Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There's an old joke in atheist communities that God must have a sick sense of humor to put an amusement park in the middle of two sewage plants, but the flip side is that it probably shouldn't surprise you if you hear arcade sounds while monitoring blackwater PH.
The evolutionary theory is that both reproductive and excretory functions have unusual vulnerability to injury and infection, so they tend to get shoved toward the least vulnerable and most core area available (... most of the time. Octopus are weird, though note that they reproduce only once and have very weird evolutionary pressures), and tend to have higher nerve density to help detect and prevent injury. Once that happens, you've now got a big bundle of closely tied sensitive nerve spots, sometimes directly connected to each other, conveniently available in the grossest ways possible. And at least some of the response follows, there: receptive men benefit a lot from having a prostate and there's not really many other good places to put it without doing a remodel of the whole front deck; rimming is very much focused around just how sensitive the ring is; women who are into anal sex often particularly enjoy pressure on the vaginal walls and internal clitoral structure coming from a different angle.
That's particularly goofy for humans because you've got (arguably) concealed ovulation, are sexually active outside of estrus, and both have social and (contested) evolutionary toward varied sex in at least some related species. Most other species with reported anal sex don't actually do it to completion often even for the top, sometimes aren't physically capable of doing it safely for the bottom, or have complex enough relationship structures that it's hard to distinguish sex from dominance displays.
There's a lot of stuff like that, though.
That said, it's also worth pointing out that it also doesn't work for everybody; that's actually some weak evidence against serious broad evolutionary benefit. Even some gay subby guys don't get much out of it, and even for those that do like it, the prep can be more than a little obnoxious.
I always heard it as a group of engineers debating what kind of engineer God was. The mechanical engineer pointed to the muscles, the electrical engineer to the nerves, the software engineer to the mind, each claiming that was the real essence of God's creation and that God was one of theirs. Then the municipal engineer said that God must be a municipal engineer, because who else would put a recreation area right next to sewage removal.
Yeah, this is what I'm getting at. It seems to be such a good design to achieve pleasure that it must be evolutionarily advantageous in some way, or it would have been selected against. If pleasurable anal sex was a purely negative evolutionary trait, one would expect there to be hard stops in place to prevent it from being pleasurable to warn you not to do it. Instead, we need a whole series of social taboos going back thousands of years across disparate cultures to prevent people from doing it. As a penetrative male partner, I find the novelty good for a once-in-a-blue-moon trip, but generally find the experience to be more trouble than its worth with the designed substitute right there. But female partners regularly request it, love it, prefer it.
Women report orgasm from vaginal penetration alone at similar rates to anal penetration. So there's something there. I don't know what's going on with gay men, we seem to have given up on actually explaining what homosexuality is as a society and I find myself increasingly unable to understand what is going on there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link