That Magic Button

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

Hey, my name's Carter. Let's talk about butt stuff in books.

Today we're going to talk about the male G-spot, also known as the P-spot because of the anatomy that it's related to, the prostate. Across the dozens and dozens of M/M romance books that I've read, the prostate is frequently treated as a button that you push that induces pleasure. All too often described as walnut-shaped in size, it is a known and knowable place where a skilled, insertive partner can immediately find and cause mind-shattering climaxes by pushing.

The most recent M/M romance book that I've read, Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, includes just such a description.

He rubbed his fingertip again over what had to be Shane's prostate. Shane had kind of nudged it himself before when he had been alone, but Rozanov seemed to know exactly where it was and what to do with it.

Lest you think that these kinds of descriptions are exclusive to cis women authors of M/M romance, allow me to quote from The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang.

Deep inside the Lord, my fingers gamely shifted to the left, and sure enough, I felt that magic little node hidden within all men.

One of the earliest M/M romance books that I read, Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy, includes this notable prostate talk. One of the main characters, Wes, is giving some digital attention to Jamie. This is the first time he's ever had anything down there. Wes says:

I'm working a finger slowly toward his prostate. When I finally get there, everything changes. "Oh fuck, oh fuck," Jamie whispers, his thigh muscles trembling. I rub his prostate again and give another good suck.

Half a page later:

I slide the pad of my finger over his prostate again, and he croaks out a curse, and I'm loving it.

Lotta, lotta prostate talk in these books.

So if you stick something up there with someone who has a prostate, and you just like, laser-guided missile, just shoot right toward it, are you guaranteed to cause waves of mind-blowing pleasure? Well, the existence of exclusive tops and sides, people who don't enjoy either side of the equation of butt stuff, seems to indicate that maybe that's not the case.

While we will need to leave the discussion of sexual position identity formation, top, bottom, versatile, for another video, and I promise we will get to that one day, there has been a lot of research related to sexual position and identity formation that gives us some very strong clues about why people might like to bottom. And the number one thing is that they like it. And the opposite is true for tops. They don't like it.

I'm drawing from this paper from 2016 by David A. Moskowitz and Michael E. Roloff, Recognition and Construction of Top, Bottom, and Versatile Orientations in Gay/Bisexual Men. They surveyed several hundred gay and bisexual men and asked them a whole number of sexual identity questions, including their self-label, are you a top, a bottom, or a vers? And they did an interesting map of how all of those things relate.

For a long time in gay male sexual health studies, there was research that Moskowitz also had done that showed that penis size was a big indicator of whether someone would be a top or a bottom. And yes, in the way that you would expect, that men with a perception of having a larger endowment than average more likely being tops and vice versa being bottoms. But what this 2016 study found was that that wasn't actually the case, that endowment had an indirect relationship with position preference, that your perception of your size might lead to certain anxieties about topping or bottoming, and that those anxieties would feed into your perceptions of pleasure in topping or bottoming. Very interestingly, in this study, negative perceptions of anxieties around bottoming tended to have a positive correlation with being a bottom.

And that might be tied up in the other thing that is a big predictor of whether someone will self-identify as a bottom, and that is the degree to which you desire sexual submission. And that is not a physiological thing at all. That is purely a psychological thing.

And there's some interesting research by sociologist Trevor Hoppe about sexual scripting among men who bottom. He finds that when discussing in-depth interviews with bottoms, like how they identify and why they identify as bottoms and what they enjoy about it, that there are two primary scripts he identifies. One, the desire to be like the source of pleasure for another person, but two, the desire for sexual submission.

Anyway, those are very interesting things, Carter, but what about the prostates?

So setting aside those psychological reasons, the other primary reason why people might self-identify as a bottom is because they enjoy the physical sensation of bottoming. This is where we get into our primary research paper of the day, Atlas of the Receptive Anal Sex Experience Among People with Prostates. The authors of this study conducted focus groups and eight in-depth interviews with cis gay and bisexual men and one cis straight guy who just likes to be pegged and non-binary and trans women, all people with prostates, and they asked them a bunch of questions about what they like about bottoming.

