The Bum’s Rush

With sincere apologies in advance

Disambiguation: The title “The Bum’s Rush” is taken by the author as a reference to the bottom, the arse or ass. But it turns out that this expression had its origin in the American sense of “bum” meaning a tramp or vagrant. “Bum’s rush” referred to the swift dispatch of an unwanted customer. Bugger that! I mean ASS!

You English and your sense of humour. During your brief stay, I look forward to learning more of your wit, your punning and your amusing jokes about the breaking of the wind. …How lucky you English are to find the toilet so amusing. For us, it is a mundane and functional item. For you, the basis of an entire culture.

-Baron von Richthofen, Blackadder Goes Forth

You’re a goddamn liberal, Mr. Garrison, you don’t know shit, cause you never been fucked in the ass.

-O’Keefe, JFK

Fuck me in the ass, ‘cause I love Jesus

-Garfunkel and Oates

Apologies for the unsavoury topic but out of the increasing pornofication of culture, there seems to be one particular idée fixe that emerges above the rest. I allude to “Backdoor action”, anal sex, sodomy, ass fucking. More specifically heterosexual anal, which has an odd legal history in the UK anyway. Back in those now much maligned 70s, the gay contingent was legally permitted to engage in this activity for the obvious reason that they did not have the option of vaginal sex. But heterosexual anal was verboten, a fact that naturally made it all the more “alluring” – for the straight guys anyway.

But in those old “naïve” days, anal sex was never mentioned in the (soft) porn mags, and believe me, I have memories of extensive consultation of such “literature”!

Now this is one area in which I have a time-travel fantasy where I go back in time and tell my younger self about the changes to come. I can imagine the younger me getting more and more round eyed. “No!... What? …Oh fuck off!” etc. And one of the things I’d relay is the astonishing increased availability of porn. No more furtive passing around soggy bits of discarded magazines found in parks or quick glances at the top shelves. Just boot up your PC and bask in an endless proliferation of …well just about anything you could imagine. And a few you couldn’t.

And hetero-anal – indeed all anal – is everywhere now. One turning point for me is that back in – I’m sure it was the 90s, I saw a book in one of the multi-storey pop culture stores (books and music) which had the title The Anal Book. I thought, “Surely not!”. And so – purely for research purpose of course! – I had a look…and sure enough, it was totally dedicated to ass-fucking. How to do it, what not to do, how to get the best out of it etc. And as far as I can recall, I’m pretty sure that the proposal of women-as-recipient of “the gift” had been legitimised by that time.

But before we get bogged down in the murky depths of this topic, there are a couple of preliminary issues:

First, as I have repeatedly said, in a sane world, nobody would give a toss about what consenting adults do in private. However, such discretion is clearly not allowed. Sex is always treated by the media as a very public matter. Pride marches, endless debates over “lifestyle choices”, endless complaints about bigotry. In a way, the media treat sex the way Zionists treat antisemitism i.e. they keep shoving it into your face until they inevitably provoke the very reaction they claim to be protesting against.

The crude version of what I just said is: If you lot want to fuck each other in the ass then carry on. Believe me, I don’t care! Also believe me, I don’t want to know!

Second, and this is specifically related to the topic of porn, I’d like to highlight what is the innermost “secret” of our whole consumer culture: the useful difference between presentation and reality. To explain that, let me relate the following tale:

An old and now defunct site called The New Left Project once featured a debate about pornography – specifically the issue as to whether it was a “good thing”. There were two debaters, both women, and one took the “liberal” view that porn was OK, that women enjoyed it as well as men, that it could enhance sex lives etc. The other took the “conservative” view that porn was harmful to both sexes, that it degraded both those who worked in it and those who viewed it, that it was particularly exploitative to women etc.

Initially I took the side of the liberal until a third voice entered – also a woman. What she said totally transformed the way I viewed the matter by the device of offering a simple little change of perspective that had the effect of a thunderbolt. She said that the liberal view sounded wonderful …until you looked at what actually happens.

And that was when I realised that the liberal view was essentially the “sales pitch”, the view that the porn industry had of itself, the advertising jingle. When I looked at my own experiences and thought back on all the conversations I had with both sexes, I can quite categorically say the following:

• Porn is an overwhelmingly male fixation. Most women view it either with disgust or ridicule. The latter reason that if you’re hungry, you eat. You don’t watch a video of people eating.

• The viewing of porn must surely indicate something lacking in the viewer’s sex life. Either he (almost always he) isn’t “getting it” or isn’t “getting enough” or “isn’t getting what he really wants”.

However, …and perhaps paradoxically:

• What happens in porn videos isn’t real in the sense of genuine sex. It’s a theatre, a display. The performers are paid (or perhaps coerced) to do it. And what it depicts has a tendency to veer off very quickly into stuff few in real life would actually do, including even the viewer himself.

So much for generalities. More specifically, anal sex of the heterosexual variety is – to put it mildly – something no woman I have ever met expressed any active interest in. And one of my (male) friends summed up the problem in the finest ever way: “Well, would you like it?” Meaning “Would you like to be on the receiving end?” (Pun intended!) Answer: No!

All of which preliminary ravings bring us to the central issue of this effort: Why the fixation on anal?

Well, here are some musings. Some are perhaps fanciful, some psychological, some political. And let me emphasise again, that if “fudge packing” happens to be your “thing”, then good for you! I am merely following certain ruminations as to what it might mean.

Being Shafted

Let’s return to Mr O’Keefe (played by Kevin Bacon in JFK). “You’re a goddamn liberal, Mr. Garrison, you don’t know shit, cause you never been fucked in the ass.” O’Keefe is indeed a gay guy in the movie. And so, we’re not talking about heterosexual anal here. But then O’Keefe is a male prostitute “servicing” dodgy mafioso type characters.

