Anal eroticism is, as noted, far more common among middle- and upper-class people than among the working classes and lower middle classes. These latter usually impose rigidly conventional standards of moral behavior, are puritanical. When analism occurs among these people it is usually faute de mieux, a substitute for heterosexual genital intercourse or a birth control means. It is seldom a preference. Among the educated and affluent it is frequently so. All of the young ladies in the aforementioned cases are typical. They are cultured, refined, responsible persons who, nevertheless, prefer rectal penetration to vaginal. Such persons are entirely capable of affection, are not notably egocentric, and are also competent. They cope with life effectively. They are deviates, perhaps, but they are not necessarily neurotic and seldom psychopathic. However, because they have the attitudes of members of a persecuted minority, and are obliged to be very secretive, they harbor considerable hostility against the heterosexual genital majority. Unlike homosexuals, they are lonely and isolated, seldom able to find partners. Also, while they usually accept adult responsibility, they derive little satisfaction from the adult role.
What the anally erotic woman wants most of all she cannot have. She wants to flee back to her childhood, be a small girl in pigtails and short skirts, who plays with dolls rather than real live babies. She may even hate small children because she resents their occupying the role she wants herself. Her sexuality is part of her regression. She wants her mother to give her an enema as when she was a child. Compared to this, what she does in bed with her lover or husband is as dull and uninteresting as the work she must do in real life. Both are unsatisfactory substitutes for play. Nothing that maturity can offer her, even if she is a model parent, or a highly successful career woman, can compensate for what she lost by growing up. As in Babes in Toyland, “once you cross its borders you can never return again.” But she never wanted to cross over; she wanted to stay, and life wouldn't let her.
From puberty on, the lot of the anal erotic is one of frustration, guilt, and obsession. Most men will not perform anal intercourse on her, and, because of tightening regulations in the medical profession, it is exceedingly difficult to be given a colonic irrigation or even an ordinary enema. Nurses will not administer them unless there is a doctor's order, and, if the anal erotic concocts a constipation problem, the physician usually recommends a laxative. Very few health institutes and naturopaths are allowed to give colonic irrigations anymore. She can, of course, give herself enemas, but that is highly unsatisfactory because it leaves out all of the most important ingredients, the passive role, the anticipation, and the experience of being penetrated by someone else. Also, she cannot discuss her desires with anyone, even her husband or boyfriend, or her most intimate women friends. If she goes to a psychiatrist his task will be to help her overcome the problem, or else he will attempt to divert her into other activities and interests. Likely as not she has many of these anyway, and sex is only a part of her life. But it is important. What she wants is so simple: some sympathetic person, male or female, who will occasionally give her an enema. But this is exactly what she is forbidden from having, because that belongs back in Toyland from which she has been permanently and unwillingly exiled.
What she does then is live with the frustration. She welcomes whatever opportunities for fulfillment might come along, fantasizes the rest, and goes on being outwardly an adult and inwardly a child. Later, as she grows older, the urgency of her sexual appetites diminished somewhat, but the yearning to regress remains. She enjoys the frivolous and unprofitable activities on the margins of her life far more than she does the deeper and more dedicated ones which she has been obliged to make the center. She fully understands the Buddhist teaching that “all existence is suffering,” but she is in no way inclined to relinquish the illusion of self which is the cause of suffering. She is not particularly defiant about her form of sexual preference, although her deviation in this area may be an important stimulus to her being a social radical or an anarchist. She may be violently elitist because she resents the majority and what it has imposed on her, and she longs to have everything upset and turned topsy-turvy so that the deviants are normal, and the people who prefer heterosexual vaginal intercourse the shameful minority who must forever hide. She is a witch. She stands in opposition to the repressive and fiercely heterosexual conception of God. Consciously or not she is anti-Christian. It is no accident that the witches of Renaissance and early Modern Europe are alleged to have committed anal intercourse, and that the Black Mass supposedly reached its climax when the witches kissed the Devil's buttocks. That such ever took place out side the imaginations of the witch persecutors now seems highly dubious, but, psychologically speaking, the truth of the allegation remains. The anal erotic is a witch. What she does or wants to do is perfectly natural. It is also just as human as it is bestial, and, of course, human beings are all bestial anyway. We are all animals. Analism is intrinsically no more disgusting or unnatural than kissing which is a sexual act recommended by the Christian Church. Buttocks are more attractive than the genital regions of both sexes, aesthetically speaking, and, since the Renaissance, at any rate, have received a good deal of attention from the artists. Both the anus and the genitals are apertures for the discharge of waste products. Why then is the anal erotic a witch?
The reason for it is probably sociological rather than psychological or, certainly, physiological, and it has to do with regression. Society tolerates forms of sexual behavior which do not lead to procreation, as witness the almost universal acceptance of contraception. There is no longer the nonsense about sex being only for the purpose of making babies. Sex has been secularized. But it must be mature, and it must be productive of pair bonds an important point which William Morris makes in The Naked Ape.
Anal eroticism remains infantile. Society does not accept it because it is a phase of development through which the person must pass. Intelligent and enlightened people see no harm in it among children, but it does not belong in adult life. Those who remain anally erotic as adults are fixated; they have become stuck at an early state of childhood development in this particular area of life, and, since no aspect of life can be divorced from others, it produces a certain type of character.
The anal erotic adult may very possibly be a very important and useful person in society, precisely because of his anal eroticism. His frustrations may lead him to be highly creative or active as a social reformer. He may be uncommonly responsible. But the golden age lies behind him; he has been expelled from Eden, and, above all, he detests children because they occupy the realm he himself would prefer. Nothing that adult life offers makes up for what he has lost. On the other hand, since deviation is a major spur in his life, should psychotherapy successfully remove his yearning for the impossible, the other worthy and creative aspects of his personality will be sacrificed as well. He may conceivably win peace of mind, but at the price of his usefulness.
