Experimentation, orgasms, and the rise of anal sex.

- By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

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The Ass Man Cometh

Experimentation, orgasms, and the rise of anal sex.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2010, at 7:58 AM ET

A new national sex survey is out. Published in the

Journal of Sexual Medicine, it reveals who's doing
what, with whom, and how. It clarifies the
prevalence of gay sex, teenage intercourse, and
oral gratification. But the big story is the increase
in anal sex reported by women—and its possible
connection to female orgasms.

Let's start with the

foreplay: a few other PRINT

trends worth noting. DISCUSS

New s tu dy reveal s what goe s o n be h in d
A mer icans' bedr oom do o rs E-MAIL
1. What teens are
doing. By ages 14-15, RSS

10 percent of boys say they've had vaginal sex. By ages 16-17, RECOMMEND...
the number is up to 30 percent. By ages 18-19, it's above 60
percent. For girls, the trajectory is almost identical. Oral sex SINGLE PAGE

follows a similar trend. At ages 14-15, 9 percent of boys say

they've performed cunnilingus. By ages 16-17, 20 percent say
they've done it, and by ages 18-19, 61 percent say they've done
it. Among girls aged 14-15, the number who say they've given a
boy oral sex is 13 percent. By ages 16-17, it's 29 percent. By
ages 18-19, it's 61 percent. If you're turning 20 and you haven't
gone down on somebody, you're in the minority.

2. Oral ubiquity. It's funny to look back at the previous national survey, taken in 1992. In
that report, the authors marveled at the mainstreaming of oral sex. Now the whole question
of its normality seems silly. By ages 25-29, eight of every nine women have performed
fellatio, and half have done it in the past month. For men and cunnilingus, the numbers are
only slightly lower. More people think the president is a Muslim than adhere to oral chastity.

Advertisement
3. Reciprocity. Women are getting as
good as they're giving. By ages 25-
29, 88 percent say they've received
oral sex from a man, and 72 percent
say they've received it in the last year.
(Men confirm this: 86 percent say
they've given it, 74 percent in the last
year.) That's pretty close to the 91
percent of men aged 25-29 who say
they've received oral sex from a
woman and the 77 percent who say
they've received it in the past year.

4. Homosexuality. Apparently, a lot

of people try gay sex, but only about
half stick with it. By ages 18-19, 10
percent of men say they've performed fellatio. That number drops among men in their 20s

http://www.slate.com/id/2269951/[10/10/2010 2:05:14 AM]

Experimentation, orgasms, and the rise of anal sex. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

and 30s. But among men in their 40s and 50s, 13 percent say they've done it, and 14
percent to 15 percent say they've received it from another man. Meanwhile, 11 percent of
men aged 20-24 say they've received anal sex. For unknown reasons, that number declines
in the next higher age bracket but then steadily rises in succeeding brackets, leveling off at
9 percent among men in their 40s and 50s.

Remember, these are "have you ever" questions. When men aged 20-59 are asked whether
they've performed fellatio in the past year, the number is more like 6 percent. And only 4
percent say they've received anal sex in that time. But that's a big jump from 1992, when
only 2 percent of men admitted to sex with a man in the preceding year.

For women, the gap between trying gay sex and sticking with it is greater. From ages 20 to
49, the number who say they've performed cunnilingus ranges from 10 percent to 14
percent, but the number who say they've done it in the last year is more like a quarter of
that.

5. Anal sex. Here's the big story. In 1992, 16 percent of women aged 18-24 said they'd
tried anal sex. Now 20 percent of women aged 18-19 say they've done it, and by ages 20-
24, the number is 40 percent. In 1992, the highest percentage of women in any age group
who admitted to anal sex was 33. In 2002, it was 35. Now it's 46.

The last time I looked at the anal sex data, I figured that most women who reported having
done it meant they'd tried it just once. I was wrong. If you push these women beyond the
"have you ever" question, the numbers stay surprisingly high, and they're getting higher. In
1992, the percentage of women in their 20s and 30s who said they'd had anal sex in the
past year was around 10 percent. Now that number has doubled to more than 20 percent,
and one-third of these women say they've done it in the last month. Among all women
surveyed, the number who reported anal sex in their most recent sexual encounter was 3
percent to 4 percent.

That's a lot of butt sex. And remember, this is what women are reporting. If anything,
they're probably understating the truth.

So what's with all the buggery? Is it brutality? Coercion? A porn-inspired male fantasy at
women's expense?

Apparently not. Check out the orgasm data. Among women who had vaginal sex in their last
encounter, the percentage who said they reached orgasm was 65. Among those who
received oral sex, it was 81. But among those who had anal sex, it was 94. Anal sex
outscored cunnilingus.

No way, you say.

