The one about SOAKING
Urban legend turned internet meme, or a real Mormon thing?
Hey horny readers! Today I’m breaking down a popular internet meme and how it’s potentially similar to other urban legends (although it might be totally real).
As always, thank you so much for reading the ADULT SEX ED newsletter! If you’re enjoying it, please share with friends, so they can be hilariously informed.
Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
Ready to get a little smarter? Okay, let’s go!
PS - Hope to see you at one of the ADULT SEX ED LIVE SHOWS coming up this Spring! May 15th in NYC at Caveat (livestream tickets available) and June 7th in LA at Dynasty Typewriter (tickets available soon).
A friend messaged me a couple of weeks ago asking me when I was going to do a newsletter about soaking. I had to admit that for me, soaking was an internet meme that I clocked, but then it completely escaped my brain. What the hell is soaking? The sex act, which may or may not be a real thing in mormon circles, started to go viral on tiktok in 2021, although a quick reddit search proved to me that former mormons have been talking about it for a decade. At its peak, celebrities with LDS ties like Chelsea Handler make their own videos discussing soaking, comedians roasted the act on podcasts, and some YouTubers even visited BYU, the apparent epicenter of soaking, to interview students there. The practice even got a mention on ESPN during a BYU game.
Also called marinating, floating, parking, and jump humping, soaking is a practice where a man (usually a college student) inserts his penis into a vagina and just stays still, letting it “soak.” It’s what most of us have experienced when a drunk lover passes out inside you, but for horny young people, it’s heaven. Sometimes, there is a third person involved who spends time under the bed moving the mattress up and down, or jumping on the bed while the desperately repressed friends lay there with the car parked inside the garage (hence the moniker “jump humping”). According to interviews with BYU students, sometimes the jumper is even paid for their service. Here’s a shorter explanation from the folks at Letterkenny and in case you were really confused, there’s an actual illustration on wikipedia.
Complicated, sometimes pricey, and probably only satisfying for really horny virgins, it’s intercourse—without the course. It’s like dry humping, but literally the opposite—wet, no hump.
Soaking is apparently seen as a loophole young members of the religion use to get around their church's teachings, specifically the law of chastity. This LDS law requires abstinence from sexual relations outside of marriage and there is a belief that the lack of movement allows the couple to technically remain within the bounds of the chastity guidelines. Students at BYU, which seems to be the epicenter of soaking, have to adhere to a student code, which includes abstaining from sex, same-sex interactions of any kind, vulgar language, and substances, including alcoholic beverages, tobacco, tea, coffee, vaping, and marijuana. There’s also a dress code that I would have failed every single day I spent at the University of Miami.
I’m not here to come down hard on the people who soak—it’s not so different from the concept of dry humping or young evangelicals who only do anal to get around their purity pledges (which I spoke about last year here). Purity or chastity pledges often create an enormous amount of shame in the people who sign them and many people look for loopholes. The obvious difference from dry humping is that soaking is actual penetrative sex. The kind of sex that can give you STIs and possibly a pregnancy if that third party jumper really does the job and someone busts a nut.
Whether or not these students have had sex Ed is a whole other topic. But they certainly haven’t had the late 90s-early aughts public school kind that had us believing we might get pregnant from the pre-cum on a toilet seat. These soakers are playing with fire! According to some of the BYU students who were interviewed, they have peers who get married while in college to people they barely know just to give in to sexual urges.
There are a lot of varying opinions about soaking on the internet. Some mormons and ex-morons don’t think the practice really exists and is more of an urban legend. Some current and former BYU students swear they’ve soaked or know people who have. And elsewhere on the internet, mormons explain why this isn’t a loophole at all, since the law of chastity emphasizes not only physical chastity but also mental and emotional chastity, which includes maintaining pure thoughts. If you’ve seen Book of Mormon on Broadway, you’ll remember the song about turning impure thought off, “like a light switch.” Others have pointed out that in the end, women will suffer because a man who admits to soaking will more likely be forgiven than a woman who will be seen as “unclean.”
So, is it possible that soaking isn’t real at all and only a practice that a few people have tried? Of course. Or is it possible that it wasn’t real, but the rumor spread and now people are doing it? Yes!
There is one historical deep dive that I went on last year that may provide some context. Let’s refresh our memories about the mythical history of chastity belts.
Chastity belts were portrayed in historical media as a repressive feature of Medieval times, but were likely always a joke. That ancient joke led to actual chastity belts being used, sparingly in actual life but more frequently in BDSM. So it’s possible that soaking was a joke that turned into a real practice.
Back to dry humping, the much safer practice of our teenage years. Dry humping between two Church members also has a nickname—durfing. While durfing isn’t as fun, the name sounds too much like barf, and it might leave you with a major case of blue balls, it likely beats getting married at nineteen.
Here are some recent newsletters you might like:
You can access all past newsletters here!