Rachel Feltman: Wendy Zukerman is used to tackling big, messy questions. That’s pretty much the point of her hit podcast Science Vs: she and her team take on fads and trends to figure out the facts. But she recently took on what might be her most taboo subject to date—something that’s gotten so little attention from scientists that she had to go collect data on it herself: anal sex.
For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today I’m talking to Wendy about how her quest to break down the myths surrounding the so-called male g-spot led her to help coordinate a massive new survey on basically everything fun you can do with a butt.
Feltman: So what inspired you to create this survey, and how did you go about designing it?
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Zukerman: I’ve been on a journey, Rachel, an, an anal-sex journey—something I didn’t think I would say this year, I’m gonna be honest [laughs].
So the show that I make, Science Vs, the whole point of it is that we take these ideas that are in the zeitgeist, that are online, and then we, like, fact-check the hell out of them, and—you know, from the serious to the perhaps seemingly trivial. And this idea came up about the male G-spot, which has been around for ages, and if you go online, like, basically every website out there, from, you know, British GQ, to, like, Healthline—you know, all these, like, seemingly medical-based websites—you know, everyone’s like, “The male G-spot, you know, this is—if you press it, you’ll get the most amazing orgasms of your life.” And for the uninitiated, the male G-spot is the prostate. Like, everyone’s like, “The male G-spot is the prostate. If you have one, press it—amazing orgasms.”
And I was like, “Really? Is that true? Is that true? And, and am I missing out, as someone who doesn’t have a prostate?” was my, was my B-story. And so I thought that ...
Feltman: Yeah, the big, important questions [laughs].
Zukerman: [Laughs] Exactly, exactly—you know, research is mesearch.
And so I thought one way to answer that question is fairly simple, is you could get a bunch of people who have prostates and a bunch of people who do not have prostates and basically ask them, you know, “When you have anal sex or penetrate yourself anally,” which is—for the uninitiated, that is how you would reach your prostate: you would put a finger or a penis or a toy about one or two inches up your bottom, and that’s how you would press it. And so the sort of scientific question is that, like, “If you do this—put a finger or a toy or a penis up your bottom for sexual pleasure—is it so much better if you have a prostate? Is that experience so much greater?”
And I went into the scientific literature thinking that there would be something. This—I mean, Rachel, we’ve been science journalists for a long time. There’s scientific literature on, on basically everything ...
Feltman: It’s true—so many things that do not seem important. And it’s like, “Good for you. I’m glad you looked into that.” [Laughs]
Zukerman: “Good for—I appreciate you.” Exactly, yes.
But there was, there was nothing—nothing had interrogated this, this question in this way...
Feltman: Wow.
Zukerman: And, and even what I realized is: this whole topic of anal sex—receptive anal intercourse in particular, you know, also called “bottoming”—but this idea of, like, putting something into your bottom, that hadn’t really been researched that well either.
And then what it really made me realize is that this topic that I started as, like, something fun and kind of frivolous, it actually became about something more, which is, like: What kinds of sex are okay? And what kinds of sex is science allowed to study and are doctors allowed to talk about? And, and, like, anal sex had—has sort of been, like, shifted off to the side as something taboo.
And so then that really drove me to, to do this survey and find out, like, A: “How many people are doing this?” And then, and then sort of the question of, like: “Does the male G-spot—and, like, you know, how many people are enjoying it?” And, and, you know, “Let’s, like, shed some light in the dark.” And then the idea of like, “Oh, and by the way, does the male G-spot exist?” It sort of became this always second-line story in the end.
Feltman: Yeah, wow, it’s—you know, even having written a whole book about sex and knowing there are so many things that we should have looked into that we haven’t looked into yet, it’s still shocking to me that really, like, everyone was just taking this for granted.
But I know that you found a couple of researchers who were ready to go deeper. Could you tell me a little bit about the, the folks you worked with in, in figuring out this survey?
