Gwyneth Paltrow would like to talk to you about bum sex
Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow wants to teach you about anal sex.
“If anal turns you on, you are definitely not alone,” the star of Shakespeare in Love and Sliding Doors has told fans.
Paltrow has attracted fans – and ridicule – with her lifestyle blog Goop, where the article was published yesterday.
The site is an easy target for those looking to make fun of pretension, with its vague categories – Go, Be, Do, See, Make and Get – and talk of ancient medicine and “Fungi’s Impact on the Body”.
There are also many articles advising on your love life, including ones about the research behind casual sex, gadgets for your sex life and orgasm equality.
And her latest offering includes useful advice and assurances that anal sex is now widely socially accepted, with readers informed that it is “practically standard in the modern bedroom repertoire”.
However, she adds: “Its prevalence doesn’t change the fact that it’s the riskiest sexual behavior in terms of HIV and other STDs.”
She then asks author and psychoanalyst Paul Joannides, who wrote Guide To Getting It On, questions like “When did heterosexual anal start to become a thing?” and “What should we be telling our kids about anal?”
Joannides tells her to maybe hold off on discussing anal sex with children, recommending some other topics which should take priority.
“We don’t tell them about the clitoris, about women’s orgasms, about masturbation, about the importance of exploring a partner’s body, and learning from each other,” he says.
“We don’t tell them that much of what they see in porn is unreal, and we don’t talk to them about the importance of mutual consent.
“So I don’t see anal being at the top of most parents’ ‘should talk to our kids about’ lists. There are more important things we need to be talking about first.”
However, he highlights the importance of adults knowing their way around anal, emphasising that “the way you see anal sex portrayed in porn is about as real as how they drive cars in The Fast and the Furious.
“The anus isn’t designed to have a penis thrust up it; nature did not spec it to handle incoming, as she did with the vagina.”
He recommends “teaching the sphincters to relax, and in addition to getting the angle right so you don’t poke the receiver in the wall of the rectum, you need to use lots of lube.”
The porn-based fantasy some people may have about anal sex would actually be worse in real life, he adds, saying: “Common sense would tell you it should go way better if a guy is normal-sized as opposed to porn-sized.”
Joannides estimates that when it comes to gay men, “maybe 50% of them have anal sex,” adding an assertion that “a lot of gay men would far rather give and receive blowjobs than have anal sex.”
He warns: “Do not use numbing lube, and do not have anal sex while drunk or stoned.”
All this advice is included in the latest issue of Paltrow’s Goop newsletter, The Sex Issue.
