But anecdotes from forums across the digital world suggest it is a now common practice. It is hard to find solid data on how many people know of or experience it most researchers don’t see the act as a sexual health priority worth studying. Yet today, man-on-woman anal fingering is functionally mainstream. It was the provenance of kink or tantric sex-wild and outré. The 2002 edition of The Joy of Sex, the late Alex Comfort’s seminal 1972 illustrated guide to everything sexual, refers to the act as postillionage, a distinctly French (read: bizarre European libertine) tradition, with which a New York Times reviewer was, circa 2003, completely unfamiliar. Just over 15 years ago, the idea of a man fingering a woman’s ass as sexual play was fairly foreign to many Americans.