Zukerman: Yeah, absolutely, so as I was sort of realizing this, this whole point that, like, so much of, of scientific research is really focused on penis-vagina sex.
Feltman: Mm-hmm.
Zukerman: I’m sure there’s a more scientific term for that, but that’s what we’ll use.
Feltman: I’m pretty sure they do just say PIV, so ...
Zukerman: [Laughs] Right, right, there we go.
Feltman: [Laughs] So, no, I ...
Zukerman: [Laughs] Call a spade a spade; that’s what we like to do.
So I, I really—where—it was really interesting because two researchers from across the country in the U.S., one in New York and one in L.A., had actually started looking at this question of receptive anal intercourse just, you know, within the last several years. And they both came upon it from the same perspective.
So both of them had been working with prostate cancer patients. And with prostate cancer, the treatment can often affect erections. And so they would be talking to their patients and asking a lot about erections. And both of them, in fact, told me this quote—they were like, “So we were asking, ‘Erections, erections, erections.’” So that, if you have them both side by side, that is six erections.
And, and then for Dr. Dan Dickstein, who’s at Mount Sinai Hospital, one of his patients asked him, “Well, what about receptive anal intercourse?” For him, for this patient, it wasn’t that important whether he had an erection or not; he enjoyed being the receptive partner. And so that’s—he was more worried, like, “How will prostate-cancer treatment affect bottoming effectively?” And Dan Dickstein was like, “I don’t know.”
And then that’s when he sort of had the realization that I had, which is that we’re not asking because we don’t care about—as the scientific community, as, as, you know, the medical community in the past—we don’t care about receptive anal intercourse. It’s only: “The erect penis goes—you know, what is the erect penis doing?” So much focus on the erect penis rather than the receptive partner. That’s sort of what got him on this search.
And then Thomas Gaither, who’s at [University of California, Los Angeles], was sort of having that realization as well. He’s a surgeon, and he was seeing all these surgeries where the prostate would be removed. And he had heard about the male G-spot as well, you know, obviously, and he would see these patients who were getting their prostates removed, and he would wonder, like, “Is that gonna affect bottoming? I mean, I don’t know if this patient is interested in bottoming, but how is this affecting it?” And so that sent him on this scientific journey as well.
And they didn’t really—they didn’t know about what each other was doing at the time, and so they both published papers, you know, really in the last five years and have kind of cracked open this research space.
So now we’re, we’re really starting to see something. And, you know, Thomas Gaither has now started this, what he calls the anorectal sexual function index, which is where he is starting to ask patients about, like, what it is—you know, receptive anal intercourse: how much pleasure they get, how much pain. And he’s then planning on using that to then talk to patients to try to understand whether prostate-cancer treatment does affect bottoming.
So we, we should have answers to this question so that when Dan Dickstein gets asked again, he’ll be able to tell the patient.
Feltman: That’s awesome. And how did people react to the survey?
Zukerman: So even though, as, as I mentioned, you know, we’re starting to see some research in this space, no one that I had found had done a survey that was speaking to people with both vaginas and penises—so with prostates and without. So even though I could sort of start seeing some stuff in the literature, I didn’t have the answer to my question: “Does the male G-spot exist?”
And so I made this little video on social media. We obviously did the survey and, and spoke to academics to help write the survey, including Tom and Dan and, and professor Caroline Pukall, who is a sexual-health researcher in Canada. So we wrote the survey, then we put it out on social media, and it just sort of blew up in this way that I had not expected at all.
We have done other sex surveys on the show, and, you know, you’re looking at the—one member of the team that wrote a—the first [in-depth] scientific study on “blue balls,” [laughs] so I, I, I have done this important work before. But the response to this survey was really out of this world.
So we ended up having nearly 16,000 responses that, when I was telling the academics as I was—you know, I kept refreshing and refreshing and seeing these survey numbers going up and up and up, and, and the researchers were just like, “Oh, my gosh, like, this is amazing. Like, this is so much data. We’re so excited.”
