Sex Lives of College Mormons

Tucked away in the sacred mountains of Utah County, in a city founded by the hands of their ancestral pioneers, college Mormons are having weird sex. Or so I was told?

In 2022, someone leaked BYU students’ sexy secret across Twitter: they have found ways to have sex without having sex. One of the first posts responded to a rumor that there was an outbreak of the STI colloquially known as crabs—but specifically an outbreak of armpit crabs. “There was an outbreak of armpit crabs at BYU. Sit with me for a moment, and think about how that happened. Have a good day y’all,” the post pushed. A whole dialect of sex terms sprung up in response to the rumor, including “soaking,” “jump-humping,” knee-pit sex, and armpit sex, of course (I don’t need to describe what those mean—look them up or just use your imagination). TikTok users, red with laughter, jiggled their roommate’s beds to simultaneously simulate sex and prevent the act itself. Others mused what else will these silly Mormons come up with?

This was news to me and so many BYU students. I remember scrolling past one of those TikToks, confused by the neanderthalic jocks squeaking beds with tears streaming down their jeering faces, and realizing they were talking about me and my peers. A countless number of my friends who are not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and who do not go to BYU just had to ask if it was all true. Honestly, I have no idea whether this “weird sex,” as coined by the wider zeitgeist, is happening at BYU. Honestly, it is none of my business.

What I do know is that making a mockery of the sex lives of college Mormons makes me weary. To infantilize BYU students and their sex lives makes me tired. I am dismayed that Twitter thinks Mormons are sitting in a sexual desert with ignorance, abstinence, and stupidity their only friends. The chaos of social media this past year has eclipsed the wider problem: members of the LDS Church and BYU students, submerged in the tricky rhetoric surrounding sex—chastity, premarital sex, sexual sin, pornography, ultimate transgression—coming to terms with their sexual needs and sex lives. 

I think I knew the word chastity before I knew the word sex. “Chastity is sexual purity,” according to the 1990 edition of For the Strength of Youth. To be chaste, you must not have sexual relations before marriage, of course, but you must also have “clean” thoughts, words, and actions. The flimsy pamphlet—that my leaders told me I should bind to my heart and have with me always as if a physical expression of the Holy Ghost—warned that this sexual impurity and any form of “arousal” would ultimately taint my future goals to be married in the LDS temple and to have a family eternally. In other words, resist puberty for the sake of your soul and your future marriage! I was twelve and more concerned about whether I should still like Barbies.

In high school, I despised our almost monthly chastity lessons. I, like so many others, was warned about pornography before knowing what it was in Young Women’s, planting seeds of suspicion surrounding my body and other bodies. In seminary classes, well-intentioned but undeniably creepy leaders pleaded with us to make eye contact and participate in the discussions around acceptable kissing. In stake meetings, as rowdy groups of teens, we were told we were like a chewed piece of gum if we had premarital sex, unable to regain the perfection of abstinence despite Christ’s gospel of forgiveness. Alma 39:5 echoed in our minds, declaring sexual sin “most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost.” And then they sent us off with a piece of candy—as if that could combat the raging hormones of adolescents—and a new fear of God’s most wonderful creation.

Now, let’s drop all of those teens in a fishbowl. A fishbowl? A simulation? A private university? Yes, a private university where a requirement to attend is literally: “Live a chaste and virtuous life, including abstaining from any sexual relations outside a marriage between a man and a woman.” Once a year, we must meet with our bishops—your average men dressed in suits for confidence—and declare that we don’t have sex in order to continue learning about supply and demand, genome mapping, and Renoir. A perfect derivative from our childhood chastity lessons. Smeared on top of that requirement, a crisco frosting sweating after years of cultural relevance, is an intense pressure to get married and I guess the only chaste way to have sex.

There is some strange, thick silence around physical intimacy at BYU, like the smog that sits below the clouds in Utah separating us from the peaks of our mountains. I was so embarrassed to admit I had a crush my freshman year: a boy in my calculus class with glasses and an affinity for math and Vampire Weekend (essential parts of my identity at the time). It didn’t feel chaste to have a crush. My first kiss at BYU was secretive, and I made it clear that I was not into PDA on campus and around my friends, a standard I kept up with every successive crush. I didn’t want anyone to see me with them on campus. It didn’t feel chaste to show PDA. I attended lectures on consent. No one came. It didn’t feel chaste to talk about consent let alone intimacy.

And then there is the shame, the darkness beneath the smog. When discussing intimacy with romantic interests, they often ask me if I am a “good Mormon” or not. Huh? Like our chastity lessons defined a black and white set of morals around intimacy instead of just a prescription for guilt and shame. I hear too often how BYU students hide behind the language of chastity to transplant their own guilt onto their romantic partners. Or, even to deny the need for consent. If we’re both “good Mormons,” then we’re on the same page. And if we’re both “bad Mormons,” then we’re on the same page. Right? Wrong.

So, what does this all have to do with armpit sex? I don’t want to make this a sob story about myself or the average BYU student. That is exactly what the self-proclaimed BYU sex-as-a-sport commentators on Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit have done. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. Well, at least, I’m figuring things out. We’re all figuring things out here at BYU. Here are the problems:

1. They don’t actually care about us. 

Utah is trending. On TikTok, “#utah” has 16.6 billion views and “#byu” has 1.5 billion views. While many of those videos are about nature hikes, natural springs, and secret bars around Utah Valley, the ones about sex are just so tempting. They are the best click-bait for people who are fascinated about the conservative space that is Utah and that is BYU. They only confirm the rumors about the “oppressed” BYU students, simultaneously scratching the itch of forbidden voyeurism. And then these videos package the issue—the chastity lessons, the “chewed gum” stories, the awkward Bishop meetings, the secrecy, the shame—as a joke. It’s just so funny. Isn’t it? No, I don’t think it’s that funny because the viewers, the tweeters, and the TikTok stars are not invested in our story; they are invested in the joke.

