Mainstream depictions of anal sex have come a long way – what does that say about our attitudes towards pleasure and all things ass?

Portrayals of anal sex in mainstream media have come a long way in recent years with more pleasurable depictions of anal intercourse making it onto our screens.

Lustery POV | Anal Sex on Screen

Anal Sex On Screen Has Seriously Evolved

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a renaissance for anal sex in American entertainment. Hollywood’s classic 

 formula hasn’t changed much in eons, with its rote trajectory from passionate kissing to penetration in seconds. If viewers are lucky, maybe there’s a bonus oral sesh in between. But 

 sex, when displayed or even just implied, has often been invoked for cheap jokes, or to punctuate an act of violence. So, the fact that butt stuff is seemingly everywhere 

 being shown as a genuine source of pleasure feels pretty momentous.

These days, hardly anyone bats an eye when anal appears in otherwise standard fare, like the sweetly surreal rom-com 

 For all its efforts to cultivate the largest possible audience, even Marvel has gotten in on the fun. In 2016, the Disney-owned studio chose to bestow its audacious antihero 

, which was nothing short of a crowd-pleaser.

(M)ass Appeal: How Anal Sex Became Hollywood Worthy

We’ve really come a long way. I’m old enough to remember when “don’t drop the soap” was the go-to anal sex reference in mainstream movies and TV shows. A few decades back, the most well-known depictions of anal intercourse were often violent attacks against someone who was queer, incarcerated, or both. For example, 

garnered Hilary Swank her first Academy Award in 2000 for portraying a real-life trans man, Brandon Teena, who was raped and later murdered in his rural Nebraska town.

To be clear, it’s not that anal sex has been totally liberated from the realm of taboo and grisly true crime. Even nowadays, getting “fucked in the ass” remains a routine shorthand in hypermasculine settings for being bested in some sort of conflict (see virtually any episode of 

 another HBO instant classic). But despite the tenacity of such lexical relics, I see the rate of progress as successfully instilling a superior norm, where anal sex is more likely than ever to be portrayed in a shame-free way that centers pleasure instead of power, and as an activity that anyone can enjoy.

"Queer folks are certainly not the only ones, on-screen or off, enjoying back-door action."

So, what’s changed? From what I can tell, it’s the early aughts when things started to shift. That’s when the Oscar-winning films that feature anal sex, like 

 (2005), were portraying the act as a source of pleasure and connection — just like any other sex scene. 

 in particular is considered a watershed moment for gay men in cinema, for its portrayal of their sexual desire as legitimate, and even sacrosanct.

In fact, the recent influx of LBGTQ+ people in Hollywood, both in front of and behind the camera, may have helped sex scenes become more well-rounded. After all, taboos about anal pleasure in the US derive from the country’s Puritan roots (with a major assist from Sigmund Freud). This led to the stigmatization of virtually all non-procreative sex, and helped to seed homophobia in Western culture. But it’s also meant that queer people, unacknowledged by the strictures governing cis-hetero sex (i.e. sex ends when the person with the penis has an orgasm), are freer to approach their sexuality from a place of curiosity and exploration.

With greater visibility in entertainment and social media in recent years, LGBTQ+ people have been able to make their experiences and desires widely known, including ones — like anal sex — that have been traditionally coded as “queer” by the mainstream. That being said, queer folks are certainly not the only ones, on-screen or off, enjoying back-door action. Seeing straight cis TV characters engaged in anilingus is increasingly common, like on 

 a short-lived Starz drama about grief, queerness, and 

In an ill-fated hookup between Linda and her boyfriend, we see her eating his ass, which he vocally enjoys. “Did you bring 

?” she asks beforehand, implying that this is routine, and also that she’s an enthusiastic participant. I loved that this was played totally straight, without mocking the boyfriend for being into it. What I didn’t love as much was the later reveal that this guy is a selfish prick, when he subjects his grieving girlfriend to a humiliating heartbreak.

While modern screenwriters may be less reliant upon prison rape punchlines and “no homo” quips, it’s definitely not uncommon to see anal pleasure (or a desire for it) as a stand-in for loathsome character traits, as with the scene in 

. Another unhelpful trope is when anal sex is shown specifically to demonstrate that a character (often a woman) is despairing and self-destructive, like in 

 Even as we’re beginning to depict anal sex more honestly overall, the cultural compulsion to 

As a passionate pleasure advocate, I feel a sense of triumph that anal sex is becoming increasingly normalized through storytelling, whether through entertainment or online. It shows that we’re helping each other understand what’s possible in our relationships and our (sex) lives, and learning to put pleasure first.