How Common Is Anal Sex? Scientific Insights on Prevalence, Pain, Pleasure, Anatomy, and Relationship Dynamics

Thursday, December 4, 2025.

If you want to understand any sexual behavior—why we do it, why we pretend we don’t do it, and why epidemiologists have been nervously clearing their throats about it for forty years—you have to begin with a basic anthropological truth:

Humans will try almost anything once, and twice if nobody panics.

Anal sex has spent decades sitting in the corner wearing a trench coat and sunglasses, treated primarily as a public-health hazard rather than a human behavior with motives, meaning, and (for many) genuinely rewarding sensation.

When researchers finally stopped hyperventilating long enough to ask why partners actually do it, an interesting thing happened:

The data told a story far more ordinary—and far more revealing—than anyone expected.

Let’s begin at the beginning: prevalence.

Prevalence: The Secret That Isn’t a Secret

If you came of age believing anal sex was a fringe activity whispered about behind the bleachers, prepare to have your worldview politely corrected.

A global systematic review in AIDS and Behavior by Branwen Owen and colleagues examined youth sexual behavior across continents and cultures. The headline is simple enough to print on a tote bag:

About 22% of sexually active young adults under 25 have had anal intercourse.

One in four. Everywhere. With no meaningful differences by continent, gender, or age within that bracket.

Apparently, geography has no bearing on curiosity.

And when researchers increased anonymity in surveys—a small kindness that relaxes shame just enough to let the truth exhale—prevalence rose even higher. People weren’t avoiding the act; they were avoiding the confession.

The United States, never one to be outdone in national surveys about sex, produced similar findings. A nationally representative sample of women ages 15 to 44 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine (Benson et al.) reports:

36.3% of American women have had anal intercourse.
13.2% did so in the last year.

When more than a third of the national sample has tried something, it’s no longer “niche.” It’s just Friday night.

The Anatomy of Pleasure: A Guided Tour of the Rectal Neighborhood

Once you get past cultural scripts, jokes, and a few centuries of religious side-eye, you reach the actual biological mystery:

Why does this work at all?

A study in Sexual Medicine by Michael Zaliznyak and colleagues mapped where people actually feel pleasure during anal stimulation. Picture an exceedingly polite erotic cartography project. The findings:

The superficial anterior region—right at the entrance, toward the genitals—is where most of the magic sorta happens.

And this makes immediate scientific sense.

For Men:

That region rests against the prostate, a structure so packed with sensory potential it may as well be the body’s original “hidden feature.”

Pressure through the rectal wall provides direct, concentrated stimulation. This is why many men describe anal pleasure as startlingly intense.

For Women:

The same region neighbors the deep legs of the clitoris and the pudendal nerve—making anal stimulation an indirect but meaningful way to light up the clitoral complex. The clitoris, as we know from simple geometry, has ambitions far beyond what’s visible on the outside.

This is crucial:
Women do not lack anatomy for anal pleasure; they merely lack an accurate cultural map.

Zaliznyak’s team also confirmed what intuitive partners have known for ages:

Here’s the massive take-away: Depth is overrated. Sensation lives near the entrance.

Orgasm: Why Biology Favors Men, but Context Favors Everyone Else

Here’s where things get interesting.

In Zaliznyak’s study:

39% of men said they can climax from anal stimulation alone.
19% of women said the same.

This is not a referendum on women’s pleasure potential. It’s simply the mechanical advantage of a prostate gland versus a more distributed pleasure network that often requires complementary stimulation.

Indeed, about half of participants of all genders reported orgasm when anal stimulation was paired with other sensation—clitoral, penile, or manual. This suggests not inadequacy but integration:

Anal stimulation often functions as an enhancer rather than a solo act.

Women were twice as likely as men to say they never orgasmed from anal sex. The reasons, however, are not purely anatomical—technique, pressure, cultural messaging, and partner competence all factor in.

Pleasure is not a gland. Pleasure is a system.

Beyond Penetration: Women’s Actual Anal Repertoires

Very little in sexuality research is more refreshing than the PLOS One study by Devon Hensel and colleagues, which finally gave names to the behaviors women were already doing.

They identified three categories:

1. Anal Surfacing.

External touch only: fingers, toys, tongue, penis—anything but entry.
40% of women said this was pleasurable.

