Celibacy is, as you may have heard, all the rage now. Call it “boysober,” call it “decentering men,” call it the focus of countless trend pieces. All I know is: it’s in.
It is an interesting phenomenon for me, personally, to observe because — well, I guess you could say that I’m a trendsetter. Back in early 2020 I stopped having sex, initially because the combination of a pandemic and medically vulnerable parents made hooking up feel to risky, and then because… it just became easier, I guess. I stopped wanting to date men, and none of the women I wanted to date were interested in dating me. I’m not exactly celibate at the moment — I broke my sexless streak in late 2022 and have had some off and on things (usually more off than on) since then — but I’m also not exactly sexually active. (Nor am I particularly bothered about any of it.)
And yet. What is strange to me, as a bi woman of celibacy experience, is how this celibacy conversation is so… straight. “Boysober” is, of course, an obvious tell — the problem isn’t sex so much as men. The recent piece from The Cut about the celibacy trend makes the hetero — and specifically hetero woman — aspect of the supposed trend clear: the only not straight woman to make the list of celibate celebs is Lenny Kravitz, and when queer/bi women come up in the piece, it’s almost as an, ahem, antidote to celibacy. Celibates, we’re told, might actually just be closeted lesbians; when bi women are embracing celibacy, they’re really just doing a rejection of men.
I think the thing that weirds me out here is the assumption of some purity of queer sex. Celibacy is for the straight women, because why would women who have sex with women want to swear off sex, right? And on the one hand, my celibacy has largely been driven by an abandonment of hetero dating and sex; the fact that I’m not having sex with women is more a fact of… well, as I said above, the women I want to date not wanting to date me.
And yet.
As a bi woman, I am well aware of all the ways that dating women is, well, not necessarily a step up from dating men. I am well aware of all the ways that dating can be unhealthy because we as people are unhealthy — and that simply moving into a queer space isn’t going to fix everything.
If celibacy is to be embraced, it needs to be embraced as something everyone can benefit from — not a rejection of men or “toxic masculinity” or even the tired tropes of hetero dating, but as an embrace of the self. As a reevaluation of one’s own needs. As a way of seeing what it means to be a person when there is no desire reaffirming that you exist. A way of understanding that, beautiful and wonderful as sex can be, it is only those things when we have a healthy relationship to it — and that having an unhealthy relationship to sex is hardly the domain of straight women, or women who have sex with men, alone.
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