My friends and I were at a party, sprawled around a table drinking wine, listening to a girl we didn’t know confidently proclaim her status as celibate. Openly and unabashedly she told us about the chaos her sexual encounters had brought her in the past. Now she had quit sex. Or, rather, she had quit the self-destructive choices she made when driven by sex. She wore her celibacy like a crown.
We nodded along to her words. We could all relate, on some level, to such an abstinence from — or indeed absence of — sex. But we didn’t talk about it in this self-assured, semi-politicized way; we didn’t hold it up to the light like this.
For me, as a 25-year-old woman, periods without sex come and go. They happen almost subconsciously, desire slipping beneath the surface, sinking to somewhere out of sight. I’ve been single for two years, following the end of a long, emotionally fraught but loving relationship in which I constantly craved sex. In its absence, space has opened up for new things and mostly I forget to want sex now. It isn’t entirely shocking to me that things have transpired this way, that the rhythm of my libido has changed, although I often feel — or am made to feel — that my lack of romantic and sexual endeavors is somehow abnormal. A young woman, surely, should be saturated with an abundance of sex, dating and relationships.
And so, after enough time has passed since the last time, a kind of social pressure to sleep with someone starts to accumulate. I resist it for long stretches, until I eventually acquiesce. It’s a familiar pattern: I download the dating apps again; I swipe half-heartedly, I trepidatiously go on a date. It’s a process detached from real desire, my hand guided by that of external pressure. The last time I slept with someone, it happened this way. By the second date I’d realized I actively didn’t like the man I’d met on Hinge, that he was somewhat patronizing, our conversations already stilted. Still, I felt I had to persist through the date, to turn it around somehow, that maybe it was me who was misreading the room. He came back to mine, I made him noodles and we had unsatisfying sex. I’d felt pressured — not by him entirely, but by this intangible weight, external and internal all at once — that I couldn’t back out. After that we didn’t see each other again.
Going from having sex when you’re in love to this is, of course, a disappointment. Those other few and far between dates I’ve been on this way are, by and large, mediocre or bad. There was the guy who invited me to his art show and quite literally didn’t talk to me, the one who started getting high before he’d even sat down for a drink and the one who told me I wasn’t allowed in his apartment with my clothes on. Compounded as they are with all kinds of social tensions, they’re a pressure cooker for bad choices. I find them hard to leave and even harder to say no to when they go further. I’m left feeling out of control, like I’m the passenger, rather than the driver, in a fast-moving car. I have to sit back and endure the ride until it’s over. Online dating had become a tick-box exercise for me, so that the next time someone asked “Are you dating?” I could give some kind of answer. Because it felt shameful somehow to have nothing to say.
Perhaps I’ve been unlucky, although the overwhelming cultural mood of dating app fatigue would suggest otherwise. According to a Forbes health survey, 79 per cent of Gen Z say they have dating app burnout. “It’s quite easy to have sex if you want to have sex,” Mira*, 26, who hasn’t been having sex for the past year, tells me, “but we’re tired of the abundance of options that actually aren’t worth your time. There are so many people on there [dating apps], but also nobody at all.”
A Psychology Today survey found that one in six American women are celibate by choice. I see it this way: there are people who desire to frequently date and have sex, and those whose desire is spontaneously sparked when a compatible person presents themselves. Yet we’ve been led to believe that we all belong to the former camp, that we should all be constantly in pursuit. By the same logic, it follows that there are multiple kinds of celibate: those very sexually active people who abstain from sex to cure an overcentralized, or even unhealthy, relationship with sex; the religious or spiritually celibate; and those whose interest in sex and dating simply wanes and fluctuates. For people in that last group, sometimes celibacy just happens.
“Celibate folks are a pretty diverse group in terms of why they’ve chosen to give up sex for a while,” says Dr Justin Lehmiller, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, who believes right now that culture is feasting on the “sex sober” arc of celibacy. In other words, going from having lots of sex to going cold turkey. Reflecting this is Melissa Febos’s much talked about new memoir, The Dry Season, which explores a year of sexual abstinence, a choice intended to radically alter a pattern of serial monogamy. In her state of celibacy, she observes those “high off the fumes of other people” — sex and seduction like a drug, celibacy something of a cure. Rules and regulations are needed, and Febos’s abstinence journey is punctuated by timelines: three weeks without sex, three months without sex and so on.
For the quietly sexless, no such measures are needed. Abstaining usually comes naturally to me and I don’t feel the need to define myself in relation to the frequency of the sex I’m having — or not having. Our cultural narrative around time and sex, in general, is peculiar; the last time we had sex carries so much social weight. “As women, we have phases where we don’t feel sexually active or available, that’s how our bodies work, but that’s not really part of the mainstream conversation,” says Andrea*, 25, from London. Meanwhile, Febos says, “By the time I crossed the nine-month mark … I no longer needed to set deadlines.” Perhaps constant sex is simply culturally learnt behavior.
This trend for celibacy follows on the heels of, and counteracts, a period when abundant female sex was considered a sign of gender equality. Take Samantha’s turbocharged sexuality in Sex and the City, or the female hook-up culture of the 2010s; we were led to believe, and in some ways still are, that sexual and feminist liberation equates to having lots of sex.
Post #MeToo, post Trump’s overturning of Roe v Wade, the illusion continues to crumble. “[Women feel] that sex is too risky in the wake of increasing restrictions on reproductive freedom,” Lehmiller says. More broadly, why are we so complacent about sex when it’s not equal, safe or pleasurable for huge numbers of people?
Stifled by the patriarchal nature of romance and sex, women in their scores are increasingly wary and even fearful of heterosexual relationships; heterofatalism (the academic Asa Seresin’s term to describe widespread disillusionment with straight dating and relationships, especially among women) reigns supreme.
Celibacy continues to gain mass appeal, with celebrities such as Julia Fox and Lenny Kravitz openly proclaiming their own. In a sharp shift from last year’s “Bumble fumble”, when the app chastised women’s celibacy, other dating apps like Feeld now openly promote it. “Since Feeld added celibacy as a Desire tag last year, members are claiming it just as they would any other preference or orientation,” the app says.
I’m fully behind these feminist choices and politics, and while I don’t want to claim the label of celibacy, I do understand the power of a name. “Choosing celibacy was a way of naming my problem, that there was a problem in my romantic patterns, and there was no going back from that,” Febos says.
Indeed, celibacy, named or unnamed, is reframing the script around sex, marking a shift among women towards independence and choice. Liberation might just look like making better, informed choices and setting firmer boundaries when it comes to sex, which is showing up culturally as less sex and more periods of celibacy. As Febos tells me, “Part of what resulted from my celibacy is a clearer relationship to consent — sexual and otherwise. I spent years compromising my own desires for those of others, including having sex that I wasn’t enthusiastic about. I came up with a name for it — empty consent.”
I can see that I too am culpable of empty consent and I would hazard a guess that most women are. Now I’ve stepped back, I can be more honest: I’d rather wait for a connection. It can be casual and inconsequential, but it should be truly of free will — and that doesn’t feel like a regressive step backwards to me.
Ruby Conway is a London-based art-and-culture writer
