Everybody wants to be a bottom now.
One of my friends is a bottom — which is a sentence I would feel odd uttering were it not for the fact that being a bottom is a core part of this person’s identity, so much so that it was one of the first things I learned about him way back when we first met.
He is a bottom, but lately, he tells me, he has been topping more. It’s not his first choice, he says, it is merely that being versatile enables him access to a broader range of sexual partners. There is a surplus of bottoms on Grindr, he tells me; everybody wants to be a bottom now.
As someone who grew up marinating in heteronormative ideas about sex, it was strange to hear that the position of penetratee was so coveted. Within the heterosexual framing of sex, it is the penetrator who is presumed to have the superior experience, the invading penis that is said to feel pleasure at the expense of the encompassing vagina or anus; a belief that is allegedly borne out by the much discussed “orgasm gap,” often held up as proof of the relative ease with which men achieve sexual pleasure as compared to their female partners.
But here, then, is an argument against the supposed superiority of being on top. As my friend put it to me, penile stimulation will do in a pinch — it feels good, certainly — but it cannot compare to the full body ecstasy of internal stimulation. It is a more immediate, yet more shallow, form of pleasure; the penis, he reminded me, extends deep into the body, external stimulation alone cannot arouse the entire length of the member in the way that being railed up the ass is able to*.
You could take this argument as a general promotion of the unsung pleasures of being penetrated; and indeed, there are universal elements to that experience that often go ignored in our rush to wax about the pleasures of the penis. Being penetrated does transform a larger area of the body into an erotic canvas, it can offer a very beautiful sense of vulnerability that can create a pathway to elevated ecstasy, whatever your internal anatomy. It is a shame that we do not talk about that more.
But I would be lying if I said I didn’t notice the particular aspects of anatomy that get a mention in this celebration of being a bottom. It is not lost on me that when many cisgender men** talk about the pleasures of taking it up the ass, they speak, not of the general and gender neutral aspects that any ass fuckee can enjoy, but of things like the prostate. I cannot be the only one who has heard a man claim that cisgender women can’t possibly appreciate anal in the same way that cis men do; that the absence of the “male g-spot” renders our pleasure incomplete.
It is as though many men cannot set aside the compulsion to position their own sexual experiences as the superior ones. To be the penetrator is obviously superior to being penetrated, unless men opt to be penetrated, in which case you’d better believe they do it far better than women ever possibly could.
And look, I don’t have a penis, and I don’t have a prostate, and barring some major advances in medical technology, I am unlikely to ever truly know how different my experience of sexual pleasure would have been if my anatomy had been other than what it is. But at the same time, the men who speak so confidently of their own anatomical superiority do not possess any greater insight into my experience of pleasure than I do of theirs — their assessment of my supposed lack comes more from a cultural belief in male superiority than any real empirical evidence that the penis and prostate are fundamentally more capable of feeling pleasure than the vagina and the clitoris are.
I think, personally, that the pleasures (and lack thereof) that one derives from sex are as much about mindset as they are about anatomy. If cisgender men receive greater pleasure from taking it up the ass than the rest of us do, I suspect it is more because men have been taught to demand and expect pleasure in a way that women rarely are — not because some man’s magic button is more magical than my own.
* And then, of course, there is the prostate; we can never forget the prostate.
** Not my friend! My friend is great! This is not me trashing my friend!
[NB: Did I go back and forth between using the broad categories of “women/men” and “cis women/men” here? Yes, and it was not oversight or a mistake — while many of these beliefs are rooted in cisnormative ideas of bodies and gender, I do believe that quite a few of these beliefs about women and sex apply to all women, regardless of their body parts; I attempted to use cisgender only when I was specifically referring to something rooted in anatomy. That said: I 100% want to explore the topic of what anal stimulation means for trans people, and would absolutely love to chat with trans people who feel comfortable talking about their own experiences with the ass.]