Bill Weintraub

Re: IS ANAL PENETRATION PLEASURABLE?

1-11-2005

Quite an odyssey.

Thank you Oscar.

Essentially what Oscar's saying is that you can only call anal "pleasurable" if you radically redefine the term.

So that "pleasure" no longer means what we ordinarily mean it to mean.

It reminds me of that moment in an old Star Trek movie when the Vulcan ambassador remarks that "Klingon justice is a unique point of view."

So is "anal pleasure."

It's a unique point of view which requires, like everything else in the topsy-turvy world of the analists, that we turn the definition of pleasure on its head, and define as pleasurable something which manifestly is not.

But which is, rather, painful, empty, and degrading.

Much of the 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, as one scientist has said, an exit-only mechanism and which has NO GENITAL TISSUE.

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, painful, and pleasureless.

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.

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 Warrior Gene remarked on this board a year ago, 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.

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.

I started this post with a quote from the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

The rest of that Klingon-Vulcan exchange, which is more than apt, goes something like this:

Klingon ambassador: We demand justice.

Vulcan: Klingon justice is a unique point of view.

Klingon: We demand our rights.

Vulcan: Do your rights include murder?

Good question.

In a speech given at NYC's Cooper-Union on Nov 7, 2004, AIDS activist and GMHC-ACT/UP founder Larry Kramer spoke of "murdering" his sexual partners through anal penetration, and having been murdered by them.

You [gay men] are still murdering each other. Please stop with all the generalizations and avoidance excuses gays have used since the beginning to ditch this responsibility for this fact. From the very first moment we were told in 1981 that the suspected cause was a virus, gay men have refused to accept our responsibility for choosing not to listen, and, starting in 1984, when we were told it definitely was a virus, this behavior turned murderous. Make whatever excuses you can to carry on living in your state of denial but this is the fact of the matter. I wish we could understand and take some responsibility for the fact that for some 30 years we have been murdering each other with great facility and that down deep inside of us, we knew what we were doing. Don't tell me you have never had sex without thinking down deep that there was more involved in what you were doing than just maintaining a hard-on.

I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend's death. I listed all the ones I'd slept with. There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick? It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know. You know how you sometimes know things? I know. Several hundred over a bunch of years, I have to have murdered some of them, planting in him the original seed. I have put this to several doctors. Mostly they refuse to discuss it, even if they are gay. Most doctors do not like to discuss sex or what we do or did. (I still have not heard a consensus on the true dangers of oral sex, for instance.) They play blind. God knows what they must be thinking when they examine us. Particularly if they aren't gay. One doctor answered me, it takes two to tango so you cannot take the responsibility alone. But in some cases it isn't so easy to answer so flippantly. The sweet young boy who didn't know anything and was in awe of me. I was the first man who fucked him. I think I murdered him. The old boyfriend who did not want to go to bed with me and I made him. The man I let fuck me because I was trying to make my then boyfriend, now lover, jealous. I know, by the way, that that other one is the one who infected me. You know how you sometime know things? I know he infected me. I tried to murder myself on that one.

To this day, the analist so-called community can not decide whether the right to do anal includes the right to infect a partner with HIV, and thus lead to his death.

That's a remarkable moral failing.

But given the physical and psychological realities of anal penetration, not surprising.

I'll have a lot more to say about this in Part 2 of an anus is not a vagina, The Psychology of Anal Penetration.

For now I thank Oscar for his frank and honest memoir, and refer you guys to two other posts on this board:

Joel's The Cycle of Anal Abuse;

and Robert Lorspir's The Ultimate Defeat.

Never accept analist lies about anal penetration and pleasure.

Listen to your body and your common sense, and remember that