ABC:
Study Reports Anal Sex on Rise Among Teens: Lack of Sex Education, Virginity Pledges, Ignorance Contribute to Risky Behavior
Carry—a Colorado college student who had been in a steady relationship for months—was recently cajoled by her boyfriend into some sexual experimentation.
He wanted to try anal sex, and even though the 20-year-old said she was “OK with the idea,” she nervously downed several drinks before their lovemaking began.
Within 15 seconds, Carry — not her real name — said she was “crying and asking him to stop.”
Recently, researchers at the Bradley Hasbro Children’s Research Center in Rhode Island suggested that anal sex is on the rise among teens and young adults…. Experts say girls and young women like Carry are often persuaded to try [anal sex] for the wrong reasons—to please a partner, to have sex without the risk of pregnancy or to preserve their virginity. But many don’t understand the health consequences.
Maybe if we had comprehensive sex education—which would cover anal and oral intercourse, and their risks and rewards—teenagers would better understand the health consequences of anal sex. As things stand now, though, even “good” sex education—good by American standards—ignores or glosses over anal intercourse.
Another note on ABC’s story: it starts with the usual innocent-girl-pressured-into-anal-by-demanding-boyfriend horror story. But if you read it all the way to the end you’ll learn that a lot of women are interested in anal intercourse for their own pleasure, not just for their partner’s pleasure. Which makes the women-in-peril image ABC uses to illustrated the story…
…seem just a touch sensationalistic.
That girl has her arms put on backwards.
In Dar-es-Salaam, that is known as “taking the graded road”. I’m not kidding.
Abstinance?
Teenagers go as far as Bill Clinton when trying to technically not engage in sexual relations with that woman/man.
Ooo, Taboo. Anal Sex! Wow, I think it was discovered in 1969 along with 69…ing.
Silly Dan, women are not autonomous beings! They could NEVER take the initiative in sex.
Looks like Ginter got promoted to the network…
Is goat blowing also a Taboo Trend? They might be doing it at ABC…
i blame pron
just a touch sensationalistic?
fucking fear mongers
@1 yes
@8, who you calling sensationalistic?
Now, I’m no Dan Savage, but I think I see what yer problem is right he-yah.
The model in the ABC graphic’s got no ass. Baked brie, prosciutto, artisan bread, and cream puffs, STAT!
I am starting at that photo trying to figure it out what other explanation there could be than backwards arms. The best I can come up with is that she is making out with a guy. Since he has no torso or legs, he has to support himself by putting his hands on the glass like that.
Apparently ABC’s writers need to research the 18th century’s “working-class contraceptive.”
I think she is in front of the glass, but they blurred the picture to look as if she is behind it.
@1 and 11, it’s the guy’s arms. You can see him by the blur of color beyond her legs and head, plus the faint blur of her arms wrapped around his waist.
man, ABC is totally behind the times. everyone knows watersports is the new taboo trend.
everybody under 30 is already having buttsex all the time.
But wait Dan, you should have given them some shit over this part of the article as well…
“In the Hasbro study, females who had anal sex were more likely to be living with their partners, to have two or more sexual partners and to have previously experienced coerced intercourse. Males who engaged in this behavior were more likely to identify themselves as being homosexual, bisexual or undecided.”
Seemingly put there for no other reason than to reinforce the stereotype that women who have anal sex are sluts or abused and the guy’s heterosexuality is questionable.
@14 that’s ridiculous. Why would a guy have his hands up on frosted glass instead of on d’ass?
Are there any other species in which the anus is used as a receptacle for the male inseminating organ?
“Experts say girls and young women like Carry are often persuaded to try [anal sex] for the wrong reasons—to please a partner”
….Trying to please your partner doesn’t seem like a wrong reason. After all, only pleasing yourself is just masturbating.
@18. If any animal does it, it’s the bonobo. But, I don’t know for sure…
#18: This blog says bonobos getting buck wild is a myth:
http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/08…
“Supposedly bonobos are bisexual apes who engage in incessant and indiscriminate sexual activity as an alternative to power struggles and male wars of domination. I’m surprised the Democratic Party hasn’t changed its symbol from the donkey to the bonobo.
