SEX IN THE CITY

Emma-Louise Boynton ponders the rise and rise of voluntary celibacy

Thanks to the proliferation of dating apps serving up a seemingly endless platter of potential hook-ups, it’s never been easier to have casual sex. More so, to specify what kind of sex you seek. Kink-friendly dating app Feeld, for example, includes a ‘desires’ section for interests beyond Sunday roasts and travel.

Alongside the post-pandemic surge in sex parties, which have swiftly gone from niche to mainstream, some suggest we’re living through a sexual revolution. Have sex with who you want, when you want, in whatever relationship structure works for you… and for God’s sake, don’t feel bad about it. But is this true sexual freedom?

While I’ve been striving to overcome my own intimacy issues (read: shame! Sexual trauma! A disconnection from my body!) through sex therapy, to have more and better sex, a growing number of (mainly) Gen Zers have been taking a different tack: abstinence.

Long associated with religious doctrine, celibacy has had a serious rebrand — largely thanks to social media. #Celibacy has 119m views on TikTok, revealing a stream of videos featuring young, often cool proselytisers lauding the myriad benefits of forgoing sex. And while some are in the religious category, many focus on abstinence as a tool for self-improvement.

Drew Barrymore, the latest celeb to publicly recommend celibacy, recently wrote that in abstaining from sex she has ‘the honour… to actually work on myself’.

‘In a world in which sex has become so casual, so disconnected that it’s now a race to the bottom as to who can care less,’ a friend recently said to me, ‘I can understand why people are just avoiding it altogether.’

Still, I can’t help but feel cynical in the face of this rebrand and the sexual moralism that seems latently, if not overtly, imbued in much of the discourse surrounding it. After all, women have never fared well in the face of sexual puritanism.

Perhaps sexual freedom is not to be found in more casual, emotionally disconnected sex, but surely we needn’t make a virtue (again) of avoiding it altogether?

After several months of involuntary celibacy myself, I have felt neither enlightened nor spiritually recharged, just increasingly desperate to get laid. But maybe I’m missing the point.

Got a sex question? Email Emma-Louise at Emma-Louise.Boynton@standard.co.uk

“Women have never fared well in the face of sexual puritanism”