Popularity of anal sex
October 4th 2005, 15:30 Jeff Sela
Tristan Taormino has an interesting piece on the Village Voice website, called An Ode to Ass. She talks about the growing importance of anal sex in mainstream culture. This is reflected in the popularity of porn films which focus on anal sex. She concludes:
The growing popularity of that puckered hole and where it leads is undeniable. Anal sex represents the ultimate collision between public and private: A person gets to go inside another's deepest, darkest place, to feel it and to know it through an erotic act laced with cultural taboos (more so than other acts). In Hollywood movies, buttfucking is still most often shown as degrading; in some gay-male fisting videos, it's portrayed as a transformative experience. In porn, it seems that there's some of both, mirroring the capacity of anal sex to be represented, imagined, and experienced as intense violation, stunning revelation, or something else entirely.
I hadn't heard of Taormino before, but she seems to write sensible things. See for example her take on ‘abstinence-only’ non-education, namely Fuck Abstinence. I'll keep an eye on her blog.