Well, maybe the liberals should put their bonobsession on hold for a while…”
In related news, today’s Wall Street Journal reveals that anti-choice nutjobs are trying to kill state and local funding for Planned Parenthood … for “economic” reasons.
Yeah, sure …
@17, Is there any other species that spends their time on blogs?
What’s yer point?
Humans find creative ways to pleasure themselves. I am not going to base my sexual repertoire on what i see on the discovery channel.
Well, maybe some of it.
whoops, @23 was meant for @18 – i get all flustered when thinking about bumpin uglies.
My anus is the center of the Universe!
My rectum is the axis of all space and time!
Celebrate the diversity of my anal opening!
The most important thing in the entire history of everything is the sticking of things into my butthole!
This blog needs even still more articles about anuses and the sticking of penises into said anuses! You are not posting about anuses enough! You need at least fifteen articles a day about the absolute importance of gay anuses with gay penises stuck into them!!!
Bow down before the glory of my poop chute!
@25: your anus is Fremont?! Neat!
I’m so tired of this crap journalism that claims to give adults ‘insight’ into new sexual ‘trends.’ Anyone remember ‘Rainbow Party,’ that stupid sensational book that implied that oral sex with multiple partners at a time was the latest teenage trend? And guys were collecting different colors of lipstick on their dicks?
I’m curious what they think the ‘right’ reason to try anal sex would be, if not to please your partner? I mean, ideally, you would enjoy it too.
So, one girl had a painful experience and started crying. Now she knows that it’s not her thing. Good for her. How in the hell that’s supposed to have implications for anyone else is beyond me.
Every time I’ve ever done it, the girl initiated. Did I do it for the wrong reason? Did she? Who the fuck cares?! It was fun and different, and we both seemed to enjoy it.
“But many don’t understand the health consequences.”
Thanks for that info, ABC. Many don’t understand the health ‘consequences’ of a lot of shit they do…
“They don’t think you can get a disease from it because you’re not having intercourse.”
First of all, I don’t buy that one bit. Second, if that is the case, then they’re stupid as fuck and should not be used to represent teens at large.
Beyond that, they’re quoting heresay from teenagers about what their friends have done. Awesome reporting! If I quoted in a study every off-hand weird sexual thing I heard from a friend of a friend in highschool… well that’d be one fucked-up report.
“There are real myths and real efforts to be cool and people running around saying how great it is.”
Yeah, just the other day, a teenager ran up to me and talked about how great anal sex is… It’s true!
“Anal sex is a serious public problem.” I LOVE this report! It’s like a report blaming driving for all driving deaths. Or blaming air travel for plane crashes. If we have to be told that sexually transmitted diseases are spread through sex, then we are truly the world’s stupidest society.
In America, “sex education” is forever a contradiction in terms.
Another question she often hears is: “If I want it, or like it, does it mean I’m gay?”
Yes, of course it does.
Jeebus, is this for real? The article reads like it was lifted from The Onion.
It seems simple and self-evident, but duh our youngins def need more education:
1) Guys, you can’t just jam that thing up there like a baseball bat.
and
2) Using condoms, gallons of lube and prepping your partner with some foreplay and fingers are NOT optional.
@25 You seem obsessed with anal sex and your anus. You must be a Catholic Priest.
In some contexts, the word “lovemaking” really cracks my shit up.
Within 15 seconds, Carry — not her real name — said she was “crying and asking him to stop.”
Sounds like the first time my boyfriend tried to preserve my virginity.
(rimshot!)
My anus is bleeding!
@18: Most birds have a semicombined anal-genital opening called a cloaca. The same hole that receives sperm also excretes guano and eggs.
My first doing anal was hot, we were having somewhat of a rough session the night of my 23rd birthday and while i was on top he fingered my ass a little and i went wild. It was first time anyone tried that with me! Then he smelt his fingers and seemed intoxicated by non-shit smell. (he would burry his face into my croch so i tried to keep things clean). Next thing i knew the head of his penis was massaging my anus. He said “you liked when i…”, then i leaned to his ear told him that “i’ve never done anything like this before”, and then, keeping my face close to his, slowly sat down on him. It was very brief, the next thing i remember was pooping him and that part of the experience was the only part that seemed weird. We only dated for a couple weeks, after a month or two of a friendship that had more sexual tension than i can shake a stick at. But then we bothed moved to different states. Only that one night did he ever try to include anal, even though we had a couple weeks together after that night.
