Prep

Lightly edited from the video above. The video is the definitive version. This page exists for readers, searchers, and citers.

Hi, my name's Carter and I read books about butts. Specifically men doing butt stuff. Sometimes they're books that I hated, like Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy, and sometimes they're books that I loved, like Teacher of the Year by M.A. Wardell. A lot of M/M, or male-male, romance feature butt stuff, and so do books that generally feature gay male characters. I've also seen a lot of bad butt stuff, like in Him. Just some free advice here at the top: dairy and spicy foods before bottoming, not recommended.

This is the first video in, I guess, a series on butt stuff in books. Today we're gonna talk about prep. I have criticized books like Him and even books that I really enjoyed, like Red, White & Royal Blue, for not featuring or dealing in any way with prep for bottoming. So what do we even mean when we're talking about prep for bottoming?

Before we get into that, let me just say a few things. One, I am not a sexual health expert. I do have a lot of personal expertise with what I'm talking about, but if you're looking for specific advice for doing some of these things on your own, that's not what this video is about. This is about achieving a greater level of realism in literature.

Second, there are as many ways to do butt stuff as there are people doing butt stuff. And very importantly, there are plenty of gay men who don't do any butt stuff. And if all or most of the books that you're writing or reading feature butt stuff as kind of like the pinnacle of the sexual experience, you are ignoring a pretty significant population of gay men who nowadays describe themselves as sides. Sides describe people who are sexually active but don't enjoy penetrative intercourse.

Third, I am offering these thoughts from my own perspective and my own lived experience and my experience in the gay male community for the past several decades. If you're an author who is using this video as a resource, I welcome that, but I would also strongly urge you to do additional research and also to interview a wide variety of gay men.

All right, with that all out of the way, let's talk about prep. So I think the word prep is a little overloaded and we need to split it apart into four categories: hygiene, diet, foreplay, and protection.

Let's start with hygiene. As most people with butts know, butts can be a dirty place. Many, although not all, gay men on either side of the butt stuff equation may want that area to be cleaned up before it is used. And there are a lot of different ways that this could go down. I think this also bears splitting things up. So let's talk about external hygiene and internal hygiene.

So cleaning up the external area, the outside part of the butt, I think is pretty straightforward. Before a sex scene, the character who is going to be bottoming may take a shower, they may take a warm washcloth and clean that area up. If they're very familiar with this, very experienced, very Boy Scout, always prepared, they may carry around baby wipes or have them in their bathroom at home if that's where the scene is gonna take place. I would hope the purpose of this kind of hygiene preparation is obvious, but if you have used the butt for its primary purpose at any point during the day, it can get a little dirty. It can accumulate some residue, both organic and inorganic, and it just can kind of be a little gross. And they may want to just clean that up. For any and all encounters down there, but I would say especially if there's going to be like mouth-to-butt encounters. That's just like polite.

Now, for some gay men, that may be sufficient, and we'll talk a little bit more about this when I talk about diet, but cleaning up the external area is probably good for prep. Now, some gay men want to thoroughly clean out the interior of that area, and that means douching. I'm not gonna get into all the details of that, just that you want to insert a small quantity of lukewarm water with no chemicals in it into the area and do that a few times until it comes out clear. That can be very confidence-boosting for people who are going to be bottoming.

And I wanna use this as an opportunity to talk about the intersection of all of this and character. So if you have like a dirty, piggy, filthy power bottom as one of your characters, they might not do any of these things. And if you have kind of a neurotic, type A, fastidious character, they may do all of these things and more. What kind of prep a character does should be driven by what kind of character they are. And this all gets into details and voice and why I think it's important for authors to do a sufficient amount of research to know what kind of voice and what kind of details are relevant for the characters that they're going to be drawing in their books. That's why this is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. You need to imagine a rich, fully fleshed out character, and then that character should drive the kind of choices that they're gonna make before, during, and after a sexual encounter. So maybe you have a vers guy who's very experienced and has a lot of sex, and his apartment is fully equipped with like a bidet and a shower douche and toys and all sorts of stuff. That character is very different, for example, for someone who is having their first ever sexual encounter with a man. So just keep that in mind.

