Booty-Eating Renaissance: Gawker on Anilingus

Thanks to Gimmick for spotting this important, moving essay —

Anilingus is having a moment.

Long considered a taboo in heterosexual circles, oral-anal sex, or, anilingus—known colloquially as “tossing salad,” “rimming,” and “eating booty”—has been a steady topic of conversation over the past few months. Trend pieces have been written in New York, GQ, and Cosmopolitan. Chris Brown Instragram’d (then promptly deleted) a picture of himself licking a model’s ass with the caption “Eat da booty! #idgt [I don’t get tired] lol.” Nicki Minaj, on her latest single “Anaconda,” speaks of a man who “[tosses] salad like his name Romaine.”

[Let’s not forget the works of Dana Vespoli — MW]

Straight people seem to have finally discovered that they too have assholes that can be explored for sexual pleasure; that gay men don’t have a monopoly on anuses.

Naturally, the turn toward publicly embracing anal pleasures among heterosexuals is not without its critics, many of whom call anything involving that region “gross,” “dirty” and/or “gay.” The sudden popularity of eating booty brings an array of questions to the fore—Is this a ‘queering’ of straight sex? What has been the cause of this shift in attitudes? Is booty eating completely mainstream now? And, perhaps most interestingly, who is and who isn’t ‘eating da booty,’ and whose booty is getting eaten?

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