Now i find myself telling my lovers that “i want you to stick it in my ass”
See, where are stories like #36 in this article? I’d like to see an update of the report saying “however, many people enjoy it greatly and consider it a valuable part of their healthy sex-lives” instead of “Anal sex is a serious public problem.”
“He wanted to try anal sex, and even though the 20-year-old said she was ‘OK with the idea,’ she nervously downed several drinks before their lovemaking began.”
The drinks were probably part of the problem. Alcohol dries out the mucous membranes. Also, the anus does not self-lubricate like the vagina does.
Having said that, I think that the appropriate response to a boyfriend who demands anal sex from his girlfriend is, “You first!”. Once he experiences what it is like to be penetrated, he will have a greater appreciation for what pleases or pains his partner.
Oh, and don’t blame Bill Clinton for this. Boys and girls have been screwing around for millions of years. Blame the abstinence-only crowd for misleading youth into thinking that the only “real” sex there is penetrative, vaginal intercourse. Oral sex is SEX. Anal sex is SEX. You can’t abstain from sex and still participate in non-vaginal intercourse!
When the priority of your sexual activities is to preserve your virginity, of course the sex (of any sort) is going to be terrible. If you want to be a virgin, don’t have sex of any sort. If you want to have sex, do it well, damn it!
Where on earth does the idea of preserving your virginity through anal and oral come from, anyway? I remember that in high school, everyone gave tons of head in order to maintain an odd purity (we weren’t cool enough, I suppose, to have jumped on the butt trend). I didn’t quite get the distinction then, I totally don’t get it now. How is anal sex not intercourse?
@40: If you assume that virginity is an objective, binary state, it’s completely illogical. If you take a more rationalist view, it does make some degree of sense: Only doing oral and anal means that you’re saving your first time doing vaginal. Now, of course, you could just as easily do vaginal now and save your anal virginity for your future spouse, or even do vaginal and anal and save your oral virginity, but vaginal is seen as more weight and symbolic for a variety of reasons, some of which make sense, some of which don’t.
tomasyalba
my comment was directed to ABC and their choice of illustration
Recently, researchers at the Bradley Hasbro Children’s Research Center in Rhode Island suggested that anal sex is on the rise among teens and young adults….
Playing board games now will never be the same again. Ah, youth.
I don’t get the whole ‘anal sex isn’t sex’ thing.
I’m one of those gals who really enjoys anal sex. I first had sex (my virginity was technically ‘hymen’ lost when I was in my early teens…from touching myself!) when I was 18, with my second serious boyfriend. Later on we tried anal and kept it in the playbook.
Since then, I’ve enjoyed anal sex with 4 or 5 partners. It’s something I usually reserve for guys who are sticking around, because anal sex is different with each partner and I like to be comfortable with someone before I can risk shitting on their cock. It’s not something I do every week, but it’s certainly always a part of a committed relationship for me. I’ve never had a partner initiate the idea; I let them know it’s something I like and I have to say, I’ve never had a guy tell me he’d rather not.
Yay for anal sex. It’s not about rape, being gay or pretending to your Christian-self that it isn’t real sex. It’s about something in my ass!
@18: if no other animal does and God created us in His image, I guess it must be divine.
They said it and can’t take it back. According to ABC, anal sex = “lovemaking”. : D
All I have to say is that I was a young man at the worst possible time. In the 70’s I was aware of the sexual revolution and aware that it would be over by the time I was old enough to partake. I was right.
Now that I am married, all girls shave their pussies, most make out with other girls just to turn on guys, and tons take it up the ass.
All I am saying is “Why, god, why???????”
@16, if the women who do it are abused, and the men who do it are gay, then who the hell is doing it with the abused women?! Maybe ghosts, which would explain the mystery blur-man in the graphic.