Yet today, man-on-woman anal fingering is functionally mainstream . It is hard to find solid data on how many people know of or experience it; most researchers dont see the act as a sexual health priority worth studying. But anecdotes from forums across the digital world suggest it is a now common practice. Many men find anal fingering so desirable, or so routine, that for the past few years it has seemingly become common for guys to try to slip a finger up their partners rectums, sometimes without any prior notice or discussion, even on a first date or hookup. As Sheena Sharma wrote in 2015 , the unwelcome finger is a plague upon bedrooms across America.
So what changed? How and when did anal fingering go from an apparently niche act to a ho-hum part of many mens sexual repertoires? And what about it do men find appealing? Given how little we talk about sex as a culture, much less document major shifts in our sexual practices, it is hard to say for sure. But sex experts do have a basic sense of how we normalized the finger up her butt.
It is worth establishing that, no matter how unusual it may have seemed to many Americans just a couple decades ago, anal fingering has likely been around as long as our species. Humans are both experimental and pleasure-seeking beings; we explore our bodies, especially in the fumbling heat of sex, discovering every possible erogenous zone that we can. And the anus can be, explains sex educator Eric Garrison , an erogenous zone for any gender thanks to the tons of sensory nerves within it. It is even possible for women some women to orgasm through anal fingering, or other forms of anal play including full-on anal sex, that wind up stimulating their g-spots. (Men, of course, can also orgasm from anal fingering thanks to prostate stimulation.) So some women have likely always worked anal fingering into their masturbatory habits . And some couples have likely always worked it into their sex lives, either as a warm-up for anal sex or a stimulating end in itself.
However, the commonality of anal play of all sorts has shifted throughout history , depending on the sexual mores of a given culture or era. And America has long been hostile to anal sexuality. Religious traditions, and religiously-derived laws, frowning on sodomy long kept not only anal play but oral sex and more both taboo and, technically, illegal in much of the nation. Such taboo acts didnt even show up often in stag films , proto-pornos of the early 20 th century that indulged in seemingly modern tableaus like threesomes and quips about bestiality fairly freely.
Americans also long viewed any type of anal sexual behavior as happening explicitly among gay men, says sex researcher Kimberly McBride , Ph.D.. Gays as a group have long been stigmatized in this nation by religious and non-religious folk alike. (In truth, not all men who have sex with men actually enjoy or engage in anal play of any kind , and not all who do enjoy anal do it every time they get physically intimate.) On top of these cultural and moral taboos, adds McBride, Americans have long had trouble getting over the idea that the anus is irredeemably, existentially dirtier than any other part of our bodies.
However, American taboos against anal play never actually shut off anal fingering, licking, sex, or any other form of stimulation, stresses sexologist Carol Queen , Ph.D. In a sense, they may have added a new level of eroticism to it for some. Crossing lines and doing something one sees as new and daring can be, Garrison explains, a deep source of psychological stimulation . But they did send it underground, making it harder to hear about anal fingering, think about exploring ones own butt, stumble upon anal stimulation and accept any pleasure one finds in it, or feel justified exploring it with a partner.
New cultural forces started to chip away at these taboos and draw stigmatized sexual practices out of the shadows, though during the latter half of the 20 th century. There is not much information on how much the sexual revolution of the 60s involved a counter-culture reevaluation of the ass. But by the 70s, many of the first mainstream porn directors started to feature anal fingering or sex in their films. Anything directed by Zachary Strong in the early 80s usually features digital-anal penetration, notes porn historian Charles Devlin, and Harry Reems put his thumb in a few asses in his early films. Rapidly, references to anal sexuality started to leak into mainstream films as well-like Last Tango in Paris , a notorious Bernardo Burtolucci film from 1972 in which Marlon Brandos American character anally rapes a French woman played by Maria Schneider using butter for lube. (Dont watch it. Burtolucci sprung the scene on Schneider without notice so, while there was no actual penetration, it is actually a recorded sexual assault.)
As porn started to get more accessible moving into the 80s, Queen adds, sex-positive education that explored pleasure, not just the nuts and bolts of procreation, started to proliferate in parts of America as well, dissecting anal taboos and teaching people about the joys of all manner of anal play. By the mid-90s, the proliferation of the internet made it much easier for people across the country to discretely peruse porn, seek out diverse sexual information, and talk to each other about their experiences. As a bonus, in 2003 a milestone Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas , toppled Americas remaining anti-sodomy laws. And during the George W. Bush presidency, a series of attempts to bust porn producers on obscenity charges for depicting non-normative sex acts, like extreme anal play, fell flat. Suddenly, anal sexuality felt less legally, officially dangerous as well.
All of these forces seemingly led to increased awareness of anal sexuality by the late 80s, when people like Garrison remember seeing the shocker hand gesture, in which men mime putting their index and middle fingers in a womans vagina and using their pinky to rub or penetrate her ass, used blithely by high school and college students. And by the mid-90s, people started to engage with anal play more actively. Preliminary research in the early 20 suggested that maybe 10 percent of woman had tried anal sex once in their lives. By the 1990s, a fifth of all women and a quarter of all men had tried anal sex at least once, according to the research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of people trying anal at least once, or working it into their regular sex lives, has only risen since then. Today, says McBride, strong survey data suggests that 40 to 45 percent of all American men and women will try anal sex at least once in their lives.