And so, just to put some stats around it, so—and I will say, you know, most of the people who filled out the survey were in their 20s and 30s, but more than 800 responses were people over 50 ...
Feltman: Oh, wow.
Zukerman: So—yeah, yeah, which was, which was really great to see, which is sort of funny ’cause an older person in my life came up to me and was like, “Well, I’ll be your only person who ticked the over-60 box.” [Laughs] I was like, “No, no, no—I don’t know which one’s you. I don’t know which one’s you. It’s anonymous.”
So—and, and what we found is that this topic that, you know, is, you know, perhaps one of the last big sex taboos—anal sex and anal masturbation [for the people in our survey] was so common [laughs]. So, you know, Rachel, so when we’re talking about anal masturbation—so this is when you’re putting a finger or a toy up your own bottom—nearly, nearly half the people in our survey had said that they had done it in their lifetime. Among that group, we had—just over a third had done it within the past month. For anyone listening who is like, “This is a gay thing,” that was absolutely not what we found in our survey. In fact, over 50 percent of straight [cisgender] men had said that, “Yes, I, I have had anal masturbation.” So this is really common—and it was over a third of cisgender women.
So, so people, people are doing butt stuff. Partnered [laughs] ...
Feltman: [Laughs] Alone, together—yeah.
Zukerman: Partnered anal penetration is similarly, similarly quite common: [about] 45 percent had said, yes, they had, they had penetrated—they had had anal penetration with their partner—you know, which, which, that 45 percent, by the way, it’s not, not just a penis, so it could have been, like, a finger with a partner or a toy with a partner.
Feltman: Well, and other than the general enthusiasm and response, what were some of the surprising things that you found?
Zukerman: To me, and this will show my ageism, which I am sorry for, but among the older people in our survey, there was also a lot of anal play. I had kind of assumed that this was, like, a Gen Z, young millennial thing ...
Feltman: Sure, yeah.
Zukerman: But in fact, you know, nearly a third of our sample over 50 had engaged in anal masturbation within the past 30 days. You know, and that was, that was pretty similar to those in the younger age groups. So it really feels like a lot of people are exploring this. So that was really interesting to me and just how common it was.
What was also incredibly delightful for me is we had a section in the survey that was sort of like, “If you want to tell us more about, you know, how you feel about anal masturbation or your orgasms, you know, please do.” When I was looking at, at this response, because it’s a social—it’s social media, was where we got most of our responses, and it’s a convenient sample, you know, it’s not, it’s not necessarily representative, I was like, “Is this real? Are people being honest?”
But then I would read the comments that people wrote to us, and they were so genuine about wanting to inform science about their experiences with anal. You know, people would say, “I don’t know if I filled out the survey properly, but, like, I really only orgasm if I am, you know, touching my clitoris as well as, you know, having anal penetration.” Or like, you know, “Oh, I just really want—you know, this is—it’s been so important to my life.” Or like, “Ah, yeah, I’ve tried it, and I don’t really like it.” And, like, what—you know, just these, like, varying responses to the same sexual activity, I found that so fascinating because it’s all just, like, when you think of the anatomy, like, it’s all just, like, nerves and blood vessels, but that people were having this huge range of responses and wanting to tell us about it [laughs] and wanting to tell science about it was so delightful.
Feltman: Yeah, well, and I definitely encourage listeners who haven’t to go check out the, the Science Vs episode we’re, we’re talking about, but to give a little bit of context for, for folks who haven’t heard it yet, what did you find about the G-spot [laughs]? And all those nerves—all those bundles of nerves?
Zukerman: Yeah, I mean, it was—so the sort of driving question going, going into this was, “So do people with prostates, are they orgasming more from, from butt play and butt stuff?”
And they were. They did tend to orgasm more frequently, and they also enjoyed their orgasms more. So we also asked questions like, “Are your orgasms through anal, receptive anal intercourse, better than your orgasms through other kinds of sex?” ’Cause through that question, we were really trying to, like, get to this [MythBusters] round: “Is it really the best orgasm of your life?” I mean, really, I was scanning through some, some news articles that have been written recently, and it’s just like the, the amazingness of, apparently, these orgasms is out of control.
