Should I Do Anal?

A Substack Writer’s Dilemma

VISUAL METAPHOR ABOVE: Porn star Riley Reid is Substack. Her anus is politics.

Some years ago I met a porn star who told me that to survive that particular industry, it was important for her to have boundaries.

“I will not do anal,” she said.

As personal creeds go, it’s not a bad one. And it’s one I’ve been thinking about quite a bit since launching a Substack.

You see I despise politics, and I lay the no-doubt imminent destruction of mankind at the feet of the suffocating, all-pervasive news and social media that validates it. If there should be a future, I am certain that historians then will discuss how the tsunami of news we endure today was what ultimately led to World War Three in 2027, The Great Panic of 2033, the Mass Suicides of 2040, and the Global Running Around And Tearing of One’s Hair Out of 2045.

But here’s the problem:

Like anal porn, politics sells.

Dan Rather’s Substack has 350,000 subscribers.

Robert Reich has 354,000.

And I’ve noticed that even here on The Fetal Position, the posts that garner the most likes or restacks are usually the ones that concern politics or news.

To be clear, while I am opposed to news and politics, I am not opposed to anal sex. Of the two roads diverged in a wood, I often choose the one less taken, so to speak. I’m just using it as a metaphor for doing something you don’t enjoy doing, simply for money (I’m being cautious here because I once compared writing for Hollywood to being anally raped, and I was accused of being homophobic. That is not a joke).

And so it seems that what’s true for porn is true for Substack: there is a financial incentive to do something we’d rather not.

Serious incentive.

Matt Taibbi has 430,000 subscribers.

Bari Weiss has half a million.

Perhaps Matt and Bari enjoy politics. If they do, gei gezunterheit as my grandmother used to say in Yiddish. Go in good health.

But I don’t.

And yet sometimes I think about it.

Because of the subscribers. Because of the re-stacks. Because of the money.

Maybe, I think, I’ll write about immigration. Maybe I’ll write about the election. Maybe I’ll write about wokeness or anti-wokeness or anti-anti-wokeness.

Maybe, I think, I’ll do anal.

This is true of course for life in general, but particularly so in a greed-based, capitalistic culture such as ours, where the end of money justifies any means to achieve it.

And so I’ve begun to believe that this is the whole challenge of life today. To be able to go about your days and your years and your art, and to be able to truthfully say, when it’s all over, nothing more than this:

“I didn’t do anal.”

As life goals go, it’s not a bad one.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

(illustrations by Orli Auslander)