The BEST Sex Advice, Courtesy Of Stoya

The inbox for stoya@refinery29.com is in quite a state. Egos are running wild, people with penises have felt the need to report the exact lengths of said body parts, and no less than six female-bodied individuals want help with their difficulty achieving orgasm during penetrative sex. For the record, promotional emails regarding your latest self-published book do not count as questions. Now let's talk about sex.

I’m not going to tell you anything about the best brands of lingerie. If your wife instantly felt horny just from looking at some fancy underpants she happened to have laying around, it seems like she might also instantly feel horny from researching lingerie brands, window shopping, and actually shopping. If I just hand you the answers, you may be missing out on a series of sexually arousing adventures that the two of you should be going on together.

What I am going to give you is a pair of links to websites that thoroughly explore the world of lingerie. They’re full of recommendations for all sizes, shapes, and price points: The Lingerie Addict and The Lingerie Lesbian. I’m also going to suggest that you and your wife set aside some time to go lingerie shopping. Look at things, try stuff on. The thrill of hunting down a new piece together seems like it’d be right up her alley. Do try to remember that you’re in public though, and save the sex for after you’ve left the store.

Here’s the thing about anuses and rectums...their main purpose revolves around poop. I’m not saying that you need to be sporting a raging mental boner over the idea of rolling around in piles of excrement — à la one of those banned-everywhere-but-Germany scat movies — but you do need to realize that anal sex is basically a repurposing of one’s lower gastrointestinal tract for sexual pleasure. You’re using a part of your body that is meant for one thing to engage in another thing. If you’re going into Poop’s house, you should be prepared to hang out with some of it. There is no way to always have a clean colon. You have to eat to stay alive, and your body will turn that food into excrement.

Now, maybe you’re having anal sex on camera for profit and know that poop is on the list of things that are considered obscene. Possibly you’d prefer to avoid major clean up. Maybe you really like having anal sex and your partner(s) are incredibly grossed out by the thought of feces, so you’re trying to be accommodating. You can use your finger or a wet wipe to check for stray excrement, and you can use an enema to flush out your entire lower GI tract. As a rule of thumb, I don’t put things in my butt if I wouldn’t put them in my mouth. So, when an enema is necessary, I use filtered water instead of the saline solution that comes in pre-packaged enema bottles.

In my experience, it is difficult to tell whether all the water that went in has come back out, and about half of the time this leads to a far messier situation — often at some point between 30 minutes and six hours in the future. Fun fact: If you ask 10 people who regularly put things in their buttholes how they deal with cleanliness, you will probably get 10 different answers.

For further information, I’d recommend The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Men from Cleis Press...and speaking with your doctor before you go sticking anything crazy up there.

As for swapping anal toys, always remember that any exchange of body fluids carries a potential risk of STI transmission. I’d recommend sterilizing them between partners because there is a very legitimate reason that people are grossed out by poop: It can contain all sorts of bacteria, parasites, and viruses that aren’t commonly thought of as sexually transmittable. If you’re really into the idea of swapping toys without sterilizing them, talk to your doctor first and make sure everyone involved has a clean bill of health.