This article originally appeared on AlterNet. With anilingus currently in so many editorial spreads and on the tip of so many tongues, it bears noting that Mozart wrote a song about eating ass. What took us so long? After hardly being spoken of publicly for the last few centuries—or the decade and a half since Charlotte confessed to performing it on "Sex and the City"—anilingus has finally became a featured player in pop culture. If asses are just newfangled knottier vaginas, the act of having your ass licked is innately one of feminization.
Through the lens of heteronormativity and patriarchy, anilingus is for everybody—that is, as long as the bodies being acted upon are female. The idea that ass play somehow makes you gay, and not just a human who has a staggering number of nerve endings down there, is a notion that dies hard, yet it seems to be receding ever so slightly. A study of more than 1, heterosexual American men found that among those who had experienced heterosexual anal sex, giving and receiving anilingus was fairly commonplace.
Twenty-four percent had performed anilingus on their female partners, while a healthy 15 percent had received it. Another 24 percent had been anally fingered. More recently, a Esquire poll of men found that 12 percent secretly wished they were getting more anilingus. The shift, in both attitude and practice, is likely an outgrowth of the fact that anal sex has steadily been making inroads with heterosexuals over the last two decades. In , a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of people age 18 to 59 found that just 20 percent of women and 26 percent of men had tried anal sex.
By the time the CDC again posed the question in to 13, people between the ages of 15 and 44, heterosexual anal sex was more popular than ever. Forty-four percent of men and 39 percent of women had engaged in straight anal sex, a leap that seems nothing short of impressive. It follows that the ever-expanding perception of the anus as a sexual organ would manifest in multiple—and fluid—forms of butt play, from sticking to licking.
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Last year alone, unisex guides to performing anilingus appeared in magazines as diverse as Ebony , Cosmopolitan and GQ. Cast in this light, anilingus is an equal-opportunity sex act that implies neither domination nor submission, but a more general, power-balanced form of sexual pleasure.
