Anal sex without illusions: passive notes after a year in Spain

There are topics that are constantly joked about in the gay environment, but few people want to discuss them seriously.

This one is one of them.

Yes, we are talking about fecal embarrassment during anal sex.

Over the past year of living in Spain, I managed to quite actively immerse myself in the local gay environment: saunas in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Sitges, cruising spaces, dating men.

And gradually I began to notice one thing.

Embarrassments occur.

But I was surprised by something else.

Not the situations themselves, but how differently people treat them.

At first, I thought I was just unlucky. Then I began to notice a pattern. Especially in saunas. In the morning, after a few hours of sex, sometimes the very smell appears, which is difficult to confuse with something else.

And at some point, I caught myself wondering: do many people prepare for anal sex as carefully as I do?

For me, preparation has always been as much a part of the process as lubricant.

Not because I think the body's natural processes are something terrible. Because it is difficult for me personally to relax if I am not confident in myself. I need this level of calm to have fun.

I understand that everyone has their own approach. For some, a small risk of an embarrassing situation is just part of reality. For me, it has always been different.

Probably, this is largely due to how I entered the gay environment in general. In Russia, I constantly heard the same idea: if you are a liability, you must be perfectly prepared. Any embarrassment was perceived almost as the end of the world. Many told stories about how the assets immediately stopped sex, disdained or then remembered this case for a long time. I don't know how much this reflects the entire Russian gay environment, but this is exactly the idea I have formed.

Therefore, over time, preparation ceased to be a choice for me - it became the rule. If I am not confident in myself, there will simply be no sex. Of course, there were exceptions. Once the embarrassment did occur, but the activists reacted calmly, without disgust and without condemnation. However, this did not help much. Because by that time I myself was already convinced: the passive must be perfectly clean.

Over time, I realized that it is generally wrong to talk about preparation as one thing. For some, this is washing. For some, it's food. Someone knows the peculiarities of their body so well that they can safely have anal sex without additional preparation. It seems that there is simply no universal way.

Personally, everything is a little more complicated for me. Nutrition did not always give a predictable result. Therefore, I rely more on preparation before sex.

And it was with this attitude that I came to Spain.

Therefore, what I saw here came as a surprise to me.

Over the past year, I have noticed more and more often that in saunas and cruising spaces, such embarrassments occur much more often than I expected. Perhaps I was just "lucky". Perhaps the fact is that it is here that I visit such places much more actively than before. I cannot say that this is happening everywhere. These are just my observations.

But I was much more surprised not by the situations themselves, but by the reaction to them.

Much more often I saw not panic, not disgust and not a desire to humiliate a person, but a calm attitude. As if everyone understands that it is impossible to fully control your own body.

It was then that I first thought: is there really less emphasis on preparation here? Or am I just confronted with a different sexual culture where these situations are perceived as a natural part of anal sex?

I began to look for information and realized that even the medical side of the question does not give an unambiguous answer.

Preparation really helps to reduce the likelihood of such situations. But experts also remind that it is impossible to completely eliminate the risk. Moreover, too frequent or aggressive lavages can irritate the intestinal mucosa and cause problems themselves. At the same time, many doctors generally place more emphasis not on lavage, but on nutrition, intestinal health and understanding of the characteristics of their own body.

It turns out to be an interesting paradox.

On the one hand, preparation is respect for yourself and your partner. On the other hand, it is impossible to achieve one hundred percent control over your own body.

My attitude did not change because of this.

I will still prepare before anal sex. Not because I think others are wrong, but because that's how I feel comfortable. But life in Spain made me look at this topic a little more broadly.

Perhaps sexual culture is manifested not only in how carefully we prepare for sex.

But also in how calmly they are able to accept the fact that sometimes the human body simply remains human. We're not gay heroes.