Soaking Sin or Loophole?
If you Google the religion Mormonism, you’ll usually find images of women dressed in modest clothes, hair covered and men in white shirts with black ties. Mormons are notorious for the strict beliefs and rules they follow: No sex before marriage, no dating before the age of 16, they’re not even allowed to participate in passionate kissing. If that’s the case then why does ‘soaking’ exist?
What is ‘soaking’? I hear you ask. Well if you haven’t seen it go viral on Tiktok, let me explain and I’ll try my hardest not to sound like a cringy sex-ed video. ‘Soaking’ is seen as a Mormon’s loophole to getting “satisfied”. It involves three people, the couple who are wanting to be intimate shall we say, get into bed and the man will “enter” the woman but won’t move and essentially “soak” inside her. From there the third person will appear out of the shadows and begin to jump on the bed, causing a motion similar to conventional sex. Now you may think: But isn’t this the opposite of what Mormonism is about? Well technically no, you see some Mormons interpret this as not actually engaging in sex, as there’s no thrusting. They’re technically involuntarily penetrating.
Gigi Robertson 22, a student at The University of Oklahoma an Ex-Mormon finds the whole concept hilarious.
“I know people who have done it, so I know it’s real. Every time there are jokes made, people react like oh soaking, it’s so taboo there’s no way that’s real, but it is!”
Gigi laughed as she continued: “Not having sex is definitely the biggest struggle of being a Mormon, obviously, a lot of Christians believe in abstinence and celibacy. So (sex) before marriage, it’s a sin and that’s really big in the (Mormon) church.”
The pillars of Mormonism are based on Christianity although many Christians don’t recognise Mormonism as an official denomination. They usually belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints also known as the LDS; which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah and has more than 16 million members worldwide.
Gigi herself was baptised at the age of eight and moved to Utah from Texas aged eleven. She, like many girls who are baptised into Mormonism, was given a ‘Choose The Right’ ring to wear. It’s known as a purity ring and the whole basis of it is to stay “pure” and to wait until marriage. But this abstinence may be causing people to create a grey area in the rule.
Gigi said: “People find these loopholes, especially when you are younger, you’re full of hormones. It’s talked about a lot between the ages of 13 to 17 but anything below or above you will not hear someone say the word soaking come out of someone’s mouth. Like my parents never brought it up, it was actually my brother who told me about it because he had experienced soaking as the third person jumping on the bed.
They (Mormons) consider it a loophole because if they’re not doing it themselves, the movement, then technically they’re not having sex. So when you have the third person jumps on the bed, then technically you’re not moving so you’re also not having sex in Mormonism’s eyes. It’s such a wild concept.”
Utah has the biggest concentration of Mormons, with 66% of the state identifying as being a part of the church. Therefore, being a Mormon in one part of the world compared to being a Mormon in Utah can be completely different.
As Gigi explains, She said: “I found it a bit weird living in Utah, knowing other people in the outside world were having sex. I lived in Texas before I moved to Utah. I lived in Texas for about eleven years and then I lived in Utah for two years, afterwards, I moved back.
During that time I was going through puberty and coming from a place where I was exposed to PG-13 movies and stuff and then we moved; it was such a culture shock. For example, when I moved to Utah everyone was white and Mormon.I have really curly hair and I had women try to straighten my hair because they felt like it was inappropriate and distracting. I was part of a beautifully diverse community of people (in Texas) and I was still able to be a Mormon. When I moved to Utah I, as a curly-haired white woman, was the diversity.”
Christian Hans, a reporter at News 9 in Oklahoma and an active member of the church recognised the differences in dating for people in the Mormon church.
Christian said: “When it comes to dating they (the Mormon church) tend to try and keep a sterile environment. Something I remember a lot whilst growing up is they tried to push teenagers to go out on dates as a group.
You were told not to just hang out in your car or at one of the person’s houses or in a room alone. God forbid!”
He chuckled as he continued: “They basically try to keep you as far away from the temptation as they call it, they don’t want you to have pre-marital sex, and they don’t want you to potentially get pregnant. Whether or not people actually believed in all that or if they actually followed those rules, varies from person to person.”
That varying from person to person may be why people have decided to bend the rules in the Book of Mormon. Christian who is now married, found it hard to wrap his head around the idea of ‘soaking’.
Christian said: “I don’t think it’s actually real. It’s one of those things that you hear about on Twitter or Tiktok and you think this has got to be a joke right? Being in Utah to visit my family and seeing other Mormons interact with each other and things like that. And because they have those very strict rules on even causal dating, the whole atmosphere is sexual repression.”
We at Single-ish obviously accept every religion and tradition in every form it comes. And people always interpret their beliefs differently. However, the action of soaking is definitely on the more unorthodox side of things.
Gigi reassured me that it’s not necessarily an ordinary thing in the Mormon church either.
She said: “It’s a very taboo conversation in itself. When I was a Mormon in Utah I lived close to the temple itself and the conversations around soaking were very “we don’t talk about it” but everyone knows it’s a thing. You don’t address it because technically no one is breaking any rules but it’s such an uncomfortable topic.”
The rules seem pretty clear cut and dry, according to the LDS church the result of sin is the “withdrawal of the Holy Ghost and eternity, being unable to dwell in the presence of our heavenly father, for ‘no unclean thing can dwell with God.’” So why participate in soaking and risk the chance to dwell with the heavenly father?
Gigi said: “I think the more human side of them takes over. Whenever they decide to go to such an extreme, thinking that it’s a loophole and that they’re fine. They basically have to convince themselves, ‘I’m not going to get in trouble, this isn’t breaking the rules’. They have to convince themselves because the human side of them that doesn’t involve Mormonism creates this drive to want to be intimate with someone.”
So is this a sin? Or is this just young Mormons finding a clever way to get their jollies?
I posed the question to Gigi, she scoffed and replied: “Personally, I think it’s bullshit. It’s penetration I think that’s sex. I don’t think it’s a loophole and I think if you are genuinely afraid of getting sent to hell you wouldn’t even risk it.”
After Gigi left the church and Utah she reflected on how Moromonisn can be hard for those who may have enjoyed different freedoms before joining.
She said: “I’m still spiritual, I’m still definitely Christian, I think it just made me realise in my personal opinion, I don’t think a God that truly loves the way I think he does, would not put so many rules and be so scrutinising. I don’t think he gave us the freedom to choose, just to make rules that basically go against that freedom he gave us.”
Christian had a slightly different view on soaking, he said: “People can do whatever they want to do, I’m not going to judge people for what they do. But I will say that people, especially older people in the church. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually sex or soaking even intense prolonged kissing. To them, it’s all the same, it’s all a pathway into temptation.”