Welcome to Butt Week, friends! An entire week dedicated to butts and butt-adjacent stuff: how-tos, thoughtful essays, original art, pop culture critiques, music and more! You are absolutely not ready for this and yet it is happening to you, right now. Let’s just get down to business: it’s time to talk about IBS and butt sex. 

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I have a friend who desperately wants to give me a fecal transplant.

Fecal transplants are real life medical procedures, where a doctor sticks a tube into your ass, and then pumps someone else’s shit through the tube. Usually, it’s shit that used to belong to a friend or family member. Familiar shit.

The idea is that the microorganisms in your healthy friend’s shit will recolonize your gut, leading to a better bacterial balance and a healthier gastrointestinal tract. People who suffer from IBS or frequent infections from the bacterium C. diff often find it helpful in treating their conditions. I qualify on both counts.

While most people choose to go through this objectively unpleasant procedure in a sterilized medical environment, some people choose a DIY route. Generally, this involves freezing a sample of your friend’s shit and inserting the popsicle as you would a suppository. Most people might want to do this alone, in the privacy of their own bathroom. But when your friends are dominatrixes and perverts, this chance to play doctor might be too good to pass up.

“Do you think he’ll notice if I just never come out of the bathroom?”

It’s the summer of 2016, and I’m having a crisis in the bathroom of a guy I just started hooking up with. With one hand I’m furiously attempting to unclog his toilet, and with the other I’m texting my best friend about escape options. I might be able to fit myself through the window above the shower, but we’re on the second floor, and my pants are in the living room.

She confirms that he will definitely notice if I never come out of the bathroom. He’s a chill guy, she says. You’ve pegged him. He’s had his tongue in your ass. He’s going to be fine.

I am not going to be fine. I am sweating, both from the cramps in my stomach and the intense embarrassment and horror I feel about what I’ve done to this toilet. I’ve already flushed twice, and the clog hasn’t been swept away. I’m staring at myself in his mirror and trying to practice what I’m going to say when I come out of the bathroom and have to ask where he keeps his plunger. There’s a Picasso print reflected in the mirror behind my head. A line drawing of a butt.

Before I can decide whether to risk flooding the bathroom by flushing a third time, he calls out asking whether I’m okay, and I know I’ve been caught.

It’s exhausting to pretend not to be sick. What takes more of a toll on the body, more than the cramps and the hemorrhoids and the bloating and the treatments, is the mental energy it takes to hide all of the symptoms.
I just have a tiny bladder.
I just don’t like to eat much on dates.
I’m just feeling a little under the weather.

“Sick,” is my code word. Nobody wants details about what kind of sickness. They assume you’re sneezing or you’re throwing up and they leave it at that. Maybe you have your period. Maybe you have the flu. Maybe you get migraines.

A few months after I destroyed my Instagram date’s toilet, I was getting ready for a date with someone else. We’d met at a play party, and hit it off after I shook my ass at her. She told me she wanted to bite it, and asked for my number.

We’d seen each other a few times since then for negotiated, formal BDSM scenes. I worked for a dominatrix on the weekends but rarely got to play. She was looking for a new play partner and had access to professional dungeons. The one we were going to that day was a 40 minute drive, and she had asked me to wear a short dress, tights and no underwear.

We’d only been in the car a few minutes before she pulled over into the parking lot of a local college. She put the car in park, tapped her fingers on the wheel, and then reached over to flip up my skirt and twist her hand into the crotch of my pink fishnets. They shredded with a skkkkrrritch, my twat and ass now bare against the heated leather seats.

On the rest of the drive, we talked about boundaries, limits, scene minutia. She reached her arm across the center console to play with the fraying edges of my tights. I couldn’t stop worrying about whether my hemorrhoids were bleeding onto the seats of her luxury car.

