Rimming

Licking and kissing a man's ass, also called a rim job or eating ass: foreplay for some gay men, the main event for others.

Rimming is licking and kissing a man's asshole: anilingus, if you want the clinical word, a rim job or eating ass if you want the everyday ones. For a lot of gay men it is foreplay, the thing that relaxes a bottom before he gets fucked. For plenty of others it is the main event, and some men would happily skip everything else.

It used to be the act people whispered about even in gay company. Today it is one of the most openly discussed items on the menu, celebrated in memes, listed in app profiles and long since out of the closet in straight pop culture too.

Where it comes from

To rim someone, and the noun rimming, have been gay slang for about a century. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds "rim each other" in a 1926 study of homosexuality, and traces the verb to an older form, ream, meaning to stretch or scrape out. The rim job shows up by the 1940s.

The gay scene built a little vocabulary around it. A rim queen, a man who loves doing it, was already in print in 1965, in W. H. Auden's privately circulated poem The Platonic Blow. Today you are more likely to hear that someone "eats ass" or is a "rimmer," and the act itself gets called a salad, as in tossing it.

On the apps

Rimming is one of the most common tags in profiles, often with a direction: "love to rim," "love getting rimmed," or both. It also leads straight to the subject of hygiene, because nobody wants to eat a surprise. Many bottoms rinse before sex for this reason as much as for anything else; see douching for how that works. Rimming often comes before fisting or sits in a pig profile next to felching, but it needs neither: it is perfectly at home in the most vanilla session.

The health side

Rimming does not pass on HIV in any meaningful way, but the ass is where poo lives, so it can pass on gut infections. Hepatitis A spreads through traces of poo and through sex, and the NHS lists men who have sex with men among the groups who should get the hepatitis A vaccine. The same route carries other stomach bugs, which is why a dental dam, or simply skipping it when either of you has had diarrhea, is the harm-reduction advice. Gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes and syphilis can also travel between mouth and ass. If you rim regularly, ask a sexual health clinic about vaccines and include throat and rectal swabs in your check-ups.

Related terms