2. Anal Shallowing.

Tiny penetration—think fingertip, not expedition.
35% of women found it pleasurable, aligning beautifully with the superficial anterior pleasure zone.

3. Anal Pairing.

Anal stimulation combined with vaginal or clitoral touch.
Again, 40% of women reported enjoyment.

Women have been doing all of this for decades; they simply lacked the vocabulary to argue with confidence about what, exactly, they wanted.

Motivations: Pleasure, Intimacy, Curiosity—Not a Single Villain in Sight

Emily Maynard’s qualitative study in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health did something revolutionary: it treated women as people.

Why do women have anal sex?

Because they want to.

Yes, some cited partner pleasure. Others mentioned novelty or curiosity. Many referenced emotional intimacy—“this is something special,” “this requires trust,” “this feels taboo in a way that deepens closeness.”

And some cited practical motivation:

It doesn’t result in pregnancy.
Practicality: the oldest reason in the book.

Pain, Skill, and the Learning Curve Nobody Mentions

The Archives of Sexual Behavior study by Štulhofer and Ajduković deserves a small award for scientific honesty:

The first time is often uncomfortable. Sometimes exceedingly.

But here’s the part that never makes it into cultural narratives:

Pain decreases with experience, communication, lubrication, and muscle relaxation.

This is not magical thinking; it’s physiology.

The pelvic floor is not a casual structure. It must be invited, not invaded.

Some women described transforming early discomfort into later pleasure. Others eroticized the sensation of intensity.

Humans eroticize everything eventually; it’s one of our more curious quirks.

The learning curve exists not because anal sex is unnatural, but because no one teaches the syllabus. except porn, badly.

Power, Coercion, and Consent: The Uneasy Adolescence of a Sexual Behavior

The BMJ Open study by Marston and Lewis examined youth narratives in the UK, and the results were the sociological equivalent of walking into a room and flipping on a fluorescent light:

Men overwhelmingly initiate. Women often feel pressured. “Accidental slips” are sometimes strategy, not accident.

The study revealed a normalization of repeated pressure—framed as persuasion rather than coercion—and the widespread expectation that sex acts trending in pornography should be attempted in real life.

Yet here’s a very significant nuance:

Women, particularly as they age, often reclaim full erotic agency, describing anal sex as something they allow rather than something they endure. Agency matures with experience. So does language. We may need more words to discuss anal sex adequately.

Demographics: The Who, Which Turns Out to Be Almost Everyone

In Benson’s national U.S. sample, women across every demographic—race, religion, education level—reported anal intercourse.

Higher education and higher income were associated with higher likelihood of participation, which should finally retire the tired trope that anal sex is a relic of desperation or coercion.

Among men, orientation was most predictive of behavior:
Gay and bisexual men report the highest rates of receptive anal sex; heterosexual men the lowest.

But even among straight men, pleasure in the anal region was underreported—likely for cultural reasons, not anatomical ones.

Risk Behavior: The Condom Gap

Here is the statistic that made every epidemiologist clutch their clipboard:

28% of women used condoms during their last vaginal intercourse.
Only 16.4% used them for anal sex.

Yikes! Given the rectum’s vulnerability to micro-tears and infection, this discrepancy is not ideal. But it is consistent with Maynard’s finding that many couples treat anal sex as an intimacy act—a private ritual where barriers feel antithetical to meaning.

Risk perception is cultural, not anatomically intellectual.

Sexual Literacy: The Clitoris Deserves a Better Press Agent

James Pickles and colleagues in the Journal of Positive Sexuality interviewed sexual health educators and discovered a simple tragedy:

Most women were never taught the basic architecture of their own pleasure.

If you don’t know where the clitoris actually is—or how extensive it is internally—you can’t understand why anal stimulation might be pleasurable. If you only hear about risk, you can’t learn about technique.

Ignorance is not abstinence. Ignorance is merely ignorance.

Pornography: The World’s Least Reliable Instructor

In Marston and Lewis’s youth narratives, porn was cited as both an inspiration and a disaster.

Porn shows anal sex as something that simply… happens.
No preparation. No relaxation. No lubrication. No conversation.

