There’s a frighteningly frequent question posed on forums like Reddit and Twitter — a query that will make you want to hop in the shower and scrub until your skin falls off.
“How do I tell my boyfriend he needs to wipe more?”
Sure, some guys treat wiping like traffic: They don’t stop until they see red. But from the online chatter, it seems there’s a surprising number of men all around us who do the opposite — they refrain from thoroughly cleaning their butts, on the toilet or in the shower.
What exactly is happening? Maybe these guys think it “makes them gay” to do so. Maybe they’re just big hairy boys for whom truly thorough cleaning is impossible. (Hey, it’s hard to find a bidet in America — and wiping is an imperfect and unsatisfying technique, even when we paper our butts to the point of injury.) Or, as one guy tells me, he was simply never taught proper butthole-cleaning techniques.
The Untrained
A majority of men and girlfriends who show up in Reddit threads regarding this subject say they never learned how to wipe properly in the first place. If this article serves any purpose whatsoever, it will hopefully teach parents to properly train their kids.
Ryan, a man in Manitoba, says he made it well into his 20s while only wiping twice. No more, no fewer. Just a swipe and another swipe. “I guess my mom didn’t give me good wiping lessons or something,” he says. “It was ‘wipe twice and you’re done,’ never ‘wipe until you’re clean.’”
Under the impression that this was the norm for all humankind, Ryan spent 20 years living with skid marks and planning his poops around showers. “After two wipes, the thought of wiping more was never really a consideration,” he says. “It just seemed like the norm to me. Skid marks were a part of life, and I’d clean it in the bath or shower. I assumed this was normal from television and why people changed their underwear daily.”
Though no girlfriend ever confronted him about the smell, he did “try to have a shower before a date partly because of it.”
“I always tried to time my poops until I could get in the shower, and lot of times, I’d hold it in until I could get home,” he says. He built his life around his shower schedule so he wouldn’t get poop on his clothing. “I’d spend all day waiting to have a shower. Sometimes I changed my plans.”
After reading a few of the Reddit threads about lazy wiping boys, Ryan realized he was one of them. “Finding out better ways of cleaning wasn’t like, ‘Wow, I was living my life wrong!’ but more, ‘Now I can go forward doing better.’
“It felt nice being clean down there most of the time, not spending all day waiting to get home to have a shower,” he adds. “But even now, I find it just doesn’t get clean enough until I shower. Might be the hairy ass.” (More on this later.)
The (Alleged) Buttphobes
The issue of boyfriends with dirty butts peaked in 2017 when @KeithCalder posted this now-deleted tweet, which detailed a man who felt his masculinity threatened if his fingers came anywhere near his butt. “He told me that a real man doesn’t go between his cheeks or spread them for anything,” the wife’s post read. “Men do not spread there [sic] cheeks to wipe or clean … nothing goes between them.”
We failed to get a response from anyone who thinks wiping is “gay.” A Twitter user, @xChyrst1an, who once tweeted, “I need my bootyhole coated with some sort of oleophobic substance so I wouldn’t have to wipe anymore … Wiping my ass feels kinda gay,” told us it was sarcasm.
“This is why I’m afraid to top straight men,” says Chicago writer Cooper Gelb, who goes by @queerandangry on Twitter. “Masculinity is poison and why straight men are dying out. Women need to have higher standards or be able to tell their men they’re gross, and that’s my final take on this.”
Sarcasm or not, it’s a frightening idea that some men might rather walk around with feces caked between their butt cheeks than touch their anus at all. But at least they’re seemingly close to nonexistent.
The Too Hairy
Then there’s the final installment of men with poopy buttholes: the hirsute. As one hairy guy put it, cleaning up post–№2 is like “wiping peanut butter out of a shag carpet.”
“Pulling bits out in the shower and snagging a few hairs is a vivid memory for me. For a while, I got into the habit of not even bothering to wipe and just going straight into the shower after pooping,” says Reddit user u/ShorterMacc in yet another thread about not wiping. “Now I pull my cheeks apart as far as is comfortable before I poop and wipe a few times before letting them relax back. Makes cleaning up after a hell of a lot easier, and I can poop at work without worrying about it (used to never poop in public as there are no showers).”
The original poster, u/thrwwaywway, agrees, saying his hairy butt is why he “continued to believe one can’t just wipe their butt clean.” Though u/thrwwaywway went the first 16 years of his life without wiping clean, he’s found shaving helps in the hair department. “What I do these days is run a hair trimmer over my butt hair, not to the point where I’ve got stubble (because that’s annoying), but just to where it’s short and trim. That seems to solve everything for me. Otherwise it’s like trying to poop through a net.”
Let this be a PSA for all men to take time today and reflect: Learn proper wiping techniques. Wiping too hard can result in what some doctors call “Polished Ass Syndrome,” and going knuckle deep every wipe — while both effective and pleasurable — can result in some plump hemorrhoids. Actually, let’s just get it over with and get America on the bidet wagon. At this point the only thing standing in the way is us.
Quinn Myers
Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.
