The other day my wife and I overheard our son use the term “rawdogging” in an absolutely inappropriate context, and we were like, “No! That’s not what that means! You can’t go around saying that!” It quickly reminded us of Harrison Ford in Bill Lawrence’s Apple TV+ series, Shrinking. There’s a running bit on the show where he frequently uses the term incorrectly, like when Christa Miller’s character storms into his office and yells at him, and he tells her to “stop rawdogging me.”
It’s a funny recurring bit, but now Gen Z has turned this recurring bit into a reality. From The Guardian:
Around this time last year, rawdogging – originally slang for sex without a condom – wasn’t the sort of word you would hear in polite conversation or find in the pages of the Guardian and the BBC. Now, it’s everywhere and being used, largely by gen Z, for the most innocuous situations. Drink black coffee? You’re rawdogging caffeine! Don’t drink coffee at all? You’re rawdogging your mornings! Just finished a nine-hour flight with no entertainment but the flight map? Bro, you rawdogged travel … The trend for rawdogging flights, which started getting attention earlier this summer, has propelled the term into the mainstream.
You can’t just rawdog the English language! Sexual slang has meaning. Now, what are we supposed to call rawdogging? Oh yeah: Didn’t we used to call it “bareback”? Well, we must have stolen that from equestrianism, so I guess Gen Z can steal rawdogging from its appropriate place in the English lexicon, as well.