Rules are a criminal’s favourite thing. When there’s a rule, there is usually an exception. Exploiting that exception, or the loophole to the rule, can give a special sort of delight. It can make you feel very clever indeed. Like you’ve gamed the system and gotten a reward no one else is clever enough to receive.
Sure, it’s a fun game, but you’re missing the point.
This article explores some commonly exploited loopholes in sex, cheating and sexual identity. We’ll poke fun at the holes in cultural and religious life and muse about why they exist, who they protect, and what might be a more complete truth.
Mormon Soaking, Jump Humping and shaking the bed
Despite the spiritual leaders of Mormonism insisting that genital touching shouldn’t happen before marriage, there are tales of unmarried Mormons engaging in quite sexual activity as a way to outsmart religious chastity standards.
The idea of these activities is that sex isn’t sex if you’re not thrusting. The focus here is on the action rather than penetration as the line between sex and not sex. Soaking is about genital-to-genital contact with fluid exchange, but without movement. Jump humping is about getting your friends, or whoever is willing to do it, to jump on the bed while you’re soaking so that there is movement but the couple isn’t doing it. Alternatively, you can get your buddies to shake the bed.
Verdict: As a loophole around chastity, I don’t really get it, but as a fun kinky experience, I love it. Restrictions and weird rules make for fun times, so long as everyone’s into it and willing to play along.
Mormon Vegas Weddings: A Friends-Type Situation
Another Mormon loophole that was reportedly exploited by BYU students was a wild weekend in Vegas.
As the story goes, students would go to Vegas, get married, have sex while married, and then get the marriage annulled before returning to class on Monday. While it’s anybody’s guess as to whether or not this would fly with God, it seemed to be an exploitable loophole for staying in school.
Joining a religious group as an adult is your own decision, but when you grow up within a certain faith, you may not feel so committed. Often upholding the values of the faith are more about community acceptance and upholding appearances than about staying true to your beliefs. When it comes to BYU students, it’s about avoiding being expelled.
Verdict: To be honest, it sounds like a fun time, and kudos to the kids who came up with the loophole. It’s a creative way to undermine authority.
My only worry is that some people might be manipulated into doing this when they are using their faith as an easy out. Sometimes people may not actually be religious, but they bring up religion when pressured into sex so that the other person will drop it. Just like saying, “I’m gay,” when you really want to say, “I’m not interested,” a no is still a no, even when it might be dressed as a lie.
Catholic Butthole Loophole
Especially among kink communities, the term “Catholic school girl” means something, and for good reason. As with many other religious communities, sex before marriage is considered sinful. However, it’s usually framed as PIV (penis in vagina) sex. Add to that the ban on condoms, and you get a lot of horny teens experimenting with oral and anal sex.
So when is a hole not a hole? When it’s a butt, of course!
The bible doesn’t define what counts as sex, and doesn’t comment on anal or oral sex. In reality, the line between what is and isn’t sex is very blurry. Everyone has their own boundary definitions of what feels comfortable, exciting, and scary. There’s no need to rush things.
Verdict: Just like with Mormons (and other religions), if you were brought up in a religion, you might be upholding those values for reasons that have nothing to do with your own belief structure. Often, it’s more about avoiding being labelled a slut than it is about maintaining your relationship with God.
When else is sex not sex?
Let’s salute the creative solutions for satisfying horniness, while not technically breaking the rules. There’s bagpiping and thigh jobs, grinding and handjobs, and of course, mutual masturbation. It turns out there’s actually a lot of sexual activity you can get up to without penetration.
Wherever you draw your boundaries, you can use sexual energy for pleasure. But where do you draw the line between sex and not sex?
Verdict: Fantasies, porn, and erotic literature can all be wonderful outlets for sexual energy that don’t put you at risk of exposure to STIs or pregnancy. But even those activities cross the line for some people, further illustrating that there’s more going on than simply biology. Some faiths feel these activities still count as sex. Some partners also feel these activities cross the line into cheating.
Cheaters: don’t even THINK about it!
Is it cheating if you’re fantasising about someone else? What about if you just think someone’s sexy? What if you’ve deeply emotionally bonded but haven’t acted on anything? Where exactly is the line?
Like with most things, we often have a good idea of what is definitely overstepping the boundaries, or definitely fine, but we get a bit hazy as we approach the boundary. Ultimately, these lines are not universal, though they may be very rigidly upheld and privately believed to be obvious.
Verdict: Clear communication about expectations and desires, right from the start, goes a long way to preventing harm.
In monogamy, we generally agree that sexual infidelity counts as cheating. However, finding out that your partner lost interest in you a year ago and has been imagining you’re someone else that whole time can’t feel good. Hiding behind the excuse that you never had sex outside the relationship may not be the loophole you think it is.
