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.
