ABSTAINING FROM SEX before marriage is a common expectation in several religions—but for every rule, there will be those who come up with ways to try and find a loophole. Take, for example, soaking.
Soaking is a term which blew up online in 2020 due to a series of TikTok videos which alleged that it’s a common way for students at Brigham Young University—a famously Mormon-owned and run institution—to circumvent the Church of Latter Day Saints’ teachings against premarital sex.
The phenomenon of soaking went viral again recently thanks to Heather Gay, a cast member on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, who lifted the lid on what soaking (sometimes referred to as “docking”) actually means.
What is “soaking?”
Mormons live by a code of chastity, with sex before marriage forbidden: soaking supposedly provides a loophole. The act involves a man putting his non-erect penis inside his partner’s vagina, after which the two of them lie motionless on the bed. Because there is no thrusting, and the act does not result in orgasm, the logic follows that this doesn’t count as penetrative sex, and therefore does not break the rules. On Real Housewives, Heather Gay described it as being “like a hot dog in a bun, just sitting there.”
When talking about soaking, there is sometimes an additional component called “jump-pumping”—where a third person jumps on the mattress to create motion so that the two people soaking don’t have to move themselves, providing pleasure but also plausible deniability—although Gay herself concedes that this part is less credulous.
“When you add a third party to jump, to create motion without you physically moving your body parts yourself, that’s called jump-pumping,” she explained on the show. “And that is something that I have never heard or seen or participated in. But I’ve hot-dogged and I’ve soaked!”
Is soaking real, or just a myth?
Since becoming an accidental spokeswoman for the move, Heather Gay has insisted that it is a real thing among Mormons, although she has frequently said this in a tongue-in-cheek manner and it’s unclear whether she’s just going with it at this point.
“It’s basically tantric sex,” she joked on the Chicks in the Office podcast. “Kama Sutra, just no movement.”
However, there are many people—including some who have left the faith—who claim that soaking isn’t real, and is nothing more than another case of misinformation surrounding the practices of the Mormon Church. Over on the Ex-Mormon Subreddit, there are plenty of former Mormons who deny its existence.
“I’ve heard of it when I was a believer. It was an urban legend, and most Mormons were very critical of the fictional people who supposedly did this,” wrote one user. “So no, it’s not real, but many Mormons have heard about it and probably heard that a friend of a friend of a friend did it.”
Others pointed out that while they have definitely heard of soaking in their community, it was always in the context of a joke, and never thought of as something that couples were engaging in for real. There’s also, one commenter said, a flaw to the logic of soaking as some kind of workaround: “It used to be that the Church’s standard definition of ‘sexual intercourse’ was penetration. So if the penis is soaking in the vagina, it has penetrated. Therefore, ‘soaking’ would not be a loophole.”