It’s not cheating if you’re poly
Ok, wow, this one comes up a lot in poly circles. Usually, but not always, men will want poly or open relationships so that they can have carte blanche to hook up with whoever they want, whenever they want, without any accountability whatsoever. Some will even have the gall to demand their partners not do the same. Even poly relationships are susceptible to cheating.
Men are rarely taught to communicate or even to detect boundaries. Women are often taught to be hypervigilant about these things, and this combination of opposite teaching is explosive. Men tend to work under a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ framework, and women tend to expect seeking permission before acting.
But it comes from a normalised viewpoint.
Verdict: The way cis-hetero-monogamist-patriarchy tends to be taught supports enforced loyalty. There’s a code.
When you agree to be together, you are agreeing to a whole set of unspoken rules that people consider to be known and consistent, even though they often are not. These rules include the idea that couples can make demands of their partners that their partners must obey. As soon as you step out of that reality, there’s a steep learning curve to sort out how to behave ethically.
It’s not cheating if you don’t break up the family
Another common one is the idea that cheating doesn’t count if you pay someone to have sex with you. Not everyone feels that way, but especially in Japan, paying for sex is a loophole that is generally accepted. In fact, Japan has a whole other take on cheating in general since marrying for love is much less common there than in the anglosphere.
“Those who come together in passion stay together in tears.” — Japanese proverb
Meanwhile in France, less than half of the population thinks cheating is morally unacceptable. Both of these cultures, and many others as well, have an approach to marriage that connects clans or solidifies long-standing family alliances.
Italy has a similar way of looking at it with the concept of the Gumare and the whole don’t ask, don’t tell mentality that surrounds it.
Verdict: In many cultures, leaving your spouse becomes so much bigger than a fleeting romance, so it is more commonly understood that these things happen and don’t necessarily have to threaten the marriage, family, or community around them. But whether that’s wrong or right really depends on your way of looking at it.
It’s not gay if…
Speaking of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” if you’re a man who has sex with other men, that is generally considered to be gay.
However, that definition has a loophole. It is not unheard of for someone to think that you’re not gay if you’re the one topping. (Topping generally refers to the person taking a more active, penetrative sexual role ie. Fucking vs getting fucked.) You see a lot of that mentality in prison and other male-dominated environments.
This line of thinking gave birth to a whole genre of memes of the 2000s that start with “It’s not gay unless/if…”
“It’s not gay unless balls are touching.”
“It’s not gay if it’s on the moon.”
This was such a thing that epidemiology researchers started studying “men who have sex with men” in the HIV/AIDS epidemic because there were so many men having sex with men who didn’t identify as gay or bi.
Verdict: It really speaks to the lack of acceptance still present in the world when men who actively have sex with other men can’t bring themselves to accept that they might be a little gay.
Ultimately, this all stems from misogyny. When you consider men to be better than women, and women to be receivers in sex, it’s only natural that you would then consider a receptive role to be feminine, and therefore more gay, than a penetrative role.
The Virginal Purity Loophole
One way that people used to, and in some places still do, check for sexual “purity” was by making sure the hymen was intact.
This method, though carrying heavy consequences, is far from foolproof. Your hymen can “break” or tear from overexertion in exercise or things like horseback riding or even just using a tampon. Some people are born without a hymen entirely!
Despite these problems, it has been used to make decisions about a woman’s purity. And the myth of it being solely linked to virginity is misleading, at best. Virginity originally didn’t even have anything to do with sex.
Verdict: The word virgin comes from Latin virgo, which is a maiden or unmarried woman. In Greece, Artemis and Athena were virgin goddesses who were untethered to men. Even Mary, Jesus’s mother, is always referred to as a virgin, but the word took on a meaning that does not reflect sexual experience.
The original Hebrew word that was translated to virgin actually just meant a young woman. All of this hype about virginity, surprise surprise, doesn’t reflect what we’re told it reflects.
Do loopholes ever actually work?
No, not really. Not in these situations, at least.
Relying on loopholes to get you out of trouble, especially when you know you’re violating agreements, is inherently disrespectful and often gets you into more trouble.
It communicates that…
- You think the other person or people involved are too dumb to notice
- You think rules don’t apply to you (red flag!)
- You’re not cognitively or emotionally capable of handling the situation you’re in.
That last one is especially important to notice.
Even if they “work” in the moment, they don’t tend to work long term. Exploiting others causes a lot of harm.
Sure, these things are funny to point at from afar, and can be intoxicatingly exciting to exploit in the moment, but they point to something deeper. If you ever find yourself seriously considering making use of any of these loopholes, maybe ask yourself: What are you trying to avoid, and why do you need to hide behind a flimsy excuse?