Annual Conference of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, San Diego.
59. Richens, J., Imrie, J., & Weiss, H. (2003). Sex and death: why does HIV continue to spread when so many people know about the risks? J. of R. Statist Soc A 2003;166, 207-215.
60. Rompalo, A. (1990, November). Sexually transmitted causes of gastrointestinal symptoms in homosexual men. Medical Clinics of North America. 74(6):1633-1645.
61. Rotello, Gabriel. (1998). Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men. New York: Plume.
62. Rotello, Gabriel. (1998). Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men. New York: Plume. See in particular Chapter 2, Gay Sexual Ecology.
63. Tarver, Chuck. Fighting the Conformity That Kills. (2003, August). Paper presented at the Black Gay Research Summit.
64. Tuller, D. (2003, February 18). Some urge type of pap test to find cancer in gay men. New York Times.
65. Walboomers JM, Jacobs MV, Manos MM, et al. Human papillomavirus is a necessary cause of invasive cervical cancer worldwide. J Pathol. 1999;189:12-19.
66. Wald A, Langengerg AG, Link K, et al. Effect of condoms on reducing the transmission of herpes simplex virus type 2 from men to women. JAMA. 2001;285:3100-3106.
67. Weller S, Davis, K. Condom effectiveness in reducing heterosexual HIV transmission (Cochrane Review). In: The Cochrane Library, Issue 1 2003. Oxford: Update Software.
68. To understand the parallels between Goldstone's denigration of men who don't do anal, and the heterosexual denigration of homosexuals, see Weintraub, B. (1999, December). Hyacinthine love, or some thoughts on cock-rubbing and the cultural tyranny of butt-fucking; and Weintraub, B. (2000, November). Frot: the next sexual revolution. Both are available on The Man2ManAlliance website.
69. Weintraub, B. (2003, February). Biological Imperative or Cultural Dictate? Bug-chasing, Bare-backing, and the Safer Sex Establishment. On The Man2Man Alliance.
70. Weintraub, B. (2000, October). The Buttfuck Dictatorship available on The Man2Man Alliance.
71. Weintraub, B. (2002, February 16). Do gay men have to be promiscuous?. 365Gay.com. Available on The Man2Man Alliance.
72. Weintraub, B. (2001, August). Heroic Homosex: Toward a New Concept of M2M. On The Man2Man Alliance.
73. See Weintraub, B. (2004, February 5). Multipartnered Pansexualism or Heroic Love for a selection of representative cultural messages from the dominant culture of anal penetration.
74. See Weintraub, B. (2004, February 5). Multipartnered Pansexualism or Heroic Love for a full discussion of the way AIDS prevention programs came to reinforce the dominant culture of anal penetration.
75. Weintraub, B. (2002, February 23). Risk Reduction or Cultural Change? Available on The Man2Man Alliance.
76. For an example of the sort of treatment our ideas receive in the gay male press, see Weintraub, B. (2005, September). Walter Odets, the sex police, and the big lie.
For further discussion of press censorship of my and other Alliance work, see the introductory notes to the articles under Weintraub, B. (2000, November 6), Frot: The Next Sexual Revolution.
77. I compare the mutual genitality of penile-vaginal sex with the mutual genitality of penile-penile sex (Frot) in Weintraub, B. (2002, February 23). What Sex Is. Available on The Man2Man Alliance.
78. Whitehead, BD and Popenoe, D. (2004, July). The State of Our Unions 2004 / Essay: The Marrying Kind: Which Men Marry and Why. Rutgers University.
79. Workshop Summary: Scientific Evidence on Condom Effectiveness for Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Prevention. July 20, 2001. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services. Available at: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/dmid/stds/condomreport.pdf
80. Zenilman, J.M., Weisman, C.S., Rompalo, A.M., Ellish, N., Upchurch, D.M., Hook E.W. 3rd et al. (1995). Condom use to prevent incident STDs: the validity of self-reported condom use. Sex. Transm. Dis.; 22,15-21.
81. Zuckerman, RA, Whittington, LH, Celum, CL, et al. (2004, July 1). Higher Concentration of HIV RNA in Rectal Mucosa Secretions than in Blood and Seminal Plasma, among Men Who Have Sex with Men, Independent of Antiretroviral Therapy. J of Inf Dis 190 (1): 156-162.
82. Of course many Frot men are not gay-identified but are rather bisexual and/or straight-identified; these men have usually had an extensive history of penile-vaginal sexual intercourse.
83. However, and because there's some confusion on this point, this should not be overstated. When we say "aggression," we're referring to typical male rough-housing and good-natured wrestling which may precede the actual Frot, and some mild roughness expressive of male muscularity during sex itself.
We do *not* mean any expression of dominance or submission, or any infliction of pain.
Virtually no Frot men are interested in "dom/sub" or sado-masochistic practices.
84. "Rarely" does not mean never. Although Frot is without question less risky than other forms of sex, including penile-vaginal intercourse, gay male promiscuity has the potential of off-setting that advantage. Interested readers are referred to our Man2Man Alliance policy paper Why Be Faithful? for a full discussion of the dangers inherent in sexual promiscuity.
85. Numerous gay male dating sites, such as GayMuscle.com, attest to the ongoing popularity of this look.
86. What about the prostate?
The prostate is often labeled the male "g-spot."
Yet in his response, Goldstone makes no mention of it.
That's because the prostate is simply not involved.
As one Frot man puts it:
I keep on hearing about this prostate gland / Male G spot. Nonsense. The prostate gland is not a sexual organ, it's a gland smaller than a ping pong ball. I don't know about you but my G-spot is my dick, simple as that. The way it feels when my buddy rubs it the right way, I don't need any other G-spot in my body. Not only that, the prostate is located a couple inches in and down toward your dick. And 2 inches, not 6, 7, or 12 inches for all you size queens. Because of its position, it's easier to reach it with your finger than with a dick.
That's correct.
And what does applying digital pressure to the prostate have to do with sex?
Nothing.
When I was a young man, I had sex with a doctor, also a young guy, who "massaged my prostate" during sex.
Like I say, he was a physician, and he certainly knew what he was doing.
Yet to this day, I have no idea what that pressure on my prostate had to do with sex.
What he did, though it happened during sex, was not sex.
Like oral-anal activity, digital-anal activity has nothing to do with sex.
It's just another dopey analist idea of something you can do with your anus in the name of sex.
But that does not make it sex.
87. The term "Orwellian" refers to George Orwell's classic dystopia 1984, in which the Ministry of Truth is constantly bombarding the populace with propagandistic lies.
Orwell, who was one of the 20th century's most astute political thinkers, recognized that human beings have a great capacity to both accept lies and to lie themselves, as he makes clear in this quote:
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue. And then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
Orwell, George. In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950 (Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell). Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Nonpareil: 2000.
Note also this famous quote from Orwell: "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
I look more deeply at the congruities between analist cant and totalitarian propaganda in Weintraub, B. (2005, September). Walter Odets, the sex police, and the big lie.
October 2004 -- September 2005
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