Draft:Shallowing

Shallowing is a technique used to increase stimulation of the clitoris in vaginal penetrative sex, involving penetrative touch from either lips, a tongue, a penis or sex toy inside the entrance of the vagina. It was first named in a 2021 study aiming to close the heterosexual orgasm gap.

The study, which was funded by the intimate health company behind sex education website OMGYes which works with sex researchers and was published in Plos One, used data from over 3,000 women in the US to learn what discoveries they had made to make sex more enjoyable. Interviews were then analysed and the names of the four most mentioned techniques were coined: angling, rocking, shallowing and pairing.

84% of women surveyed reported using shallowing. A majority of women had done shallowing with a penis tip (67.1%) or with a tongue or lips (69.7%) in order to make penetration more stimulating, whereas smaller proportions had used it with a fingertip (60.4%) or a sex toy (37.8%).

Dr Devon Hansel, one of the study's co-authors, told the BBC that "sex research as a field has been around for well over 100 years and it was really incomprehensible to us as researchers that there were not names for these things. And when something is unnamed, it almost becomes unspeakable."