noun
You may have come across this term on the internet and are wondering, “What is shrimping exactly?” Read on to find out the shrimping meaning, as well as shrimp slang, and everything else you ever wanted to know about this fetish and sexual practice.
Shrimping Definition
“Shrimping” is sexual slang for sucking a partner’s toes for sexual pleasure. It’s often associated with a foot or toe fetish, although those who engage in this practice, be they the one sucking their partner’s toes or the one having their toes sucked, are not necessarily engaging a foot fetish.
Partners have been known to combine toe-sucking with manual stimulation of their breasts and genitals, while the activity can be enjoyed as foreplay, leading to actual fucking, or enjoyed as a ‘cool down’ post intercourse.
Why It Feels So Good
For the receiver, toes have sensory nerve endings that respond to touch, pressure, and temperature. Attention to an area that rarely receives such specific contact, and certainly hardly ever of a sexual nature, can cause the sensations, physical as well as mental, to become arousing.
For the giver, much of the pleasure derived from this practice may come from an attraction to feet or toes, enjoying a partner’s reactions, or the intimacy of the experience.
While there isn’t a special “orgasm point” in the toes, usually, there are a whole host of possible sexual stimulations that can come from having your toes sucked.
Shrimping Slang Origin
The exact person or place that coined “shrimping” has never been firmly established, but the name has a straightforward explanation: in this sexual context, a person’s toes are being compared to small pink shrimp.
The most careful explanation is a visual nickname for toe-sucking, with documented early ties to John Waters. His 1981 memoir, Shock Value, discusses toe-sucking as “shrimping” in connection with his early films, and while this establishes an association of the word to underground film culture, it doesn’t prove definitively that Waters invented the word.
Shrimping urban dictionary style means, “to suck on someones toes for sexual gratification”, toesucking, “usually performed by a foot or toe fetishist.”
Shrimping in BDSM Play
For partners engaged in this practice — sucker and the suck-ee, as it were – it can be part of general foot worship activities, where attention to the dominant partner’s feet expresses admiration, service, or submission. The level of the BDSM element in shrimping, if there is indeed one, comes from how each partner defines their personal shrimping meaning,
As is true of all BDSM or kink activities, the definition of play is surely set and constantly updated by the partners participating in a non-vanilla sexual activity.
For example, a submissive partner might view shrimping as an act of devotion to a dominant partner who allows them such access to their toes. Others may incorporate this practice into consensual humiliation play, in that the dominant partner ‘forces’ (which the sub actually wants) their submissive to attend to their toes and feet in such a supplicant way. Although this manner of shrimping can involve sexual humiliation, humiliation in shrimping isn’t always inherent, even in a BDSM intimate power exchange context.
Roles can also vary here: the person receiving the attention isn’t necessarily dominant. Maybe the game here is that the person who is having their toes licked and sucked is again being ‘forced’ (with their consent again) to endure the activity.
The term/ describes the activity; it doesn’t automatically imply a particular power dynamic.
Although sucking and licking someone’s toes does appear as shrimping in Urban Dictionary, the activity should not be confused, as it often is with felching, which is the act of sucking sperm out of a person’s anus.
Not So Much What It Is… As Why We Do it
While we can definitively say what is shrimping, the reason why partners might engage in this activity can vary greatly from person to person, and sex play to sex play. And these reasons are what make shrimping or any other sexual activity we fantasize about or actually engage in, more interesting usually than even the activity itself.
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