The Rise of Anal Sex

Yep, you heard me. Today I'm going to be talking about the side effect of the Fertility Benefit Act that nobody expected. Anal sex.

Just a few short decades ago, anal sex was thought of nearly exclusively as a queer act. Gay and bisexual men, as well as straight and bisexual transgender women, were just about the only people who had anal sex with any regularity. Everyone seemed to agree, without actually saying so, that it was just what you did if you wanted to have sex but neither of you had a vagina.

That's not to say it was unheard of for cis women, but it was uncommon. Research into sexual diversity in the USA conducted in 2017, just a few years before the fertility collapse started, found that only around one in 20 women had received anal sex during the previous month. To put that in context, that's about the same as the proportion of women who remained lifelong virgins.

Restricting this to women of breeding age (roughly under 50), we can get some numbers to compare with how often breeding aged women have anal sex today. In 2017, 6.4% of women aged 18–49 had received anal sex in the previous month and 19% within the previous year. But only 41% of breeding age women had ever had anal sex at all.

We can see here that there were two big divides. The first is between women who never had anal sex and women who had anal sex at least once. This split women nearly right down the middle, 41% to 59%. The second split is within the group of women who did have anal sex, where about half of them had not had anal sex within the past year, whereas one in six had received anal sex within the past month.

Other research from this period backs up this conclusion that there used to be a concentration of anal sex, in which 10% of women participated in about 50% of anal sex between men and women.

Almost all anal sex was once received by the same few women.

The 2017 research also contains some interesting insights into how early women started to have anal sex. After the 18–24 age bracket, the proportion of women who had ever had anal sex stayed pretty steady at a little over 40%, so very few women were having anal sex for the first time after they turned 25. But only 28% of women aged 18–24 had ever had anal sex.

So of those women who did eventually have anal sex, at least one in three of them had their first anal experience after they turned 18, whereas almost all of the remainder had their first encounter before turning 25.

We all know the reputation American culture had a century ago for being prudish. Anal sex only really entered the mainstream consciousness with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and then only in the queer context I mentioned earlier. It wasn't until the 1990s, and especially the 2000s that anal sex among women started to be something people thought about at all, outside the context of hardcore pornography.

Because of this reputation, and particularly due to its association with HIV, anal sex had a reputation for being "dirty". The influence of religion, particularly Christianity's condemnation of homosexuality, led to so-called "sodomy laws" to prohibit anal sex between two men that stayed in place in many states until as late as 2003. Though these contexts applied specifically to gay and bisexual men, they influenced the cultural perception of anal sex more generally.

Anal sex once had a reputation for being "dirty".

Since then, attitudes have changed significantly. Regardless of your gender, if you're old enough to be reading this article chances are pretty good that you've had anal sex multiple times.

A similar survey of sexual diversity in the United States, conducted late last year, found a vastly different picture to 2017.

Perhaps the most obvious difference is the Missing Generation. From the start of the fertility collapse in the early 2020s up until the Fertility Benefit Act was passed into law in 2039, very few people were born. So there is a big drop in the 18–24 age bracket, and smaller drops in the 25–29 and 30–39 age brackets respectively.

Anal sex actually started to increase before the FBA was passed into law, as we developed more effective and convenient prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and the reputation of anal sex being "dirty" started to fade from our cultural consciousness.

The FBA itself didn't actually lead to much change in anal sex. It was only its subsequent amendments that had a big impact. Firstly, the Unretirement Amendment in 2044 led to a fear of accidental pregnancy among women who did not want to become breeders. With many states already starting to make contraceptives illegal, this led to a crisis of birth control.

Women around the country started wondering the same thing: how can I have sex without risking prison or becoming a breeder against my will? And they collectively seemed to come to the same answer: anal sex.

A survey of sexual activity conducted in 2046 found a very different picture to what we saw thirty years earlier. It found that three out of five non-breeders aged 18–49 had received anal sex within the past month. Only one out of five of non-breeders aged 18–24 had never had anal sex, and in older age groups the proportion of women who had received anal sex at least once came close to the proportion of women who had ever had vaginal sex.

The stranglehold on anal sex had been broken. Instead of the disparity seen in 2017, where 10% of women had about 50% of the anal sex, by 2046 the most active 10% of women had only about 20% of anal sex.

The demand for anal sex is driven almost entirely by women.

Another difference between 2017 and 2046 is that, in 2017, the demand for anal sex was driven almost entirely by men. By 2046, it was driven almost entirely by women.

However, the situation for breeders was quite different. Without the fear of accidental pregnancies to drive them to anal sex, and with almost all the men they had sex with being licensed breeders, breeders in 2046 actually had less anal sex than the average woman in 2017. Neither men nor women within the breeding system were initiating anal sex. The result is that, though lifetime incidence of receiving anal sex for breeders stayed only a little below 2017 levels, at around 35%, the proportion of breeders who had received anal sex within the last month was just 4%.

This changed again in 2047, when the Sexual Acts Amendment allowed licensed breeders to demand anal sex of registered women.

This change had the largest impact on the population of breeding women. Research in 2053 found that almost every single registered breeder — 98% — had received anal sex at some point in the past. The proportion of breeders who had received anal sex during the past month also surpassed the non-breeding population, at 72% compared with non-breeders at 59%.

Of course, direct comparisons between breeding and non-breeding populations have to be looked at in the context of the hypersexuality that comes with the territory of being a breeder. In 2053, breeding women received anal sex more frequently than non-breeding women, but as a proportion of all sex they participated in it was far lower.

This could be seen more easily looking at the proportion of women who had vaginal sex during the past month, as a comparison. For breeders, it sat at 97%. For non-breeders, it was all the way down at 21%. The non-breeders who had participated in vaginal sex within the past month were mostly younger, perhaps where caution had not yet set in through a pregnancy scare.

There is still some remnant of the inequality of anal sex we saw prior to the fertility collapse. Many women, going for long periods of anal sex and vaginal chastity, have actually come to prefer it. Research dating back to the '30s proved definitively that women can experience orgasms through anal stimulation alone, and that the ability to have this kind of orgasm can be honed through, essentially, practice.

Anal sex isn't just practical, it's pleasurable too.

I'm bisexual. I've been with my girlfriend for nearly two years, and I haven't had sex with a man in just over three. But I have had sex with men, and when I have it has been almost exclusively anal sex. I know this won't be true of everyone, but I've found that my best orgasms are anal orgasms, and it's very difficult for me to climax with no anal stimulation.

I think this is a perspective that has been missing from a lot of the research around anal sex. One of the reasons that women drive the demand for anal sex is simply that, if you do it right, it can be very pleasurable.

I wonder, if I could go back to 2017 and talk to those 10% of women who had 50% of all anal sex, would they say the same? If it weren't for the taboo of anal sex being associated with being dirty or perverted, would it have been as common then as it is today for women to openly seek and enjoy anal stimulation?

I can only say for sure that I'm glad I wasn't born back then. If I'd never felt comfortable touching my anus I might never have been able to reach orgasm on my own. If it hadn't been socially acceptable for me to wear a buttplug during the day, instead being some embarrassing secret, I'm sure I would have completely lost my mind years ago.

Even though I'm not a registered breeder, I'm very thankful for the way the FBA has brought our culture around anal sex out into the open.