The Anus is your God
We’ve witnessed an explosion in the popularity of anal eroticism over the last few decades. Anal sex has become a mainstay in heterosexual pornography, and is increasingly popular in the heterosexual bedroom as well. Implied anal scenes have even found their way into a handful of popular films and TV shows. The mainstreaming of anal play has been accompanied by a flurry of think pieces, ranging from gleeful celebration all the way to moral panic. Strangely, there seems to be very little writing on the meaning of anal eroticism through an artistic and philosophical lens. This essay is the first in a series—my own effort to fill in that gap.
To speak intelligently about butt stuff, we will need to drill down into the very core of the human condition: we are animals; and we will die. At first glance, this might not sound like a novel insight. On some level, human mortality is the most obvious thing in the world. Nevertheless, in The Denial of Death, Pulitzer-prize winning cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that our fear of death is the wellspring of nearly all human activity.
In Beckers’s framing, we are all torn between two irreconcilable visions of the self: one symbolic, the other animalistic. The symbolic self refers to the fact that we have a name, a station in society, an intuitive sense that our lives ought to serve some higher purpose. At the same time, however, we understand the truth: we are no different from any other animal. According to the Book of Ecclesiastes: “The fate of human beings is like that of the animal; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.” This is the animalistic version of the self distilled to its very essence—insignificant, fragile, prone to disease, and destined for no higher purpose than to become worm food.
As the unique species condemned to anticipate its own demise, we humans are forever torn between the ingrained sense that our accomplishments ought to count for something, and the harsh truth that every mark we leave on this earth will be erased on a long enough timescale. In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Thomas Ligotti summarized the situation with his usual panache: “Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unselfconscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”
Becker believed that we distract ourselves from the gnawing horror of mortality with hedonistic pursuits such as eroticism, drugs, shallow entertainment, and mindless consumption. Or, alternatively, we pour ourselves into “immortality projects.” We amass wealth and status. We conquer nations. We build monuments to ourselves. We create art and scholarship. In short: we devote ourselves to some pursuit which might offer an afterlife to the symbolic self, if not to the physical body. In this framing, all important facets of human culture—art, culture, politics, war, entertainment, hedonism, sexuality, etc—ultimately stem from our inability to reckon with the harsh reality of death.
Death and Sex
To connect Becker’s psychological analysis to the subject of eroticism, we need only state the obvious: few acts are more clearly tied to the animalistic version of the self than fucking. And because that animalistic version of the self is the one associated to mortality, erotic desire is inextricable from death. “Sex is of the body,” Becker wrote. “And the body is of death.”
This observation is hardly original. Many writers on art, philosophy, and spirituality have taken note of the symmetry between the taboo events which bookend human existence. According to the great philosopher, novelist, and pornographer Georges Bataille: “Decay summed up the world we spring form and return to, and horror and shame were attached both to our birth and our death.”
The intimate connection between sex and death is also the basis for Biblical story of the Garden of Eden. At the goading of a snake, Eve eats the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Soon after, she coaxes Adam to do the same. And having eaten this fruit they become, for the first time, ashamed of their nakedness. This moment should be understood as a sexual awakening. It is no accident that the animal responsible for this awakening resembles a phallus.
As punishment for their transgression, Adam and Eve are cast out from Paradise, never again to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life, which made them immortal. In Christian mythology, this so-called Fall of Man is the origin of death. For Christians, the transition into sexual maturity comes hand-in-hand with the looming spectre of mortality…
Death and The Anus
The passage of food through the digestive system mirrors the cycle of life. Eating is a life-giving activity. And what we consume is fresh, beautiful, nourishing. The subsequent journey from mouth to anus is one of disintegration and destruction. Finally, what emerges from the anus is nothing but an echo—the decomposed remains of what once was. But the act of shitting is hardly the end of this story. Instead, it marks the renewal of the cycle. Shit is fertilizer, after all. Shit is fuel for plants which, in their turn, feed animals. And these, in their time, also become food. The cycle begins anew, over and over, never exhausting itself.
The fate of any meal is like the fate of all living things. From the lowliest worm to the most accomplished human, all creatures are equally condemned. We are born. We grow old. Our bodies deteriorate. And we die. After death, our rotting flesh is consumed by worms, reprocessed, and reintegrated into whatever life succeeds us. “All go unto one place,” according to the author of Ecclesiastes. “All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Here, “dust” means the decayed remains of all that has come before. That is to say, “dust” means shit. Although the Bible never puts its quite so crudely, the statement could fairly be re-written as follows: We are all born of the anus; and to the anus we shall all return.