I’d almost texted her that morning to cancel. I’d been up half the night with cramps and a feeling of urgency in my bowels despite an inability to empty them. My body had finally decided to cooperate and expel the painful build up early in the morning, and then seemingly couldn’t stop. On the drive, I pretended that I was twisting in my seat out of squirmy anticipation, rather than a stabbing pain in my colon and a desperate need to find a bathroom.

When we arrived, I forced myself to make small talk and be appropriately gracious to the domme who was lending us her space before excusing myself to the bathroom to “freshen up.” The walls were thin, and I could hear them chatting in the kitchen over a spread of cheese, crackers, and wine. I was terrified that they could hear me too.

Later, my then-domme and now-partner will recall this scene as one of her favorite moments from our early days. She remembers the glint from the red pom poms she asked me to bring, the music she had picked out, the way she smirked at me over her glass of wine when she said,

“Do a cheer routine.”
“Dance for me.”

She was horrified when I eventually told her the truth, that I don’t remember anything about that scene, except that I used the bathroom three times before we played, and that the feeling of her teeth sinking into the cheeks of my ass made me sweat with humiliation. On the ride home, it started snowing, turning a 40 minute drive into an hour and a half. She wanted to come up to my apartment afterwards, and I wanted her to, but I made up some excuse. I almost shit my pants between closing the front door, and reaching my bathroom.

“What does it mean when you say you’re sick?”
We’re out at a restaurant. After a few months of just playing together, we’ve branched out. Once a month, we go out for dinner and see a play. She’s seen my apartment. It’s getting harder to hide things.

I take another sip of my cocktail. I don’t want to talk about this. Talking about the details of what happens is too real, too personal. I’d rather say, “I’m just sick,” and leave it at that.

She can sense that I don’t want to talk about it.
“I’m asking because I get sick too.”

“I had a surgery a few years ago, and things in my system got a little screwed up. So now I can’t eat very much at one time, or have too much sugar, or I throw up.”

She knows me well enough by now to know that now that she’s put herself out there, I’ll have to reciprocate.

“I get…the other kind of sick.”

“Elaborate.”

I play with the skewer of orange and cherry in my old fashioned. I have talked about so many nasty, dirty things with her. She’s described the way she wants to push her tongue into all of my holes. I’ve talked to her about my most humiliating fantasies. I’ve let her hold a violet wand against my asshole.

This feels beyond all of that. The intimacy of showing the really gross parts of myself feels so much scarier than any other kind of play we’ve done.

When it’s only me who knows what ‘sick’ means, I can remember that anal play is sexy. My past partners, left in the dark, didn’t know that when I said I’d left my phone charger in my car and I’d be right back, I was running around the corner to the gas station so I could shit. Or that as soon as they left to go pick up our takeout, I would be sick in their bathroom. When it was my secret, I could believe that it was hot to talk about taking a dildo in my ass, or take pictures of myself sucking on a princess plug. I could compartmentalize that part of myself as separate from the part that cried on the toilet when all that was left inside of me was bile that burned when it dripped out.

Part of the appeal of anal sex or rimming, for me, has always been the shame. The feeling of someone’s hand, cock, mouth, there. The excruciating knowledge that they could tell exactly how much I liked it used to be enough to push me over the edge. Desires are often the fetishization of some deep-seated shame. But now, I can’t separate the dirty thrill of feeling disgusting from the fear and anxiety of actually being disgusting. What if I get them sick? What if I give them C. diff? What if they don’t want to touch me there anymore, now that they know how dirty I really, really am?

I’d been honest about the potential risks with my partners, but I hadn’t realized about the risk to myself. When I decided to stop hiding the experience of existing in my body from my partners and friends, I found a deeper intimacy with them. But doing so also forced me to acknowledge the truth to myself. My ass has polyps. It has scars. It has internal and external hemorrhoids. The skin is delicate enough that I bring my own toilet paper with me on trips, to make sure I don’t have to deal with chafing. I am sick, and it is dirty. But I still really like having it eaten.

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