This is a dog-eat-dog world of underhanded deals and “offers you can’t refuse” and O’Keefe is hinting that it’s not much different from the “legit” world. To put it bluntly, we are all being fucked in the ass. In other words, the metaphorical meaning (to be conned or robbed) is the main one implied. Everyone is out to fuck everyone else in the ass. And it’s a sodomite hierarchy. Who would disagree? And so perhaps, part of the attraction of anal is this assertion of dominance in which someone is made to submit in the most degrading way. Perhaps anal is one way even those at the bottom (pun intended again) can momentarily get to feel like a “boss”.

Liquidising Gender

I use the term gender in the old and only meaningful sense i.e. as signifying male or female. Anal negates the genitals. Or at least it negates the genitalia of the receiver, effectively neutering the recipient. Also, anal levels everyone. Everyone has an asshole. Therefore, everyone can get fucked in it. Admittedly the fucking is enacted by a male or with a dildo …or something less pleasant? Therefore, although the submissives have their gender “annulled”, the actual activity has a male component.

And one reason that anal has a high profile is that it is part of that “insectification” that is steering us towards a hivelike social formation. What we may term actual biological sex i.e. the sex that leads to reproduction, is being downplayed in favour of a “neutralised” sex guaranteed to be sterile and in which the very distinction of sex/gender is negated. Which leads to …

Depopulation

This is so obvious it hardly needs emphasising. Anal negates sex as reproduction. And so perhaps there is a Malthusian component here. Increasing fixation on anal, presumably leading to the increasing proliferation of the practice, cannot help but have the effect of thinning out the population. It gets rid of the “dead weight”, as defined from the ruling class point of view.

It also theoretically leads to furthering the collapse of the old bourgeois family unit. When the male/female distinctions blur, a process of dehumanisation intrudes. At which point it occurs to me that one of the pioneers in all things anal was none other than Freud. Speaking of which …

Freud Wonders About His Mum

Talk of this father of psychoanalysis leads me to muse on one of the most staggering passages I ever read. I picked this up from one of Freud’s most devout followers, Mr John Steppling. Although the quote is from Giorgio Agamben:

According to Freud, the fetishistic fixation arises from the refusal of the small child to acknowledge the absence of the penis of the female (of the mother). Confronted with the perception of this absence, the child refuses [Freud used the term Verleugmung (disavowal)] to admit its reality, because to do so would permit a threat of castration against his own penis. The fetish is therefore the ‘substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and-for reasons familiar to us–does not want to give up’.

Giorgio Agamben (Stanzas)

https://john-steppling.com/2024/05/already-dead/

Now isn’t that stunning? “…the refusal of the small child to acknowledge the absence of the penis of the female (of the mother)”?!

Note first of all that “small child” clearly must refer to a small male child since (and it pains me to spell this out so pedantically) the female child cannot possibly refuse to acknowledge the absence of the penis of the female, since she never had one and would most likely not even know what a penis was until a later stage in her life.

Then deliberate over the likelihood that even a male child would refuse to acknowledge the absence of the penis of the female (of the mother). Or, to put that another way (as echoed by Agamben), the little boy does not want to give up the “conviction” that his mother has a penis.

Well, I can claim a little personal insight here since I myself was at one time a little boy. And I don’t ever recall being under the impression that my mother had a penis. Which also means that I never wanted to hang on to this impression because I would be upset to find my Mum didn’t have a willie. In fact, I can categorially say that if I had found my mother did have a knob, it would have severely traumatised me.

But what is Freud implying here? It looks to me like total rejection of the female body itself. Thus, leading to a desire for everyone to be male. At which point we are yet again steered towards anal sex as the only possible form of sexual intercourse.

Diminution

Anuses pass waste material. Shit is the ultimate refuse. It’s disgusting, it stinks, nobody wants to go near it. Our body expels it. We have gotten rid of it. It’s the ultimate substance that we don’t want. And consider the meeting of the penis (fertilising organ) with the anus (literally repulsive mechanism). The seed doesn’t meet an egg to produce new life. The seed meets shit, an emblem of death.

So, what does all this amount to?

Fear of the female, fear of the vagina, fixation on a brutal pecking order, testosterone fuelled jousting, attraction towards death and decay, neutralisation, exploitation, ultimately sexlessness.

Well, I think that pretty much covers that. But before I go…

Addendum: The Human Centipede

The Human Centipede film franchise constitutes a trilogy of movies on the awesomely disgusting proposal of attaching people together in a chain in such a way that one’s mouth is attached to another’s anus forcing the one behind to eat the excrement coming out of the one in front and then pass this through his own stomach to the one behind him and so on. Insofar as this has a rationale, it is that the creator of this wants to make a “composite creature” with multiple stomachs. Or at least that’s how it goes in the first film which features three such “component people”. The second film features twelve and the third any number. By the time we get to that point, the whole mad scheme is meant purely as a punishment to inmates in a prison.

In this case, the anal fixation seems to have achieved a grandeur that has an enormous resonance in a consumer capitalist culture. Recycled shit revolving around and around a claustrophobic circuit isn’t a bad metaphor for such a culture in which the most minuscule impoverished material is forced into reapplication for the purpose of extracting the maximum of profit margins. And where, instead of everyone fucking everyone else up the ass, everyone is forced to eat the same shit over and over. The concept is almost awe-inspiring in its apocalyptic ambition.

And if, at this point, the reader responds: “What a load of shit!” Well, I understand.