Way. Read the data. Table 5, Pages 357-8.

What could explain this? Taboo thrill? Clitoral migration? Some new kind of vegetable oil?

Here's my guess. Look carefully at Table 4, Pages 355-6. Only 6 percent of women who had
anal sex in their last encounter did so in isolation. Eighty-six percent also had vaginal sex.
Seventy-two percent also received oral sex. Thirty-one percent also had partnered
masturbation. And the more sex acts a woman engaged in during the encounter, the more
likely she was to report orgasm. These other activities are what gave the women their
orgasms. The anal sex just came along for the ride.

So why did the inclusion of anal sex bump the orgasm figure up to 94 percent? It didn't.
The causality runs the other way. Women who were getting what they wanted were more
likely to indulge their partners' wishes. It wasn't the anal sex that caused the orgasms. It
was the orgasms that caused the anal sex.

If anal sex is a trailing indicator of women's sexual satisfaction, then by all means, let's
toast the new findings. Here's to you, ladies. Bottoms up.

Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Human Nature's latest short takes on the

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Experimentation, orgasms, and the rise of anal sex. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

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Ass Backwards
The media's silence about rampant anal sex.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, at 11:23 PM ET

Download the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up to get all of Slate's
free daily podcasts.

"Oral Sex Prevalent Among Teens," announced Friday's Washington Post. "A federal survey
finds more than half of 15- to 19-year-olds have had oral sex," said the subhead in the Los
GET SLATE EVERYWHERE
Angeles Times. "Sex Survey Shocker; Concern as most American teens have had oral sex,"
cried the Boston Herald. Sign up to get Slate's daily
newsletters.
Across the United States—and beyond it—any newspaper that
Like FOLLOW US:
didn't focus on lesbianism in the sex survey (released last week
by the National Center for Health Statistics) declared a crisis of PRINT
oral sex among teens. Experts and journalists, unwilling to
DISCUSS
express plain old moral dismay at the idea of their kids doing the
deed, cited its health risks. "Oral sex has been associated in E-MAIL
clinical studies with several infections, including gonorrhea,
RSS
syphilis, herpes and the human papillomavirus," observed the ALSO IN SLATE
Post. Teens "have not been given a strong enough message about RECOMMEND...

the health risks of oral sex," an expert warned the Times. "We SINGLE PAGE
need to provide them with information about the public-health
consequences," another expert told Time.

If only it were that simple. Talking to your kids about oral sex is
the easy part. If you're going to be frank about the most Nobel Prize: Norway Is One Jim Jones Is Out as National
of the Only Countries That Security Adviser. Will Anyone
dangerous widespread activity revealed in the survey, you're
Can Afford To Pick a Fight Notice?
looking at the wrong end of the digestive tract. With China

Advertisement
There's no delicate way to put this,
so I'll just quote the survey report:
"For males, the proportion who have
had anal sex with a female increases
from 4.6 percent at age 15 to 34
percent at ages 22–24; for females,
the proportion who have had anal
sex with a male increases from 2.4
percent at age 15 to 32 percent at
age 22–24." One in three women
admits to having had anal sex by age
24. By ages 25 to 44, the
percentages rise to 40 for men and
35 for women. And that's not
counting the 3.7 percent of men aged
15 to 44 who've had anal sex with
other men.
The last time major national surveys asked about this practice, in the early 1990s, only 20
percent of men aged 20 to 39 said they'd had anal sex with a woman in the preceding 10
years. Only 26 percent of men aged 18 to 59 said they'd ever done so. In the first survey,
the 10-year limit excluded half the sexual career of half the sample, but that isn't enough to
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The media's silence about rampant anal sex. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

explain a doubling in the percentage saying yes. In the second survey, according to the
current report, the inclusion of men aged 46 to 59 might have diluted the sample with Slate.com on Facebook
"cohorts that were less likely to have had anal sex." But that's the point: Newer cohorts are Like 43,362
more likely to have tried it.
You need to be logged into Facebook to see
your friends' activity
Why does this matter? Because anal sex is far more dangerous than oral sex. According to
data released earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of HIV
acquisition by the receptive partner in unprotected oral sex with an HIV carrier is one per
10,000 acts. In vaginal sex, it's 10 per 10,000 acts. In anal sex, it's 50 per 10,000 acts. Do
the math. Oral sex is 10 times safer than vaginal sex. Anal sex is five times more dangerous
than vaginal sex and 50 times more dangerous than oral sex. Presumably, oral sex is far
more frequent than anal sex. But are you confident it's 50 times more frequent?

