Dry humping: everything you need to know

What is dry humping also called dry sex or frottage is a way of mimicking sex. It happens when two people rub their bodies or genitals together often with their clothes on. 

The friction of your genitals against your body or against your partner’s own genital causes sexual stimulation and can lead to orgasm. 

Penis to penis rubbing is often referred to as “frot”

Is dry humping considered sex?

People connect the word sex to the meaning that feels right to them based on culture, personal values and experiences. 

For many people, having sex involves penetration. For others sex also includes oral sex. For yet others, sex covers all activities involving the stimulation of sexual organs, including masturbation and dry humping.

Regardless of personal interpretation, one thing should be clear to everybody; any direct stimulation of the sexual organs that is intended to cause arousal and that could lead to orgasm is a sexual activity.

Dry humping with clothing on is certainly less intense than some activities involving genitals but it is still a sexual act. 

After all, rubbing your genitals on your partner’s body in order to induce arousal, sometime to the point of reaching orgasm cannot be dismissed as an innocent exchange of affection. It is a lot more intimate than that. 

Can I get pregnant from dry humping? 

It is extremely unlikely 

A woman risks getting pregnant if sperms enters her vagina.

If you and your partner dry hump with your clothes on, even if he ejaculates while rubbing his penis against your body, the probability that his sperm will travel through two layers of clothing and enter your vagina is practically zero. 

Even if your boyfriend has only underwear on and you can feel some wetness in the material after he ejaculates, the chances that sperm through the underwear and manage to enter your vagina while you are rubbing against each other are again close to zero. 

If you rub against each other without your clothes on and your boyfriend ejaculates, then you might be exposed to some risk. 

This would be especially true if rather than immediately cleaning your body to remove your boyfriend’s cum or sperm, you continue kissing and touching and rubbing against each other. 

In fact, if the semen remains on your bodies, there is a chance that it will drip down to your genitals and find a way into your vagina. The probability of this event is very low but it is possible. 

The best way to remove this kind of risk is to clean yourself immediately after your boyfriend ejaculates to remove any traces of cum or sperm. 

In addition, have your partner pee to stop the flow of semen completely. This way he will avoid the risk of leaking some post orgasmic semen.

Can I get any disease from dry humping? 

It depends on whether or not you use a barrier between your body and your partner’s 

Given that sexually transmitted infections(stis) are passed by skin to skin contact or by the exchange of blood and other body fluids, if you dry hump with some sort of barrier between your bodies, the risk of spreading diseases is close to none. 

However, if there is no barrier and the genital areas are rubbed against each other directly, the risk of getting infected by an STI is actually fairly high even if there is no penetration.

In fact, when it comes to several diseases, like HPV, genital herpes and genital warts, skin to skin contact is more than enough to pass the disease.