I first wondered about how to prepare for anal sex when I was in college. I was 21, an age when everything is sort of do-or-die, especially regarding love. I had a couple of friends who had tried anal sex, but I judged them ruthlessly for it. Anal sex was something I decided I would just never, ever do. Then my boyfriend, my darling, my love, the man I planned to be with until I died, suggested we try anal too. For the record, my female friends did not agree with this assessment. Still, I was suddenly intrigued. I layed flat on my stomach one night in my apartment, and with my roommate just on the other side of the bedroom door watching Sex and the City reruns, I did it. It was While anal sex is more mainstream than ever a study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reported that 46 percent of women had tried it , the taboo around this particular sex act still very much persists.

2. You absolutely, positively need to use lube.
Intelligencer
Anal sex may still be shocking to your grandma, but heterosexual couples in the UK are increasingly incorporating the sexual practice into their love lives. Or does it? The Tinder-generation get a bad rap for their sexual promiscuity and attitudes to the bedroom, but turns out anal sex is more common between spouses than strangers. Put a ring on it guys. When Gwyneth Paltrow interviewed sex expert Paul Joannides about the ins and outs of anal sex for her lifestyle website Goop, he emphasised the importance of training your sphincter muscles to relax in order to achieve successful penetration. The NHS recommends using a water-based lubricant, which is available from pharmacies. A study published in the medical journal BMJ Open, attempted to work out why straight men and women engage in anal sex, and they found the reasoning was pretty different. While men in the study tended to correlate anal sex with pleasure and macho sexual achievement, women brought up a fear of physical pain and a damaged reputation, and were only doing it to please their partner. How disappointing.
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Sexual risk-taking is influenced by individual, interpersonal and social factors. In-depth interviews were conducted with 88 women from South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Findings reveal that despite its social stigmatisation, women engage in penile-anal intercourse for reasons including male pleasure, relationship security, hiding infidelity, menstruation, vaginal infections, money and beliefs that it will prevent HIV transmission. In addition, participants described experiences of non-consensual penile-anal intercourse. We used sexual scripting theory as an analytical framework with which to describe the sociocultural and relationship contexts and gendered power dynamics in which these practices occur. Condomless penile-anal intercourse is a high-risk sexual activity for HIV transmission; moreover engaging in heterosexual penile-anal intercourse has also been shown to be associated with other practices that increase HIV risk, such as condomless sex, alcohol and substance use, trading sex and having multiple concurrent sexual partners Kalichman et al. Limited evidence suggests that women in sub-Saharan Africa substitute penile-anal intercourse for vaginal sex for an array of reasons, including as a means of contraception, during menstruation, to ensure relationship stability and because they perceive it as a way to avoid contracting sexually transmitted infections STIs and HIV Duby and Colvin Heterosexual decision-making is limited by gendered power inequities; unequal gendered power distribution and male-to-female HIV transmission are correlated Rosenthal and Levy Although there is variation between cultures, traditional gender roles generally portray men as the dominant, controlling initiators in heterosexual relationships.
Illustration by Lia Kantrowitz. Just a few decades ago , outside of queer circles, it was seen as a taboo act that only about a tenth of men and a quarter of women would cop to researchers to having tried at least once. Now, anal is a fixture of mainstream pop, not to mention porn, culture.