A good ‘ol deep cleaning—formally known by the Butthole Powers That Be as douching—has long been treated as a prerequisite for anal sex, right up there with anal lube and a little patience. In a society that despises mess, especially messes of the sexual or genital variety, it’s not surprising that people have long considered an unexpected rabbit pellet making a cameo during anal sex to be The Ultimate Bedroom Buzzkill. But, as it turns out, douching is rarely necessary.
But that's not how it works,” Evan Goldstein, DO, a doctor in New York City who specializes in anal care, the founder of Bespoke Surgical, and the author of Butt Seriously, tells Cosmopolitan. It’s generally when you feel that urge to go, go, go that the solids take the escalator down to the rectum and below, he says. And while that might be reason enough to retire your pre-anal rinse routine, it's far from the only one.
Emerging research suggests that all that rinsing and repeating could actually be messing with the delicate ecosystem inside your bum. To fully grasp the impact of cleaning deep inside your derriere, it helps to understand a bit more about the butt itself. I am a journalist with a portfolio that disproportionately features anal play, but I’m neither a butt microbiome researcher nor a gastroenterologist.
Thankfully, two were willing to take time out of their lives to explain it to yours truly. More often than not, that microscopic community of bacteria in your backdoor works hunky-dory. But just like any community, things can get a little wonky when its delicate balance is disrupted, Dr.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, the very thing people do to get their butts squeaky-clean (anal douching) may be associated with changes to that bacterial ecosystem, according to emerging research. A March 2026 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases suggests that douching before receptive anal sex (a.k.a. bottoming) may lead to a less diverse rectal microbiome. The researchers compared rectal samples from 64 men who douched to those from 27 men who reported refraining from doing so, and found that the douchers had lower bacterial diversity.
Now, the researchers didn’t prove that douching is the cause of these guys' imbalance, nor did they conclude that a lower-diversity biome is synonymous with an unhealthy one. But the findings do raise questions about the potential risks of douching. It is not built to be pressure-washed,” Sabine Hazan, MD, an award-winning gastroenterologist, gut health expert, and microbiome researcher, tells Cosmopolitan.
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