While I am not an expert on assholes (God, that deserves an acronym!), I suspect it’s a combination of two things:
Some body parts change naturally at puberty. The five small children whose anuses I have had occasion to pay any attention to, in changing diapers or bathing them, had “nothing special” coloration – moderately pinker than the surrounding skin, presumably due to the blood vessels in the area. But typically the scrotum and the labia darken, to a varying extent, at puberty, and I’d venture to guess the same is true for the anus.
Bilirubin is, after all, a pigment, as well as a significant part of the excreta. Without any distasteful jokes on relative cleanliness, I’d be quite unsurprised to find that over time it dyed paler tissues it came in contact with, by reabsorption, even with extreme cleanliness.
I asked this question on this board before a long time ago and I think the best answer was because of glands. Here is a link for the old thread.
I’m still bothered by that whole bleaching question though. I don’t know how anyone can bleach their glands off. Or if they did I don’t know how they would ever want to sit down again.
Not if you’re a porn star, which I’m fairly certain are the biggest customer base (assuming it’s real, cause I still haven’t seen any evidence that it is…though the fact that a good 90% (at least) of porn stars have perfect pink balloon knots is probably pretty good evidence.)
Socrates said “Know Thyself,” and this thread really made me wonder. After all my years and all my, cough, adventures, I have no idea what color my anus is!
This calls for empirical testing. My hypothesis is that it’s pink. Dont worry though, this will be an unpublished experiment
Heh, forgot that was also a poster. We call my cat Mr. Dibbles when we want to piss him off, and even as we speak he’s trying to put his (pale pink) anus right up in my grill.
Pink Cheeks is a waxing salon in Los Angeles that is quite famous for their bikini waxes. All the Playboy girls go there to get every bit of hair removed from their nether regions, as do many porn stars from the near off San Fernando Valley.
Pink Cheeks also offers a very popular anal bleaching. From their site:
I’ve seen plenty. and yes, the colors vary quite a bit, but we’re talking about the same kind of skin that you find on scrota, labia, aereola, and other “demarcated” regions. No one knows why, of course, but one might reasonably guess it’s “hey, I’ve got a special purpose, and I want you to distinguish me from that run-of-the-mill skin over there.” Either as a warning or an invitation, it’s all the same.
It’s a rather delicate subject, but a really good question. My initial take on it was that the anus, vulva, scrotum, penis, and areolas all are erogenous zones, easily stimulated, similarly colored, and amazingly adept at stretching/contracting, very quick, when stimulated, so there would be an easy answer to be found. “Must be sumthin’ about that sorta skin’s ability to stretch”, I figgered. And we experience that everyday, so, researchers have been working non-stop, right?
But, my Googlin’ is weak: could find links to research papers dealing with “genital melanocytes”, but didn’t have access to the papers, and probably wouldn’t have been able to decipher and understand them if I had.
One, perhaps helpful Wiki site might lead a more astute Doper, especially a medical expert, to a better answer. From what I could tell in the abstracts pulled up, there is a correlation between genital melanin compounds, the pituitary gland, and serotonin. This would make sense in the normal functioning of those human bits.
Hope this helps a more intelligent sort give a real answer. It’s not a nasty question at all; I’m really curious, and hope Cecil hisself might take it on to shed light on the everyday bidness of the nether regions.
