Anal massage: why is the anus so sensitive?

There's many reasons anal play can feel so good

When I ask people about the most sensitive areas of their body, the obvious places tend to spring to mind: lips, nipples, genitals, sometimes neck. Their anus doesn’t usually make most people’s initial list and in this blog article we’re going to explore why that’s surprising (and a little bit of a shame).

Anatomically speaking, the anus is a remarkably interesting part of the body. It has a rich sensory nerve supply, an intricate relationship with the pelvic floor, and two different muscular sphincters working together to give us both automatic and conscious control. It’s also an area where sensation can vary enormously depending on something very simple: whether the body feels able to relax.

I’ve spent over a decade working with anal massage; supporting clients who want to explore pleasure, access better pelvic floor relaxation, enjoy prostate stimulation and overcome shame. I’ve been diving even deeper into the wonders of anal massage recently while working on some new online course material, and the more closely you look at this part of the body, the more fascinating it becomes.

The anus is designed to feel

The anal canal is richly innervated, which means there’s a high density of nerve endings in the tissue, but sensation isn’t distributed evenly throughout it. The outer anus and lower portion of the anal canal have somatic sensory innervation – broadly speaking, the kind of nerve supply that allows us to perceive touch, pressure, temperature and discomfort with quite a high degree of precision. This is partly why very small changes around the anal opening can be surprisingly noticeable. There can be a sense of numbness at one point, but when you can move your touch just a millimetre to the left the receiver experiences a sudden intensity that’s entirely different.

Travel further inside the rectum, however, and sensation changes. Here, the type of nerve cells collected in the inner tissues tend to be much better at detecting things such as stretch, pressure and fullness, rather than being able to identify precise touch in the way the skin can.

So rather than thinking of ‘the anus’ as one uniformly sensitive structure, it makes more sense to think of it as a place to explore the transition between different kinds of sensation. When working with clients who are new to – but curious about – anal massage and play, I will always explain that external sensations can feel really intense and pleasurable, more ‘immediately’ exciting, whereas only a short distance further inside it can feel completely different and more difficult to (initially) discern subtle sensations.

There are actually two anal sphincters

We often talk about ‘the anal sphincter’ as though it were a single muscle, but there are two main sphincters involved: two clever little bands of muscle that work harmoniously together (for the most part), alongside the surrounding pelvic floor muscles, to maintain continence and coordinate bowel movements.

Your internal anal sphincter is made from smooth muscle and is not under your voluntary control. You don’t consciously tell it to contract throughout the day; your autonomic nervous system largely manages that job for you. That’s the same part of your nervous system that keeps your heart beating, and the muscular walls of your digestive system contracting to move food through your bowel. Wrapped around the internal sphincter, is the external anal sphincter, made from skeletal muscle. This one is under your voluntary control: you can consciously tighten or relax it (although the latter can feel difficult for many).

This brings us to one of the biggest misconceptions about anal massage, anal play and anal sex – one that means a lot of people have experienced anal as something uncomfortable or painful. Understanding this important aspect of anal anatomy will make anal play far more enjoyable for the person receiving.

You can consciously decide that you want to relax the external sphincter, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the entire area immediately softens. The internal sphincter is influenced by the autonomic nervous system – the same broader system involved in our responses to stress, safety and arousal. In other words, wanting to relax and actually relaxing aren’t always the same thing. It takes more than just telling someone to ‘relax your bum’ to get them ready for penetration. If you want your receiving partner to enjoy internal stimulation you need to operate from that premise.

The anus is part of the pelvic floor

The anus doesn’t exist as an isolated ring of muscle. It sits within a much larger muscular system: the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor forms a hammock-like arrangement of muscles across the base of the pelvis, supporting the pelvic organs and contributing to continence, sexual function, breathing mechanics and pressure regulation through the trunk. One particularly interesting muscle here is the puborectalis. It forms a sling around the junction between the rectum and anal canal, helping create an angle that assists continence. During a bowel movement, puborectalis needs to relax so that this angle can straighten and allow stool to pass more easily.

This means that what happens around the anus is intimately connected with what is happening across the wider pelvic floor. Someone can therefore experience a general sense of tightness or resistance around anal touch even when they’re consciously trying not to ‘clench’. The nervous system, sphincters and deeper pelvic floor musculature are all part of the picture.

Why relaxation changes sensation

This is the part I find most interesting, and I’ve seen this happen in thousands of sessions: the point at which someone drops into deeper safety and relaxation is the point at which they start to connect with pleasure and arousal from anal touch.

Our experience of being touched isn’t restricted to the nerve endings in the spot being touched. The brain is constantly interpreting all that sensory information and deciding what it means. A sensation can be perceived as pleasant, neutral, ticklish, intense or uncomfortable depending on the context, expectation, previous experience and how safe the nervous system perceives the situation to be.

If someone anticipates discomfort (because of a previous experience, a thought, or their feeling of safety in the space), the body will often respond with ‘muscular guarding’: the pelvic floor and external sphincter tighten, brace or contract. That increased tension can then make the touch feel more intense or uncomfortable, which encourages further tightening. You end up with a rather unhelpful feedback loop of anticipation – tension – increased intensity – more tension. Trying to force relaxation usually isn’t the answer. Slowing things down tends to be far more useful.

Breathing, warmth, gradual external touch, plenty of lubrication and giving the body enough time to become accustomed to the sensation can all change how touch is experienced. There’s nothing good about trying to make the body submit to something it doesn’t want. Discomfort or pain should always be taken as important information, and sharp, persistent or significant pain is a reason to stop rather than something to ‘push through’. But there is an interesting distinction between protective tension and genuine pain – learning to notice that distinction can be valuable, and it’s easier for your partner to notice when you move slowly, mindfully and with good technique.

A surprisingly sophisticated bit of anatomy

Perhaps the biggest misconception about the anus is that it’s simply an opening with a muscle around it. It’s actually the meeting point of several sophisticated systems: voluntary and involuntary muscle, the pelvic floor, sensory nerves, autonomic regulation and the digestive tract. That’s why exploring this area – whether through massage, self-touch or somatic meditation – can teach us quite a lot about how our bodies respond to sensation, to stress, to excitement and to pleasure. It also provides a rather lovely example of something I return to again and again in my work: good touch isn’t necessarily about doing more. Very often, it’s about slowing down enough to notice more. In an area of the body where a few millimetres can take you from one type of sensory experience to another, that becomes particularly interesting.

If you want to learn more about mindful, pleasurable and relaxed anal play I highly recommend my online course in anal massage. You can also book an intimate bodywork session in Brighton, London or Stockholm to explore receiving anal massage. Or for a completely free of charge option, a great starting point is signing up to my newsletter and getting your free pdf guide to anal massage – complete with instructions for external and internal massage techniques.

With Love,

Libby

Thanks for taking time to read my blog articles, I hope that they help you to feel more confident and relaxed with your body, touch and intimacy. If you’d like to support the page you can make a donation and ‘buy me a coffee’ to fuel me whilst I’m writing the next article 🙂

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