And so, and so what we did find is that, you know, yes, in general, people with prostates were enjoying their orgasms more and were orgasming more frequently. But where things got complicated in the [data]—you know, suggesting that perhaps the prostate does play a role in sexual pleasure—nothing in our data suggested that it is some sex button for everyone. And in fact, you know, not everyone was orgasming from anal sex and anal play. You know, even if you just want to look at anal masturbation figures because, you know, partnered sex can be complicated and it ...
Feltman: Sure, yeah.
Zukerman: You know, involves different factors, and if you’re not comfortable with your partner—but if you just want to look at the masturbation figures, I think they’re, they’re quite useful ’cause then you sort of know your body, and again you would expect if you masturbated and pressed that magic sex button: bam! But we didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t see, like, a “bam” in our data. And what we also saw that was really interesting—so from Thomas Gaither’s research, he had seen that people who have more experience with anal sex tend to enjoy it more. And—which makes sense, and it’s true for other kinds of sex as well: you know your own body; you know what you like.
And so he—so because I had spoken to him, I was like, “Oh, we need to ask about experience as well in the survey: ‘How many times have you done this?’” And that ended up being really informative because once we controlled for the experience people had—and so we just took people who had had quite a lot of experience with anal sex and anal masturbation—then we saw the differences between people with prostates and those without them got smaller and smaller and smaller.
And so from that, and then from the anatomy, to go back to your question, when you look at the, like, nerves and blood vessels around people who have prostates and those without them, it’s all very, very similar. I mean, we’re all cut from the same cloth [laughs]. We’ve all got, like, this pudendal nerve that kind of branches into, into the butt region and stimulates all these, you know, good feelings that people can have. And that obviously explains why both people with and without prostates can enjoy anal sex.
And so to go back to this question of, like, “Does the male G-spot exist?” what we ultimately concluded is that—I mean, I think I’m probably giving the game away—there’s, there’s no magic sex button, per se. There’s, there’s many sort of different points along the butt that can be arousing. And, and perhaps for some people, the prostate is quite special and is a, is a nice thing, and we definitely saw that in the data for some people. But it’s definitely—yeah, but it’s not a magic sex button. So that was, that was the—so I think, I think “myth busted” is, is really where we, where we landed.
Feltman: So what are researchers hoping to do with the data you collected?
Zukerman: So we’re really excited ’cause now we’re working with this group of academics, including Dan Dickstein, to write it up into a scientific paper and to, to put the data out there. And it’s, yeah, it’s really wonderful. We had a meeting with them recently—with Dan and, and Caroline Pukall and Sam Levang, who helped us analyze the data to begin with—and, and everyone’s just really excited to get this information out there, to, to break these taboos around anal sex.
I mean, once you see the figures of, of how common it is, at least in our sample, and how people are enjoying it, for the most part, it’s just hard to feel this, like, “Uh-oh, we shouldn’t be talking about this,” when almost 50 percent of our sample had tried it. I should be honest with you: when starting to research this, I was quite nervous about putting it on my work calendar: “male G-spot,” “anal sex”; quite nervous about, you know, we had a couple of clips that we put on Instagram—I was like, “Oh, no, am I gonna be, like, the anal-sex lady?” And now it’s like, “That’s okay.” [Laughs] “That’s great.”
Feltman: Yeah [laughs].
Zukerman: It’s, you know, it’s just—I, I think, I think, without good scientific data and surveys like this one, I mean, where are people gonna get their information about anal sex? It’s gonna be pornography or their friends.
And getting your information about anal sex from pornography is probably the worst place to get it because, as we talk about in the episode, preparation—if you are going for—you know, if you are planning on putting something fairly large into your butthole, such as a penis, it, it can be quite painful if you’re not going about it the right way and if you’re not relaxed and you’re not using a lot of lubrication and you’re not going slow, for example.