All right, let's talk about diet. Two things to talk about with diet. One, people who regularly bottom may eat certain kinds of food or avoid certain kinds of food so that they are more prepared for that kind of an encounter. And in fact, a lot of people who bottom regularly swear by just a bottom-friendly diet and no internal hygiene. And the big thing that you will hear is fiber. That might be taking Metamucil or psyllium husk either as a drink or a pill, or it could just be a diet full of soluble and insoluble fibers, eating chia seed and, you know, roughage vegetables, stuff like that.

That also might mean avoiding eating certain things, specifically things that might upset your stomach. This is where the ice cream and burritos of it all comes into play. I criticized Him for having a first-time bottom encounter mere hours after the characters indulged in ice cream and burritos. I saw some people in comments say like, oh, it takes like 24 or 36 hours for that food to go through you. What's the problem? Foods that cause gastrointestinal distress are probably things that people who regularly bottom are going to avoid if they think that they might be having sex later. And something that as an author you probably want to avoid introducing into those encounters, because gastrointestinal distress is connected to the area where the butt stuff is happening. I would love if this were just obvious, but like, I don't think people really want to, you know, have sex with each other when they've got a tummy ache or they're farting. And that's especially bad if the sex is happening where the farts come out.

You might also see people who have like very strict bottoming diets, like they won't eat for hours before they bottom or they have extremely light food. In general, I think most people in the gay community think that that's like extremely excessive and unnecessary, but it does happen.

All right, third thing, foreplay. The butt, while a great sexual organ in its own right, is not like all of the other sexual organs. One, it's not self-lubricating, and two, by design, it can be a little tricky to work with going in. I think foreplay is important for any butt stuff encounter, but especially if a book contains a first-time encounter, there should be a significant portion of time and attention paid to foreplay. That foreplay might include fingering, rimming, and toys.

Oh, and as I'm talking about this, I realize that there is a fifth category of things and I'm just going to slip it in right now, and that's lube. As a non-self-lubricating organ, you absolutely must have lube, and lots of it. Unless the encounter calls for a different situation – but again, those choices should be driven by story and character and not ignorance.

All that being said, generally, the butt wants to get warmed up a little bit before it gets used for this fun secondary purpose. And just keep in mind the anatomy of the area, right? We're talking about just inside, there is this thick rubber band kind of thing, which is a muscle that expands out into an open space. And this muscle can be relaxed either through stretching or voluntarily. So stretching it before use might involve toys or fingers, deep breathing, and internal meditative techniques can relax that muscle. Some people choose to use a drug called poppers, which causes lots of your muscles to relax. But you can also voluntarily relax that muscle by pushing out.

Finally, protection. Characters should be choosing whether they're using condoms or not, and being mindful of the kinds of lubrication that they're using, depending on the condoms that they may be using. And many gay men choose to use a drug called PrEP. So we've wrapped all the way around talking about PrEP again. PrEP stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and it is a drug that can prevent the spread of HIV. Books that take place after about 2012 or 2013 and feature characters who are doing unprotected butt stuff really ought to mention PrEP. And in general, I think it's good for characters to know their STI status and to share that with their partners. Or not, depending on what the story calls for.

Finally, this isn't a checklist of things that you need to do or not do to have good butt stuff in your story. There are things to keep in mind, and there are details that all can add to the eroticism of a story. Characters could be getting ready together. Someone who's doing bottom prep could be really excited to do it because they're excited about the encounter they're about to have. There can be a lot of erotic tension while one character is waiting on another to get ready. Characters could be very interested in the idea of unprotected butt stuff, and they're both waiting to get on PrEP so that they're confident in doing that with each other. Ooh, or one more sexual health thing, making sure that they have the HPV vaccine. There's all kinds of opportunities for sexiness with butt stuff. I just don't want your characters to miss out on it.

I think that's the end.