In reality, this is like watching someone assemble IKEA furniture in a single step and assuming you, too, can bypass the instructions without harm.

Porn performs fantasy. But bodies perform physiology.

When young couples try to replicate what they see, they often end up confused, hurt, or convinced they’re inadequate.

Not because they are—but because porn never tells the truth about warmups, consent, technique, muscle tension, etc.

Frequently Asked Questions About Anal Sex: Science, Safety, Pleasure, and Misconceptions

Is anal sex actually common, or are people just bragging?

It’s common. Very common.
Global data from Owen et al. shows that 22% of sexually active people under 25 have had anal intercourse. In the U.S., more than 36% of women ages 15–44 report having tried it.

When nearly four in ten women have engaged in something, it’s no longer exotic—it’s ordinary human curiosity with, in this case, very poor lighting.

Why do people have anal sex in the first place?

Because it can feel good. Because it’s intimate. Because they’re curious.
Because sexual scripts get stale. Because they trust their partner.
Because it doesn’t lead to pregnancy.

Maynard’s qualitative research makes one thing clear: women’s motivations are multi-layered, blending physical pleasure, emotional connection, novelty, and partner pleasure. It's not a single story—it’s typically a network of them.

Is anal sex supposed to hurt?

No. But the first attempt often does—not because the act is inherently painful but because nobody teaches the crucial prerequisites: relaxation, lubrication, pacing, communication, and anatomy.

Štulhofer & Ajduković show that pain decreases sharply when folks have experience, preparation, and patient partners. Muscles relax with repetition—not coercion.

Pain is not a sign you’re doing something “wrong.”
Pain is a sign you’re probably doing it too fast.

What makes anal sex pleasurable for men?

Biology handed men an easy button: the prostate.

The superficial anterior region of the rectum sits right against this gland. Zaliznyak et al. found that this area reliably generates pleasure. This is why 39% of men in the study reported they can orgasm from anal stimulation alone.

What makes anal sex pleasurable for women?

because the clitoris is bigger than anyone told you.

The internal legs of the clitoris and the pudendal nerve sit near the anal canal. Stimulation of the superficial anterior region can activate the clitoral complex indirectly.

This is why many women report that anal sex is enjoyable when paired with clitoral stimulation—and why 40% enjoy “Anal Pairing” (Hensel et al.).

Does depth matter?

Not as much as you think.

Zaliznyak’s mapping study shows that pleasure lives near the entrance, not deep inside. “Shallowing” (light penetration) is often as pleasurable—or more pleasurable—than full penetration.

Depth is a cultural fantasy. Sensation is an anatomical reality.

What if I’ve never had an orgasm from anal sex?

Then you’re in the majority.
Women are twice as likely as men to report never orgasming from anal stimulation alone.

This is not a verdict on your body. It’s a verdict on the fact that women typically require external clitoral stimulation during penetrative acts.

It’s also a verdict on partner technique, cultural silence, and, in many cases, unnecessary speed.

Is anal sex risky?

It can be, yes—but risk is modifiable.

The rectal lining is delicate and more prone to micro-tears, making condom use particularly important. The problem, as Benson et al. documented, is that condom usage during anal sex is shockingly lower (16.4%) than during vaginal sex (28%).

Risk isn’t an indictment of the act. It’s an indictment of the public’s lack of information on how to engage safely.

Do people really do anal sex because of porn?

Porn influences expectations—especially for young people—but it is not the only motivation.
Marston & Lewis found that young men often cite porn as inspiration, but women’s motivations tend to be more relational or curiosity-driven.

The problem isn’t that porn exists; it’s that porn is instructionally useless. It shows none of the preparation, pacing, lubrication, or negotiation required in real life.

Porn depicts fantasy.
But bodies operate on physiology.

Can anal sex deepen intimacy in a relationship?

For many couples, yes.

Maynard’s research found that women commonly describe anal sex as an act requiring exceptional trust. Some couples view it as a private, symbolic marker of emotional closeness.

This is not universal—but it is real. Intimacy is subjective, not standardized.

Can anal sex be pleasurable without penetration?

Absolutely.

Hensel et al.’s research names three pleasurable behaviors:

Anal Surfacing: external stimulation only
Anal Shallowing: very shallow penetration
Anal Pairing: anal stimulation with other sexual activity

Many women prefer one of these over full penetration. Many men do as well.