And in pornography, what you see is really just a dick jamming into a butthole. And, and I know there is literature out there on, you know, often women’s experiences of anal sex where that is what their partner has done. And it is just the worst place. So, so breaking taboos around receptive anal intercourse isn’t just fun ...
Feltman: Right.
Zukerman: It’s also really important that we just start talking to people about how to do this properly so that we can have a good time with it rather than it being a painful experience.
Feltman: Yeah, well, in talking about, you know, the importance of preparation and, and getting good information, what kind of responses did you get about negative experiences?
Zukerman: So we also asked about coercion, which is: “Had people ever felt pressure to have receptive anal intercourse when they weren’t comfortable with it?” And this was also fairly common, so more than one in five in our sample said yes. And it was particularly common amongst certain groups, so more than 40 percent of gay cis men said yes, more than a third of people who were assigned female at birth said yes. And so that is also something that’s worth discussing: you know, why this is happening, why people are feeling this coercion.
And then away from that, we also heard from people who just weren’t that into it ...
Feltman: Sure, yeah.
Zukerman: And I think that’s really important to say because there’s preferences around all kinds of sexual activities. And, you know, there—when we asked people for, “How do you feel?” and some people said, you know, “Oh, it’s mind-blowing sex. It’s blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” we also had people who just wrote, “It’s fine.”
Feltman: Yeah.
Zukerman: “It’s fine.” [Laughs] You know, like, “It’s, it’s [fine].” You know, a lot of people, when we asked, “Is this, you know, better than other kinds of orgasms you’ve had, or is it the same as other kinds of orgasm?” you know, a lot of people were just like, “It’s just the same. It’s fine.” [Laughs] Like, it—so I think that’s really important to say: while some people really enjoy it, others don’t. So I think it’s, it’s just a question of, like, “Is this something you want to explore? And here’s some really good information about it.”
Feltman: Yeah, absolutely. And what kind of response have you gotten to the episode? I’m especially curious compared to some of your other sex-focused Science Vs, like the blue-balls episode.
Zukerman: Do you know—it’s really funny, Rachel; our, our sex episodes do quite well. Like, so we can see in the numbers that …
Feltman: Sure, yeah.
Zukerman: People are listening, but it is quite silent [laughs]. So people do not like to tell us that they’re listening. I, I have to say, the male G-spot episode has probably been a little bit louder than, than our other episodes. But I remember, we did one about the orgasm gap, which is why, generally, you see women orgasming less than men, and I remember seeing, like, hearing nothing on social media and just being like [gasps], “Oh, my gosh, like, is no one listening to this episode?” And I was like, “Oh, no. People are listening [laughs]. They’re just not telling us about it.”
There was someone on TikTok that I thought was very sweet, and he was [laughs], he was just, like, “Only an Australian could talk this openly about anal sex.” But you know what, Rachel, we could change that, you know?
Feltman: [Laughs] Absolutely, I think that’s a fantastic goal.
[Clip: Show theme music]
Feltman: That’s all for this week, but don’t worry: I’ll be back on Monday. We won’t have a news roundup next week, because we’ve got another very special guest: filmmaker James Cameron. When he’s not busy writing, directing and producing some of the highest-grossing films ever—Titanic, Avatar, The Terminator, super casual stuff—James spends a lot of time thinking about, talking about, and exploring the ocean. He brought those passions together to executive produce and narrate National Geographic’s new series “OceanXplorers,” which premieres August 18 on Hulu and Disney+.
Tune in on Monday to hear more about how James Cameron fell in love with the deep, and to get a taste of the production challenges you face when you try to track down ancient sharks, swim with baby whales, and tag ferocious orcas—all while trying to make a stunning television show.
In the meantime, do us a favor and leave a quick rating and review for us wherever you listen to this podcast. You can also send us any questions or comments at sciencequickly@sciam.com.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