We arrive, finally, at the cornerstone of my analysis: the anus is associated with death. In Becker’s words: “The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundedness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: death and decay.”
The connection between the anus and death is, of course, not independent of the aforementioned connection between sex and death. “The horror we feel at the thought of a corpse is akin to the feeling we have at human excreta,” according to Bataille. “What makes this association more compelling is our similar disgust at aspects of sensuality we call obscene. The sexual channels are also the body’s sewers; we think of them as shameful and connect the anal orifice with them.”
It is interesting to re-consider the Garden of Eden narrative in light of this connection. It cannot be an accident that the inciting incident for Eve’s loss of innocence—a symbolic loss of virginity—was the consumption of food. Surely, this creative choice implies a connection between the Fall of Man and the movement of food through the digestive tract. The Book of Genesis makes no explicit mention of defecation, of course; nevertheless, every reader understands that the remains of the forbidden fruit must have eventually been expelled from Eve’s anus…
The Anus as God
Having unpacked all this, we can see what is powerful about anal eroticism: it transmutes a terrifying symbol of death into a desired source of bodily pleasure. The penetration of the anus with a penis is particularly interesting, because it suggests a kind of rebellion against mortality, by depositing the seed of life into the orifice associated with death.
From a psychological perspective, the primary purpose of any religion is to ease that fear most central to the human condition—fear of death. In practice, of course, religions can serve many purposes, from fostering community, to bolstering certain political ideologies. But these are all secondary concerns; what matters most is that a religion offers its followers a clear vision of immortality. We want to believe in Divinity because we desire a life beyond this one.
Atheists are not immune to this desire for immortality. Many of us are driven to pursue some noble project or other—the writing of a great novel, for example—with the implicit hope that this thing will outlive us, affording immortality to the symbolic self, if not to the physical body. The act of writing a novel might seem very different from going to church; however, both serve the same psychological purpose. In this sense, then, the novel becomes a kind of personal religion for the author.
We can make a very similar argument about the anal eroticism. The anus represents death. And the fetishization of the anus transforms the spectre of death into a source of erotic pleasure, thereby assuaging the horror of mortality. For those who enjoy it, then, anal eroticism also becomes a private religion. This goes some distance toward understanding the evangelism of certain new converts to the church of the asshole. This also explains the proliferation of “ass worship” videos on smut streaming sites.
Eating Ass
The act of rimming should be given special consideration within this framework. Eating ass is probably best understood in the context of the connection between the motion of the digestive tract and the cycle of life. We are, after all, speaking of an intimate connection between the organ associated with life/nourishment (the mouth) and the one associated with death (the anus). It follow that anilingus offers a profound spiritual connection to whatever cosmic force maintains the balance between life and death.
We can find a great reverence for anilingus throughout art history. Indeed, the great novelist and criminal Jean Genet’s most evocative writings involve eating ass. A comprehensive analysis of rimming in art is well beyond the scope of this work, but I do want to make it clear that this conversation is hardly limited to niche French perverts like Genet and Bataille. Even the celebrated composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote several pieces about licking ass…
In Toward Union, the poet Angelo Nikopolopoulos frames eating ass as a sacrament—a transubstantiation analogous to the Eucharist of Roman Catholic mass. Notice, yet again, the connection between Divinity, eternal life, and the movement of food through digestive tract. In Christian mythology, Jesus Christ took away the sins of the world by offering his own body as a sacrifice, analogous to the ritual slaughter of lambs at Passover. And just as the flesh of the sacrificial lamb is consumed and eventually shat out, so too are Christ’s followers instructed to remember him through the metaphorical consumption of his Divine flesh.
The Solar Anus
Many themes of this essay are present in Bataille’s short surrealist work The Solar Anus. That text is strange and ambiguous; however, The Solar Anus contains some powerful imagery. For example, Bataille explicitly connects sexual penetration to the turning of the earth. Alongside his repeated references to death, bodily waste products, and consumption, Bataille’s claim that “the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus,” and vice versa, seems a clear reference to Ecclesiastes’ insistence that all things are cyclical, that life and death are trapped in a perpetual feedback loop, that all arise from the anus and to the anus all must return.
The Solar Anus’ penultimate metaphor is, of course, the titular connection between the sun and the anus of a beautiful young woman. In this single image, we see Bataille’s obvious erotic interest in the woman’s anus. We also note the superficial similarity between the creases of the anal sphincter and the rays of the sun. Most importantly, however, Bataille is implying something much deeper: a symbolic connection between death-haunted hole of the anus and the life-giving power of the sun. It is no coincidence that many cultures have incorporated solar motifs into their worship. Indeed, some cultures have even worshipped the sun as a God…