2. The joke disqualifies unusual or unique expressions of sexuality.

I guess since it’s not “real” sex, they can joke about it. Heavens no! As I watch those videos and read those tweets about my experience at BYU, I really watch them narrow and narrow the definition of sex and the expression of sexuality. What’s disturbing is that these commentators have fallen into the same trap as the LDS Church: conflating sex with vaginal penetration by a penis. This conflation reeks of heteronormativity, homophobia, and the very sexual repression social media has tied with the BYU experience (four fingers pointed back at them!). These jokes have invalidated any NCMO (non-committal make-out), soaking, and any other sexual go-arounds important to the BYU experience, hammering in the shame and guilt that seeps from their own coming-of-age stories likely similar to mine.

I fear that this new source of shame will exacerbate the silence around sex and sexuality. In 2007, Gordon B. Hinckley, prophet of the LDS Church at the time, spoke at a BYU devotional about chastity, concluding, “Understand that you are being chased. Satan is chasing after you, and you had better run as fast as ever you can.” Now, social media is chasing after us, and I bet we are going to run even faster. I worry that conversations about sexuality will stop; that religious shame will fuse with secular embarrassment with intense atomic potential; and BYU students’ sex lives will remain a joke.

3. They’re creating a dangerous environment here in Provo.

When different expressions of sexuality are invalidated, then different types of assault are invalidated. What happens to consent in the context of armpit sex and soaking when they are treated like jokes? What happens after a traumatic NCMO when it is considered non-sex? Will survivors be denied the language of help and consent usually applied to traumatic sexual experiences? Will their trauma be discounted as long as it is labeled “non-sex” or made into a joke?

It’s scary to think of the ways in which people could manipulate sexual experiences and deny accountability. It’s scary to think of the disbelief and dismissal that will greet survivors of a variation of assault outside of heteronormative intimacy. It’s even scarier to think of the ways this could affect queer students at BYU who are already pushed underground by the institution and the culture. To infantilize BYU students is to deny potential assault, to discount past trauma, and to stunt survivors’ healing.

Now, let me tell you a story, and let me preface it: the story is why I wrote this essay. For a second, I had hope that the world beyond Provo actually wanted to understand these problems. I had hope that someone cared about us, even our feeble attempts to reconcile with our pasts and the eerie feeling that the Honor Code is somehow personified and omnipresent. I was wrong.

In the fall of 2022, Prodigal Press received a thrilling email inviting our gaggle of “spunky, young journalists” to work with a prominent national magazine. It was our first big gig, our first time interacting with a newspaper larger than ABC4 or the Salt Lake Tribune (just Google us for proof), our first time going national! Assigned to head the project, I contacted the author spearheading the article on consent across college campuses. Pacing outside the Wilkinson Center, I spoke with her about the tension surrounding sex, sexuality, and consent at BYU for about thirty minutes. I was so excited that someone had taken interest in our existence, not just the gimmicky TikToks and weird sex accusations.

I can’t remember if she was actually engaged when I blabbed—or poured my heart out, really—about sex, consent, and BYU; there were a couple of grunts and what I took as verbal nods. Maybe no questions, but at least some grunts, right?

And then she explained the project to me. The goal was to gauge what consent looks like among college students. To do so, I would need to find BYU students hours after (the sooner the better) having a “sexual encounter” and have them fill out a Google Form about the experience. She said the project purposely left the term “sexual encounter” ambiguous. Then I would snap a picture of them against a white backdrop and provide their full name to the newspaper. She said her team would be ecstatic if I could find just one or two BYU students to do it. Queer students? Even better.

After calling five people to explain this awesome, amazing, unbelievable opportunity, the bubble popped. What in the world is a “sexual encounter?” Could I even ask BYU students about anything more than kissing? How in the heck would I find someone to interview? Corner people making out in the library? Wait outside of the dry bar Afuego Fridays? Lurk in the parking lot of Classic Fun Center? Could a Google Form capture the nuance of consent? Why did the pictures have to look like mugshots? And the big one: would my interviewees get kicked out of BYU?

It fizzled. I fizzled. Actually, the whole project fizzled—to the best of my knowledge. When I looked at the magazine’s website and searched “consent,” I found just a handful of The Sex Lives of College Girls weekly summaries. In my last email to the writer, I asked if I could interview a married student since he was the only person who felt comfortable participating in the project. She said, regretfully, that that was not the demographic they were looking for. She proposed that BYU students could use pseudonyms. Still, their mugshots would hang on the website, indicative of their offense against God’s university. Maybe even God?

I cannot speak to the writers’ intentions with me and BYU (I would love an article about consent across American universities), but I can speak to how I felt. And I felt silly. I felt invalidated. I felt small. It was not a matter of being seen but a matter of voyeurism—the sex lives of BYU students an infantilized joke. 

Again, it doesn’t matter if our weird sex is actually happening. That’s not the point. In fact, I am proud of us BYU students for exploring our sexuality that “God … planted in [our] bosoms … to promote [our] happiness and union,” as LDS leader Parley P. Pratt expressed, and not succumbing to the fear of the Honor Code, of the Law of Chastity, and of God taught to us as children. I am proud that even as social media and the actual media breathe down our necks, invalidating our sexual education and experiences, we persist. 

Since the fall, the TikToks and the tweets started and ended. I ghosted the newspaper writers. My romantic flings petered off, and my friends got engaged. Whispers of sexual assaults floated around my peers. Pizza parties at the Title IX office continued. Temple pictures still decorate Mutual profiles. For all I know, weird sex is still happening. Nothing much has changed. And as I write these last paragraphs, I guess my frustration has begun to fade.