E-Mail This Article to a Friend Getting in the door BY DAN SAVAGE

Are porn performers who take it in the ass all on drugs? Every girl I’ve tried it with (all of them willing, mind you) wails in pain and declares the ass unpassable! Are porno bottoms, male and female, all coked out of their minds or something? Seems like they’d have to be to take those huge porno cocks in their asses.

Make Up an Interesting Acronym for Me

So you’ve tried anal sex with numerous girls — all of them willing (and some people say chivalry is dead!) — and it’s been a disaster every time. Hmm. Many women, many butts, one guy. They’re the bottoms, you’re the top. Hmm. That makes you the common denominator, MUAIAFM, so it could well be that the reason all those porno bottoms enjoy anal sex isn’t that they’re all on drugs (although some no doubt are), but that none of them is bottoming for you. I thinks you gots to checks yourself, as they’re still saying on Ricki. Before you accuse all happy anal bottoms of abusing drugs, let’s check on your technique. Did you engage in a great deal of anal foreplay? Did you rim all those girls until your tongue was as sore as you hoped to make their asses? Did you try a few fingers first? Did you use lots of lube? Did you put your dick in sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyy, about one-eighth of an inch at a time, encouraging your partners to breathe deeply and let their anal muscles gradually relax to accommodate your dick? Once inside, did you wait for permission to start the actual fucking? And when you did start fucking, did you start sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyy?

If you answered "no" to any of the above questions, MUAIAFM, then you’re responsible for making all those asses unpassable. Before your next willing victim allows you to take a stab at her, I suggest you do some reading (I recommend Anal Pleasure and Health by Jack Morin) and some experimenting. Get yourself a buttplug or a dildo and learn by doing — by doing yourself. Believe me, MUAIAFM, you’ll have a better understanding of just how sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyy to go, of just how much lube and prep a butt needs, after you’ve bottomed a few times by yourself, for yourself.

I’m a girl who really enjoys being fisted by my boyfriend. We don’t do it too often because I worry that frequent or prolonged fisting will loosen me up too much. How much is too much? Could I become the Grand Canyon if we indulge in it too often?

Fisting Is Super Titillating

"It isn’t looseness that permits insertion," says Deborah Addington, author of A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting (Greenery Press), "It’s control. The pubococcygeal muscle is the ring of muscle inside the vagina, and relaxing the PC muscle is what permits insertion. If a woman does her Kegels, she can buff up that muscle and be better able to control it. A buff PC muscle not only aids in fisting, but it can also reduce the odds of urinary incontinence later in life. Additionally, a buff PC can be used to tighten down around anything that gets inserted."

So if you and your buff PC muscle get fisted a lot, FIST, will you wind up huge and loose? "If a woman was fisted four or five times a day, every day, for several years," says Addington, "she might begin to notice some loss of vaginal elasticity." So buff up your pubococcygeal muscle (start buffing it now), but remember to fist in moderation.

As a long-time reader and fan of your column and books, I was hoping for a reference. You see, I applied for a job at a nice little sex shop in Portland, Maine, called Condom Sense. Since the majority of the sexual knowledge I have is because of you, and because they said my references would be a big factor in deciding if I would get the job, I thought why the hell not try to have you on my list of references? I am a hard-working, 25-year-old guy down on his luck, Dan. I think they would get a kick out of me telling them that Dan Savage says I have what it takes to serve the public.

Neill Needs a Job

Oh, Neill. I would love to help you out, but I’m afraid I can’t. Since we’ve never actually worked together, I don’t know if you’re presentable or good with customers or, shit, if you’re even capable of making change. You could be a morphine addict for all I know. And while I’m glad you’re a fan of the column, I’m sorry to say that being a regular reader of "Savage Love" doesn’t carry a lot of weight with me. Judging from my e-mail, a lot of my regular readers, to say nothing of my fans, are out of their fucking minds.

How about asking your readers to send in stories about childhood misconceptions they had about sex, and give a "Savage Love" prize to whomever has the funniest story? (By "funniest," I mean stories we can laugh about now, as opposed to "I thought you couldn’t get pregnant the first time, and boy, did I find out how wrong I was when I missed my period.") I’ll give you an example:

When I was about eight, my father decided it was time for my older brother to learn about sex via Nova’s "masterpiece," "The Miracle of Life." Knowing that my brother would either tell me anyway, or twist the facts just enough to scar me for life (what else are brothers for?), Dad decided it wouldn’t hurt to have me sit in. At one point, there is a slow-motion shot of the head of the penis as it ejaculates inside the vaginal canal. Because it was a close-up, the head looked about the size of a basketball and I was convinced there was no way I could ever have sex.

Fast-forward about 10 years. Dad takes us to Paris for a week. As we’re looking at the Greek and Roman statuary in the Louvre, I noticed how small the penises all were. I remember thinking: "If that’s average, then sex with a guy will be no problem!" Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account that all those marble penises were flaccid. Six months later, I saw my first real-life erection, and all I could think was, "JESUS CHRIST! THAT’S HUGE!" The head wasn’t as big as a basketball but it was a lot bigger than those penises I saw in the Louvre.

Laughing at Myself Now

That’s a marvelous idea, LAMN. Readers are hereby invited to send amusing misconceptions to fuckedinthehead@savagelove.net. If I get enough amusing stories, I’ll dedicate a couple of columns to them toward the end of the summer. In the meantime, I can’t resist sharing one that, like LAMN’s, involves a brother. My older brother Eddie told me when I was, oh, about 12, that a blowjob was when a man opened a woman’s vagina and blew into it. You had to do this, he explained, to inflate the woman’s vagina enough to get your penis inside. You can imagine my distress the first time a guy offered to give me a blowjob. "I was dumb and young," Eddie says today in his own defense. "You shouldn’t have listened to me. I didn’t even learn what a clit was until I was 19. It’s not like we had good health or sex-education classes in our Catholic grade school."