Tossing Salad Goes Mainstream

First, Porn Called it Gross. Now, It’s Just Another Kiss.

There was a time when I, in my youthful naivete, had no idea what “tossing salad” meant beyond the conventional, fancy dinner-type tossed salads made by people who actually give a damn about preparing food. Reviewing porn removed that level of innocence from my eyes, mind, and ultimately, personal experience.

Yet another of those saucy prison terms that have wound their way into our bedrooms, tossing salad refers to the salad oil used in prison to distract from the taste of ass when forced to play the butt-eating bottom. Also known as anilingus, which seems less romantic to me, and to rim or eat ass, both of which make perfect sense to me, the idea of doing it by any name if you were straight was unthinkable until relatively recently, geologically speaking.

Men who indulge in sex with other men understood the profound pleasures to be found in stimulating the delicate tissues surrounding the anal opening long before everyone else stopped clutching their pearls and acting shocked and appalled at the very idea. I’m not saying that eating ass has become something done between casual straight hookups on the regular, but I see it in porn a lot more than I used to see it. And the context is entirely different.

When I first reviewed a heterosexual “salad tossing” DVD (remember DVDs?) the whole point of the activity was humiliation. Oh, gosh. Look at those beautiful women being degraded because they’re giving a man’s ass pleasure with their tongues and lips. After all, we all “know” that men’s butts are intrinsically gross and any pleasure the butt of a heterosexual man experiences is entirely unauthorized and probably a sign of secret same-sex attractions. Blahblahblah. It’s amazing the nonsense we try to believe in an attempt to con ourselves out of pleasure.

I don’t remember when the goal of ass eating in straight videos ceased to be punitive and became part of the buffet of treats available to people in porn who have asses, but I was relieved when I realized there had been a shift. I totally “get” the concept of erotic humiliation, but if the humiliation comes from the mere fact someone has engaged in the activity and not whether they feel genuinely humiliated by engaging in it, it falls flat for me. It feels like kink-shaming, body shaming, and a lot of other things I don’t personally like to deal with in my erotic fantasy material. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

The first time my ass was on the receiving end of another person’s tongue was a surprise. I was new to the whole sex writing thing and had a lot to learn. I still do. We all do. It’s kind of a birth to death sorta thing, in my opinion. But, in that moment, the idea that anyone would intentionally place their mouth on my asshole was as alien as the alien that caused Ripley so much trouble in that movie of the same name. Sure, I knew people did it. But no one would want to do it to me, right? I was on my knees when it happened and assumed they’d accidentally aimed too high. I was wrong. Wonderfully, wonderfully wrong.

By the end of the evening, I was a little less naïve. Learning can be fun.

The first time my mouth was on the receiving end of another person’s asshole was a planned event. Well, not an “event,” in the sense of the parties I’ve been hosting for the past 20 odd (and boy have they been odd) years, but as part of an in-home date. He’d never experienced anyone noshing on his tushy and was hoping I’d be game to give it a whirl. He’d gone so far to prepare by shaving and douching his ass. Thoughtful! And oh, was that a smooth and delightful twink butt blossom to further lose my innocence kissing.

I assume that this willingness to explore the pleasure potential of the ass by mouth is at least part of what went into creating the lie that “gay men eat each other’s shit.” Younger readers may not be familiar with this slander, but it was popular in the 20^th Century. Apparently, some moral orals don’t understand the basics of hygiene. Given that Martin Luther thought devils flew out of his ass when he took a poop, so he used broken pieces of pottery to wipe his ass and punish his flesh, I confess that I don’t have a lot of faith in or patience with those who claim a superior knowledge of spiritual or physical purity.

I prefer to think that Louis Armstrong had it right, if perhaps not within the same context, when he wrote “You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.”