A CDC fact sheet explains the risks of anal sex. First, "the lining of the rectum is thin and
may allow the [HIV] virus to enter the body." Second, "condoms are more likely to break
View My Network on Slate »
during anal sex than during vaginal sex." These risks don't just apply to HIV. According to
MOST MOST
the new survey report, the risk of transmission of other sexually transmitted diseases is READ E-MAILED
likewise "higher for anal than for oral sex," and the risk "from oral sex is also believed to be
lower than for vaginal intercourse." 1. The Ass Man Cometh
Experimentation, orgasms, and the rise of anal sex.
By William Saletan | Oct 5, 2010
If you live in Bergen County, N.J., congratulations. You get the only newspaper in the world
that mentioned heterosexual anal sex, albeit briefly, in its write-up of the survey. Two other 2. Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
papers buried it in lines of statistics below their articles; the rest completely ignored it. I spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser
scanner. I don't feel good about it.
Evidently anal sex is too icky to mention in print. But not too icky to have been tried by 35
By Michael Savitz | Oct 6, 2010
percent of young women and 40 to 44 percent of young men—or to have killed some of
them. 3. Toxic Persons
New research shows precisely how the prison-to-poverty
cycle does its damage.
Not that there's anything wrong with it, as Jerry Seinfeld might say. But if your moral By Sasha Abramsky | Oct 8, 2010
standard for judging sex acts is the risk of disease, anal is worse than oral. The spin that 4. Don't Stick It In
activists, scholars, and journalists have put on the survey—that abstinence-only sex The dangers of USB drives.
education is driving teenagers to an epidemic of oral sex—doesn't hold up. As the survey By Farhad Manjoo | Oct 5, 2010
report notes, data "suggest that there was little or no change (accounting for sampling
5. Civil War Road Trip
error) in the proportion of males 15-19 who had ever had heterosexual oral or anal sex
Gettysburg on a Segway
between 1995 and 2002." The more interesting numbers are in the next age bracket up— By John Swansburg | Oct 4, 2010
and the next orifice down.

I understand why we fixate on the oral sex numbers. Even liberals can digest sexual
revolutions only one taboo at a time. We think oral sex is the new frontier. We think talking
New cracks found in
about it in print and sex education classes makes us hip and candid. It doesn't.
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The media's silence about rampant anal sex. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

The Ass Man Cometh

Experimentation, orgasms, and the rise of anal sex.
William Saletan | Oct. 5, 2010
William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How
Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here. Bugged Naked
Webcams, sex, and the death of privacy.
William Saletan | Oct. 1, 2010

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JOURNAL MENU Among Adults Ages 18 to 59: Results from a National Probability Sample in Inthis
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ABSTRACT
Introduction. Although studies of specific groups of individuals (e.g., adolescents, “high risk” samples) have examined sexual repertoire,
little is known, at the population level, about the sexual behaviors that comprise a given sexual encounter.

Aim. To assess the sexual behaviors that men and women report during their most recent sexual event; the age, partner and situational
characteristics related to that event; and their association with participants' evaluation of the sexual event.

Methods. During March–May 2009, data from a United States probability sample related to the most recent partnered sexual event reported
by 3990 adults (ages 18–59) were analyzed.

Main Outcome Measures. Measures included sexual behaviors during the most recent partnered sexual event, event characteristics (i.e.,
event location, alcohol use, marijuana use, and for men, erection medication use), and evaluations of the sexual experience (pleasure,
arousal, erection/lubrication difficulty, orgasm).

Results. Great diversity exists in the behaviors that occur during a single sexual event by adults, with a total of 41 combinations of sexual
behaviors represented across this sample. Orgasm was positively related to the number of behaviors that occurred and age was related to
greater difficulty with erections and lubrication. Men whose most recent event was with a relationship partner indicated greater arousal,
greater pleasure, fewer problems with erectile function, orgasm, and less pain during the event compared with men whose last event was
with a nonrelationship partner.

Conclusion. Findings demonstrate that adults ages 18 to 59 engage in a diverse range of behaviors during a sexual event and that greater
behavior diversity is related to ease of orgasm for both women and men. Although both men and women experience sexual difficulties
related to erectile function and lubrication with age, men's orgasm is facilitated by sex with a relationship partner whereas the likelihood of
women's orgasm is related to varied sexual behaviors. Herbenick D, Reece M, Schick V, Sanders SA, Dodge B, and Fortenberry JD. An
event-level analysis of the sexual characteristics and composition among adults ages 18 to 59: Results from a national probability
sample in the United States. J Sex Med 2010;7(suppl 5):346–361.

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2010.02020.x/abstract[10/10/2010 2:08:35 AM]

An Event-Level Analysis of the Sexual Characteristics and Composition Among Adults Ages 18 to 59: Results from a National Probability Sample in the United States - Herbenick - 2010 - Th...

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2010.02020.x/abstract[10/10/2010 2:08:35 AM]