Rest assured, bottoms: “The fear of permanent damage to your butthole is, for the most part, a myth,” Zoë Ligon, CEO of Spectrum Boutique and author of Carnal Knowledge: Sex Education You Didn’t Get in School, says.
“Simply put: Bottoming saves bottoms.” Doing Damage “I often see patients with fissures who aren’t regularly engaging in receptive anal sex, but the patients who frequently engage in receptive anal sex often do not get fissures,” Baker says.
This reduced sphincter resting tone is also preventative, since an increased tone makes the area more susceptible to injury and fissures, which are tears in the skin that are mighty painful and difficult to heal. “This reduction in resting tone is helpful because it helps us engage in receptive anal sex without the preparation, slowness, and discomfort of anal sex.” “In people who routinely and recreationally use the anus (i.e., for receptive sex), the sphincter muscle resting tone is reduced, but the squeeze tone remains about the same,” Baker explains. This means we can afford to lose a little elasticity in the area. “Even in people who regularly engage in receptive anal intercourse, the sphincter is typically still much tighter than what’s required.” “The anal sphincter is an exceptionally resilient part of the body that is way stronger than it needs to be-for perspective, it’s roughly four times stronger than what’s required to hold stool in,” colorectal surgery PA Jonathan Baker, M.P.A.S., PA, tells TheBody. Second is the “squeeze pressure,” which is the tightness of the muscle when you’re actively squeezing it. First, there is the “muscle-strength resting tone,” which gauges the tightness of the muscle while it’s not being used. People generally measure sphincter-muscle strength in two ways.
So let’s dispel some harmful myths and put those fanny-based fears to rest. To assist, I’ve enlisted the expertise of not one, but two LGBTQ butt doctors as well as one experienced anal sex advocate, author, and sex shop owner. Almost instantly, I was taken aback by the volume of folks who wrote me desperate that their holes were-or would soon become-loose as a result of receptive anal intercourse.Īs a radical empath who despises sexual shame in any shape or form, I want to wax poetic on the power and resilience of our buttholes. I became particularly invested in this topic after working with a sexual wellness company that launched a service called Text-a-Sexpert, in which a fellow sex educator and myself would answer people’s personal sex questions via text message.