What it means when men want anal sex

Some guys are boobs men. Others are legs men. But in the bedroom, all are bum men. I do not know a heterosexual woman alive who has not, at some point, experienced a partner trying to use her backdoor instead of the front. There are the curious gents, gently investigating if the key fits. Others are as unsubtle as the pile of junk mail flyers that stumbles through your letterbox every week. But the male goal is the same: they want in.

Only, why do they? And why don’t we? I know plenty of women who’ve tried anal play, but I don’t know a single one who initiated it – or who’d admit to it without that other essential lubricant, wine. “It’s all that internet porn men are watching,” I hear you cry – and, yes, true. Over the last six years, PornHub has reported a 78% increase in the number of searches for anal clips. Yet when I started university – a time before a phone could send a photo let alone stream PornHub – guys’ drunken banter still involved cheers of “Up the bum, no harm done!” The irony was that most were virgins and had little idea how to handle a vagina, heaven forbid anything more complex. Still, they wanted to. That’s the allure of the arse.

But if porn and peer pressure are only half the motivation, what’s the rest? I got sex therapist Mike Lousada to break down men’s fascination with the hole-y grail of sex. And, oh my, it’s interesting.

At its most basic, men crave novelty more than women

“If a woman finds something that she likes sexually, she usually wants that repeated again and again. Whereas men seem to need different stimuli to stay engaged. The anus and anal sex is more taboo than vaginal sex; it’s perceived as ‘dirty’. If a woman is open to it, it implies that your sex life is ‘dirtier’, too.” And ‘dirty’ is a label that novelty-addicted guys crave – not fear.

Anal sex avoids intimacy – cue the commitment-phobes

“The most common position in anal sex is for the woman to be bent over, with the man on top or over her, looking at her back. For men, a sense of power and domination comes with that. There’s also no real connection: there’s no face-to-face interaction, no eye contact, it avoids intimacy and is not seen as a ‘relationship experience’. In our culture, men’s emotions are more supressed than women’s. So men might find anal sex more comfortable because of the lack of intimacy, while women might find it less satisfying because of the same thing.”

Men are secretly fascinated by their own bums

“There’s a deep psychological thing for guys because their anus is the source of enormous pleasure for them, with the prostate located there (in the rectum). Men may not have experimented with that, but in their psyche they’ll know that part of the body is capable of giving great pleasure. Because of lingering homophobia in our culture – even though homosexuality is normalised, good and healthy – there’s still this internalised idea, “If I enjoy having something up my arse that means I’m gay, and I am not gay.” So men displace their own desires to experience pleasure in that part of the body, and put them onto women.” So there’s an ulterior – well, posterior – motive, after all.

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