When 33-year-old Alyson was in high school, she heard a rumor that many school-aged children have since come across: that anal sex makes your butt bigger. Not your butthole, mind you — the butt overall.
It’s a patently ridiculous concept, but she wasn’t the only one who believed it was true. To this day, people regularly turn to Quora and Reddit for answers, and on Twitter, its weird staying power shows up in jokes and tweets from time to time.
Countless myths about the way sex “changes” you regularly make their rounds. It’s not uncommon for people to believe that having sex induces some type of chemical transformation, particularly for women, or that sex can somehow change your genital anatomy. For example, “loose” continues to be a pejorative descriptor of a woman who frequently has sex, despite there being no evidence that the vaginal canal does any permanent stretching to accomodate dick at all.
I’m usually rather understanding of these weird, obviously false sex myths. Most of the time, they originate from fear, ignorance or unchecked cultural norms, and education is really the best tool to set the record straight. But this idea that anal makes your ass — the whole ass — bigger has truly stopped me in my tracks. Are people afraid of a bigger ass? Is it a means of convincing hesitant people that anal comes with benefits? Is having a bigger ass a mark of promiscuity?
My best guess is that the myth has come to exist from a warped game of telephone: Perhaps it’s been thought that anal makes your butthole bigger, and the more innocent among us interpreted that to mean your buttcheeks.
Likely, all of this has been imbued with some classic misogyny, body politics and probably even racism. Black women have historically been sexualized and falsely perceived as promiscuous, with particular emphasis given to their butts. As Psychology Today reported in 2020, people are also more likely to perceive women with big breasts as open to casual sex than women with smaller breasts. In some truly twisted leaps of logic, perhaps some people associate having a big butt with being promiscuous, and further, being promiscuous vis-a-vis anal. Maybe they interpreted the two theories as connected via causation, rather than simply correlation. I don’t know — I’m genuinely just spitballing here.
In any case, it’s obviously not true. “I hoped it would give me a fighting chance against my flat-ass genetics,” Alyson, now the social editor at MEL, tells me. “However, at almost 34, and after doing anal regularly for years, I can firmly state that my ass is indeed still flat as hell!”
Others confirm: “I do anal all the time, and my butt is still pretty small,” a woman named Lana tells me via Twitter.
Meanwhile, it is actually sorta possible for your butthole/rectum to become overstretched and “bigger” following repeated bouts of anal sex with a wide object. “It’s possible to push the anal sphincter muscles with a toy, cock or fist beyond their ability to recoil and snap back,” Evan Goldstein, founder of Bespoke Surgical, a proctological and anal plastic surgery practice, told Well and Good. “Looseness occurs if one continues to push the boundaries of their anal muscle elasticity.” In these cases, you might even need to be surgically restored.
But this doesn’t usually happen from your average round of anal — you’d feel it if your body was being pushed beyond its limits. With proper lube and foreplay, your butt should relax and temporarily stretch to accomodate anal play, then return to its usual size when you’re done.
As for the cheeks getting bigger, I really can’t think of a way anal would cause that. Maybe if you were doing it every day in a squatting position, you might see some new muscle definition. But even then, there’s no guarantee your butt would look bigger.
Frankly, though, I wish the rumor were true. If anal really did make your ass bigger, why would anyone go get a Brazilian Butt Lift? Taking a dick up your butt is far less invasive! I’m just at a loss here. I say it all the time, but we really need better sex ed in this country — anal definitely included.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
