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Butt sex for President!
By Slutty Girl Problems — Written on May 17, 2017
Today, anal sex plays a primary role in the erotic literature of homosexual as well as heterosexual masochism. It has gradually become a common practice not only among gay men, but also lesbians and heterosexual men and women.
Although, according to author Richard Fantina in his book Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism submitting to sodomy can be “both painful and accompanied by an aura of humiliation,” some can barely resist themselves from partaking in the pleasure and pain that anal sex engenders.
Regarding the physical pleasure, it is stated in The New Our Bodies, Our Selves:
“The anus can be stimulated with fingers, tongue, penis or any slender object. For many of us, it is a highly sexually sensitive area."
Thus, it is possible to achieve a state of bliss — or jouissance — through the stimulation of the anus in a gentle and proper way.
As for the psychological aspect, some believe this is far more complicated, as they feel it relates to humiliation and the sense of guilt produced by the superego.
According to the work of Sigmund Freud, a man who holds the desire to “be copulated with” characterizes masochism. Later expanding on Freudian theory, Leo Bersani believed there is a strong link between masochism and sodomy: “self-shattering jouissance."
To be able to understand what “self-shattering jouissance” means, first, we have to see Freud’s comments on human sexuality:
- “Human sexuality is constituted as a kind of psychic shattering, as a threat to the stability and integrity of self — a threat which perhaps only the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to survive.”
- “We desire what nearly shatters us, and the shattering experience is, it would seem, without any specific content — which may be our only way of saying that the experience cannot be said, that is, belongs to the nonlinguistic biology of human life.”
On the basis of the descriptions above, we could be led to believe that human sexuality is a threat to the self as it destabilizes our ego.
However, as humans, we seek to experience what nearly destroys our ego, the shattering stimuli, in order to become more “human.”
Freud believed this paradoxical condition is then alleviated by masochism.
Thus, this led to the points made by Fantina that masochism functions as a vehicle to fill the “gap between the period of shattering stimuli and the development of resistant or defensive ego structures" and that, therefore, “masochism lies at the very core of all sexuality.”
Sodomy, which they believed to be an essential component of masochism and S&M, also represents an important issue when we talk about human sexuality.
Whether the anal sex in question is male-on-female, female-on-male, female-on-female, or male-on-male, we recognize the fact that men and women both have anuses and therefore, they can desire “the same.”
In this sense, the mutual interest in and enjoyment of sodomy can be positioned as a method with which to promote gender and sexual equality.
Anal sex “remains a polymorphous practice that transcends categories of sexual preference,” as Fantina notes.
This transcendental act further calls into question our current system of gender and sexuality classifications, which is insufficient in covering the diverse desires of human beings.
And by doing so, brings us a step closer to embracing more fluid notions of sexuality.
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This article was originally published at Slutty Girl Problems. Reprinted with permission from the author.