And in particular, they plopped down in front of them an actual anatomical guide to the male anatomy and said, show us on this picture where you like to be touched. And spoiler alerts, in both the conversations that they had with these folks and in the pin the tail on the prostate game that they had them play, many of them incorrectly identified the prostate or identified other locations within their anatomy where they felt pleasure. That was not the prostate. Fascinatingly, one of the guys had a prostatectomy and he said that he had no change in sexual sensation from before and after he had his prostate removed.

The most common thing is that people thought that the prostate was a lot deeper in. You can see in the first quotation here, one person saying that it's about five and a half inches in there. That like, that's way past the prostate. Another person saying it's near the pubic bone, which is not the location of the prostate. A third person saying they like this slightly deeper stuff, like just one finger in. And I guess presumably they're making the like come here motion is like not what does it for them. Also note that one of the participants in a focus group is a med student and still didn't know where their prostate was.

What's going on here? Well, there's the thing that's going on within the community of people who have prostates. And then there's the thing that's going on in the literature that we're reading.

Among people with prostates, there's just like folk wisdom about your prostate being the thing that feels good. But it's probably not. It might be, but it's less that it's the prostate itself that feels good and it's more all of the nerves that are kind of centrally located around the prostate. Stimulating those nerves with your fingers or with like putting, you know, pressure on all of them at the same time with something larger than your fingers feels good.

And actually there is an analog to these nerves in people with prostates to people with vulvas. And that's the Skene's gland. And that is the oft-cited location of the G-spot in people with vulvas. Both the Skene's gland and the nerves that are around that and the prostate and its surrounding nerves feel good when stimulated. That also means that it's very likely that the G-spot and the P-spot are not one knowable location. There's something that you have to find out for yourself. And some people might not have that at all. They might just have a physiological or a combination of psychological and physiological sensation that just causes them not to feel good when you do stuff down there.

In the romance writing about this, I think that there are at least three things going on. One is a form of M/M romance scripting or you could think of it as cargo culting. People write in this way and it makes people understand like, oh, this is the kind of butt stuff pleasure happening. And I remember that from other books, so I'm going to include it in my book. And when I read it in a book, I understand what's going on. It's like a shortcut to understanding what's happening down there. But two, there is also a lack of understanding of the physical anatomy. And that goes for men and women, as we saw in this study. And two, analogizing to certain elements of female anatomy.

I've already extensively covered the idea that there's a general lack of understanding about the anatomy down there, not just for people without prostates, but even for people with them. The analogy thing is interesting, though. I think that there is a bit of analogizing of the prostate to the clitoris that's going on in M/M romance. It is this place that unskilled people don't exactly know how to find, but skilled people do. And when you touch it, it makes you feel good.

Unfortunately, anatomically, there is an analog to the clitoris, and that is the penis. The right analog of the prostate in that area is not the clitoris. It is the G-spot. It's like the internal sensation spot in a person with a vulva. And I think that poor analogy does a disservice to M/M romance authors and people who are writing about butt stuff scenes for people with prostates, because the analogy makes you think that this is a known, knowable location. And that, for example, if you were having a first-time scene, if you have an experienced partner, they're just going to know what to do. Whereas if you were analogizing it to the G-spot, you might have more of that trial and error, having to look for feedback from your partner.

And finally, just because you have a prostate doesn't mean that you're going to find any stimulation down there pleasurable. But despite that, people who would otherwise identify exclusively as a top sometimes bottom anyway out of sexual altruism. And oh my God, we've got to stop talking about this. This video is going to end up being 20 minutes long.

So to sum up, the prostate is not, in fact, a magic button that you push that makes a man whimper before he shatters. It is actually both more complicated and more interesting down there.

Thank you for coming to my butt talk.