The New York Review of Anal
The New York Review of Anal
On beauty, agency, and assholes
Last week, I went to New York to participate in the Hole Debate, sponsored by Substack and hosted by
, who writes the incredible Review of Beauty. My topic: Is the beauty industry that’s cropped up around anal care — including scrubs, serums, toilet-mounted mirrors, special soaps, and cosmetic surgeries — neurotic or necessary? I spoke onstage, sparring with renown proctologist Dr. Evan Goldstein, at Duane Park off the Bowery — a rococo environment with tarnished mirrors and free drinks and an aerial dancer who gave us an operatic rendition of “Seven Nation Army.” Other debaters included , , , and . There were Polaroid cameras in each bathroom stall — and yes, I made anonymous use of a little film. Afterward, I took a long walk (free drinks, alas) through SoHo and the Lower East Side, eating peanut butter M&Ms and peering into darkened storefronts. The next day, I did the usual: signed books where I could, ate pastries, drank too much coffee, and met a friend for a drink. That night, I went to Ruth Madievsky’s New York paperback launch, where I saw , Simon Wu, and Erin Somers read from their work. Later, drinking again, I realized we were all at the same bar where I’d celebrated my own east coast launch — my first ever New York book event — in early 2018.
New York is a city of talk, and where anyone goes to do their best talking. The debate itself felt like talk — less a competition than a panel of ideas (and jokes). A few of us were nervous — not about performing, per se, but about being seen, I think, or being witnessed, as our opponents disagreed with us onstage. The threat, I guess, was an audience reading our faces as we reacted to a challenge. But even the challenges, for the most part, were in their way supportive. “I don’t think we actually disagree,” I told Dr. Goldstein, and we recommended that everyone buy a bidet immediately.
I went (and was invited, I suppose) because it’s easy for me to see the shadow in hole care— the same shadow in all beauty products, which DeFino writes about so marvelously. As I said then, if you’ve eaten your share of ass you know that each has its own flavor; like dicks and tits and cunts, every asshole is unique. But if you listen to the companies trying to sell us serums, creams, scrubs, and so forth, you’d think there’s only one acceptable kind of asshole: smooth, silky, pale, puckered, hairless, and above all shitless. This is the idealized asshole that beauty marketeers, in their copy and graphics, have created as the imagined standard; its perfection is advertised at us relentlessly while scrolling or browsing. In fact, like many aspects of sex and of beauty, the smartphone is inseparable from beautifying the asshole.
It would be difficult to imagine caring so deeply about what your asshole looks like if we weren’t all walking around with the near power of a space telescope in our pockets, able to aim it at our holes and capture their details and upload them for public consumption at any time. Like any other part of the body, the hole in high-def has a lot to surrender to critique; and, like any other photograph, the hole pic ultimately has no sway over the conditions under which the photo is seen, nor over the states of mind of those who will view it. Even if we attempt to affix context, we are ultimately unable to influence the judgment of those who look at pictures of any kind, including pictures of our bodies or parts of our bodies. This inability to control the conditions of how photography is seen is what underscores virtually all insecurity in the beauty industry. These creams and serums then, these diets and routines, become a kind of preemptive defense; and to be most successful, this defense aims itself at a simplified, flattened, idealized version of beauty. In this case: that perfect, shaven, shitless asshole. This is hole-as-lifestyle, the dedicated anal sex organ we neurotically want to have in order to complete as sexual creatures in the marketplace of fucking. Under these consumerist aesthetics, the very question — neurotic or necessary? — neutralizes itself: the neurosis becomes a necessity.
One of the greatest things about sex is that it’s a state of totality. We fuck to make the self go away, which makes fucking — along with spirituality, art, drugs, etc. — one of the few sacramental activities common to most human behavior. I call it sacramental to connote its un-self-conscious, un-individuated, noncommercial inflection. With the exception of sex work, we tend not to think about our time as money while we fuck.
The beauty industry, of course, has always encroached on this territory, but with the smartphone as its new tool it’s harder and harder to imagine sex without this kind of thinking — that time is money, that we’re here to compete, that we could look and perform better, that we could’ve found a better sex partner — scratching at the door. Because smartphones have become, in our society, a kind of prosthetic consciousness, they function as a sexual prosthetic. We use them to find sex partners, compare ourselves to others, surveil our own bodies, and both evaluate and cultivate our sexual interests and preferences. For many, the smartphone is the primary path to sex, whether solo (porn) or social (hookup apps), and for still more it plays an integral role in flirtation and seduction. This reliance on the phone as prosthetic consciousness is how the idealized version of an asshole — or a cock, for that matter, or a set of whatever lips you want to think about — comes into being, and how its beauty standards become so omnipresent that countless companies can market products meant to arrive at such a perfect hole, even if the products themselves are unvetted, untested, and in most cases emphatically not recommended.
This kind of neurosis is precisely why beauty must be distinguished from hygiene — a category of self care for which certain products and practices are very helpful, and can improve not only one’s sex life but one’s overall health and comfort. Beauty is a fantasy, often built on and fueled by ignorance or compartmentalization — up to and including, as many neurotic billionaire men have demonstrated, the denial of our most sacramental experience: an inevitable death. Hygiene, on the other hand, is rooted in knowledge — in authority. With the right information and adequate resources, we are prepared to care for our bodies in ways that actually improve our lives.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that these products are primarily (and rather suddenly) marketed on an internet now polluted with so much “A.I.” slop that it’s more difficult than ever to sift what is true from what is outright made up to tickle our expectations (if not intentionally misinform us). The research we could have done even two years ago is now immensely difficult, and without that kind of reference at hand it is extraordinarily hard to make informed decisions about our bodies — and for that matter almost every other aspect of our lives. This kind of siphoning away of authority seems the obvious answer in asking ourselves why these algorithms were created and marketed as “artificial intelligence.” We are meant to be almost totally deskilled by this distraction, including being deprived of knowledge, which is to be deprived of authority — and by extension deprived of health and left to our neurotic, self-destructive, deathless (even shitless!) fantasies of beauty.
The company that makes a serum for your asshole doesn’t care what your hole pics look like, nor what your sex partners think when they ease their tongue or their fingers inside. This dynamic is the baseline of a consumer society — misinforming or manipulating us, draining away our agency, so we buy what we do not need to achieve a body or lifestyle that does not exist. And the fact is, this is fun — or at least it can be. Cultivating oneself as a sexual being can be an exhilarating way to spend your money, if you have money to spend, and an even better way to spend your time (same caveat). But as with other aspects of sex — BDSM, fetishes, roleplay, chastity, exhibitionism, cucking, slavery, and on and on — this matter of agency is what separates theater from neurosis, or even theater from oppression. It’s one thing, for example, to put on a face and tell the man you’re with that you’re worthless, that you don’t deserve his cock, that he should choke you, that he should spit in your mouth, that he should call you a faggot, that he should spin you around and shove you against a wall and leave you gaped open; but it’s another thing, entirely, to believe it.
Loved this so much. As a sex counselor, I have been fascinated by these and other trends which, to me, desexualize the actual experience of sex as a vehicle into paradox of the taboo (disgust, etc.) and the numinous.
This is so good. RIP twitter circle