‘Shallowing’ Is A Sex Trend. Here’s What It Is

You may have seen the term “shallowing” making the rounds on social media recently. But asking Google AI to define the term returned the following: “’shallowing’ can refer to a specific sexual act or a golf swing technique.” Those two different definitions could cause some trouble since you typically don’t want to mix up things that you do in bed with things that you do on a golf course. So, assuming that many TikTokers haven’t for some reason decided to work on their golf swings, let’s go deeper into what shallowing in the sex context means.

What is ‘Shallowing’

“Shallowing” is when you literally go shallow during sex. No, this doesn’t mean that you play that “Shallow” song from the movie A Star Is Born over and over again on loop while making love. It also doesn’t mean having shallow conversations during sex such as frequently asking, “What have you been up to” or “Nice weather we’re having, right” in the heat of things.

Instead, shallowing as a sex act is about staying just around the entrance of the vagina as opposed to going in any further and deeper. When shallowing, you may not even penetrate into the vaginal canal at all or at most stay within just the first few centimeters of the canal. This can apply to basically anything that might be in that neighborhood whether it’s a finger, tongue, penis, vibrator, dildo shaped like Darth Vader or whatever else you may be using for your bedroom rodeo. As you can imagine, shallowing can apply to many different kinds of sex too, ranging from an amorous congress of more than one to making a purchase on the iPad, which by the way is a euphemism for masturbation.

Shallowing May Bring More Pleasure

Speaking of vibrators, shallowing has been getting quite a lot of buzz recently on TikTok and other social media platforms mainly because of its ability to heighten pleasure while you are having your corn ground, which is a euphemism for sex. A survey of 3017 American women showed just that, as described by a publication in PLOS ONE back in 2021. A team from Indiana University (Devon J. Hensel) and For Goodness Sake, LLC, (Hensel, Christiana D. von Hippel, Charles C. Lapage and Robert H. Perkins) conducted that survey. And for goodness sake, around 84% of the survey respondents reported using shallowing to make vaginal sex more pleasurable.

A deeper look into this survey and publication shows that shallowing is not some new fangled, Gen Z-only thing. The survey was from almost half-a-decade ago and the respondents ranged in age from 18 to 93 years. So, Boomers may be using it to go boom-boom. GenXers may be feeling it marks the spot. And Millennials may be saying, “I can even” to it. It’s not as if people only recently realized, “Oh, gee you don’t always have to go as deep as possible?” Although it is not completely clear when exactly the term shallowing was first coined.

Shallowing Leverages The Many Nerve Endings Near The Vaginal Opening

The pleasure of shallowing arises from the fact that the entrance to your vagina has a lot of nerve. Make that a lot of nerve endings, many more than deeper inside your vagina itself. And if you want sexual pleasure, you’ve got to get on your body’s nerves, so to speak, meaning activating the right ones that will send “this is good, this is real good” signals to your brain. The clitoris certainly qualifies as one of those body parts if you can find it, as I wrote in Forbes back in 2022. But so do other parts of the vulva.

The vulva is the external part of female genitalia, the part that can be seen between the legs when you are viewing from the outside. It’s what many people without X-ray vision mistakenly refer to as a vagina when they are actually seeing no more than the opening to the vagina. The vagina is actually the internal canal that leads from this opening to the cervix. The cervix is what connects the vagina with the uterus.

The nerve endings mean that the right type of stimulation can go a long way, with an emhpasis on the words “right type.” This doesn’t mean that you should push those areas like you would buttons on an elevator or your smartphone when you’ve found a match on Tinder. A study published in 2014 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine tried light touch, pressure and vibration on different external body parts of thirty different healthy women, who ranged in age from 18 and 35 years. It found that for light touch the most sensitive areas were the vaginal margin along with the neck and forearm, which by the way are nowhere near the vagina. The vaginal margin is where the vagina meets the vulva.

Shallowing Can Build Anticipation

Another reason that shallowing can be more pleasurable is that it plays around with perhaps the biggest and most sensitive sexual organ of them all. No, not that one. I’m talking about your brain, that thing that helps you take selfies. Psychologically, staying shallow versus going deep can have very different meanings. The latter can feel like going all the way in more ways than one. Therefore, shallowing can be a teasing maneuver that builds up anticipation, sort of like walking around a dessert table a bunch of times. It can be a prep phase to going deeper. Or you could keep things at a shallow level.

Shallowing Can Help When You Are Not Ready For Deeper Penetration

Finally, shallowing can be a good option if you find more penetrative sex to be painful or otherwise uncomfortable. Dyspareunia is the medical term for any type of painful intercourse. Many different things in and around the pelvis and even further above can lead to dyspareunia. When the issue involves the vaginal canal such as dryness there or a mismatch between the size and shape of the canal and the size and shape of whatever you are trying to put in the canal, shallowing can help avoid such problems.

When you are fearful of such discomfort, shallowing can also serve as a way of testing the waters or gradually easing into to things. It can allow you to slowly advance and see at what point you start running into difficulties. Also, the sexual stimulation from shallowing could itself help overcome the challenges if, for example, the issue is vaginal dryness.

And even if there should be no physical discomfort with deeper penetration, you could still not have enough emotional or psychological comfort with your partner. Or you could be one of those people who doesn’t want to go straight from dinner to jackhammer. Shallowing can serve as a gradual transition in such situations as well.

Shallowing In Golf Is Different

Now, if you are doing some swinging —meaning swinging a golf club—you may still be wondering about the other definition of shallowing as it applies to golfing. That type of shallowing refers to completely different parts of your body and is when you rotate your body and move your arms in ways that make the downswing part of a golf swing flatter. This can create better contact between the head of the golf club and the ball, which in turn can hit the ball a further distance. Again, this may not be something you want to try during sex since driving balls a further distance is likely not your primary goal in bed.

Forbes