Penetration is optional. Pleasure is not.

Why does anal sex have so much stigma?

Because people confuse silence with morality.

Historically, the act has been framed through public health, religion, and shame-based sex education. None of these frameworks consider pleasure, motivation, anatomy, or emotional meaning.

When you don’t teach something, you create mystery.
When you create mystery, you invite stigma.
When you invite stigma, you guarantee misinformation.

The research exists.
The shame doesn’t need to.

Is it normal not to like anal sex?

Of course.
Preference is not pathology.

Some people enjoy the sensation; others prefer clitoral stimulation, vaginal intercourse, or completely different forms of erotic play. Anal sex is neither essential nor morally elevated—it’s simply one option among many.

You’re not “prudish” if you dislike it.
You’re not “kinky” if you enjoy it.
You’re just a human either way.

How do I talk to my partner about wanting—or not wanting—anal sex?

With clarity, timing, and no agenda.

A few modest guidelines:

• Talk outside the bedroom. Arousal is not a thinking state.

• Use curiosity rather than demand. “Would you ever want to explore…?”

• State your boundaries plainly. Both the “yes” and the “no.”

• Remember the ethics of agency. Consent can be withdrawn at any time.

• Avoid the porn script. Negotiate pace, preparation, lubrication, and communication upfront.

• Good sex begins with good conversation.

Does trying anal sex say anything about my sexual orientation?

No.
Behavior does not determine orientation.

Straight men enjoying prostate stimulation are still straight.
Straight women enjoying anal pairing are still straight.
Your orientation is defined by who you’re attracted to, not what nerve endings respond when stimulated.

If anatomy automatically assigned labels, half of Harvard medical school would be bisexual by semester two.

Final thoughts

Anal sex persists not because folks are reckless or deviant, but because:

It can feel good.
It can feel intimate.
It can feel adventurous.
It can feel connecting.

For men, the mechanics favor easy orgasm.
For women, the mechanics favor enhancement of clitoral stimulation.
For couples, the meaning often lives in trust, not anatomy.

Experience, education, communication, and relaxation predict pleasure far more than gender or culture.

When done consensually, attentively, and with a partner who understands the concept of preparation, the act stops being taboo and becomes something far simpler:

just another way humans express curiosity, attachment, and pleasure.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Benson, L. S., Gilmore, K., Lin, T., & Khosropour, C. (2019). Anal intercourse among women: Findings from the 2011–2015 National Survey of Family Growth. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 16(7), 1021–1030.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2019.03.002

Hensel, D. J., Fortenberry, J. D., O'Sullivan, L. F., & Orr, D. P. (2015). The developmental patterning of vaginal and anal intercourse in adolescence: Exploring the role of perceptions, motivations, and behaviors. PLOS One, 10(11), e0143575.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0143575

Marston, C., & Lewis, R. (2014). Anal heterosex among young people and implications for health promotion: A qualitative study in the UK. BMJ Open, 4(8), e004996.
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-004996

Maynard, E., Hetherton, J., & Calzavara, L. (2018). Women’s experiences and motivations regarding anal intercourse: A qualitative study. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 50(3), 111–118.
https://doi.org/10.1363/psrh.12073

Owen, B. N., Brock, P. M., Butler, A. R., Pickles, M., Brisson, M., Baggaley, R. F., & Boily, M. C. (2015). Prevalence and frequency of heterosexual anal intercourse among young people: A systematic review and meta-analysis. AIDS and Behavior, 19(7), 1338–1360.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-014-0994-y

Pickles, J., Radhakrishnan, A., & Riddell, J. (2020). Pleasure, anatomy, and sexual literacy: Insights from sexuality educators. Journal of Positive Sexuality, 6(1), 32–41.
https://doi.org/10.51681/1.612

Štulhofer, A., & Ajduković, D. (2011). Female anal sexual experiences: Pain, pleasure, and learning. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40(4), 755–765.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-010-9664-8

Zaliznyak, M., Zucker, K. J., & Brotto, L. A. (2022). Anal eroticism in cisgender men and women: A survey of anal pleasure zones and orgasmic experience. Sexual Medicine, 10(3), 100518.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esxm.2022.100518