Yesterday you lamented the fact that "those relatively easy 'how-to' or 'what-that' questions" had dried up, so here goes: I recently showed my mother the first few episodes of the magnificent Fleabag (all hail Phoebe Waller-Bridge!) and she found it profoundly disturbing. Her main concern was the (female) lead character's laissez-faire attitude to anal sex. A little background: Mom's a recovering Catholic. She's an avowed liberal, a feminist, and has spent her entire life working against her hideously moralistic, paternalistic upbringing. She's also a neuropsychologist and a big fan of Esther Perel. But occasionally the Catholicism evokes a fear-based knee-jerk reaction in her otherwise entirely rational and decent head.

I pointed out that it can't be that problematic because men have been doing it to each other for literally millennia. She told me that the practice, while safe for men, can cause a degeneration of the wall between a [cis] woman's vaginal canal and her... colon maybe? It wasn't clear and my anatomy is rusty. Apparently this leads to unspeakable infections, injuries, and attendant horrors. She said this had happened to a friend of my (staunchly Catholic, slut-shaming, misogyny-internalizing, pedophile-priest-forgiving) grandmother. Now, I feel kind of dumb for even asking the question. I'm 41, extremely open-minded and consider myself a student and celebrant of human sexuality, yet I've never heard of this? So help me, Dan:

1. Is this some misconception on the part of my Mom?

2. Is it a bullshit cautionary tale with which granny for some ungodly reason felt it necessary to burden her?

3. Was the poor woman in the anecdote perhaps anally raped or at least penetrated with such force and regularity that an anomalous and highly unusual medical fate befell her?

Is This A Thing

1. Yes.

2. Maybe. Since granny isn't around to ask, ITAT, it's impossible to determine the reason why she burdened your mother with this story—if she burdened your mother with it all. It's entirely possible your mother made this story up to rationalize her disapproval of/disgust with anal intercourse and then stuffed this "cautionary tale" in her own mother's mouth.

3. Who the fuck knows?

Men and women have been so roughly and/or ineptly penetrated during anal intercourse that injury or death has resulted—RIP Edward II—so it's possible your grandmother knew a woman or knew of a woman or heard from someone who knew someone who knew of a woman who was injured during anal intercourse. Anything is possible.

It's fine for your mom to dislike anal (it's a free country) and she can think anal sex is gross (it's not) or inherently demeaning (it doesn't have to be*)—there are things I dislike and think are gross—but your otherwise rational mom clearly isn't capable of thinking about this subject rationally. I mean... with somewhere between twenty and forty percent of women report engaging in receptive anal intercourse in the last year... if receptive anal sex was safe for men but invariably led to unspeakable infections, injuries, and deaths in women... we'd all have to step over female corpses on the way to work, right?

Your mom isn't required to have anal sex or approve of Phoebe Waller-Bridge having anal intercourse. But you can challenge her to make the logical (and obvious) inference.

* But it can be hot to pretend to pretend it is—with the right partner, of course.