Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” cover

Rimming. Salad tossing. Eating booty.

All of a sudden, it’s the sex act everyone can’t stop talking about (or reading about). But who’s actually actually doing it?

Sadly, I couldn’t find any specific surveys dedicated to purely analingus. (Kinsey Institute, want to get on that?) But we can deduce a couple of things from general anal sex stats.

A 2010 “Psychology Today” article states that “recent surveys” found that around 15% of Americans engage or have engaged in “some form” of anal sex. This amounts to around 20M people. (Also, props to the author for noting upfront that he couldn’t find any analingus stats himself.) But this doesn’t tell us a) how often, or not, Americans are engaged in anal play, and b) what exactly they’re doing with the ass. We also don’t know how “recent” these surveys were, or what length of time they covered.

Slightly more recently, the CDC’s 2011 National Health Statistics report found that 36% of women and 44% of men reported engaging in anal sex, using the cohort group of men and women ages 25-44. But again, this only tells us about one specific act, unless participants were lumping rimming under the general “anal sex” umbrella.

Unless we get an actual study devoted to analingus analytics, we’ll never know for sure. But anecdotally, in mainstream culture, the prevalence of the act appears to be on the rise.