Why do people who don’t need people think they’re the luckiest people in the world?
Celibacy Chic
Daniel, a 35-year-old artist from San Francisco, was talking: “I’d been having yet another affair that wasn’t going well. Isn’t it always that way for single people — that we sort of stagger through relationships? In the end you don’t really leave the person, you just drift away. Well, I finally decided to give sex a rest. The woman I’d been with loved to make it. That was the problem: except for wanting to do it with her, I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved at all.
“Four years ago, on Valentine’s Day, I decided, ‘This is it! I’ve got to stop letting my body, rather than my mind, be the boss. I’m going to try celibacy.’ I stayed over at my girlfriend’s house that night to help her celebrate the holiday, and that was the last time I made love. After that, I just stopped calling her.”
Daniel’s decision may seem callous, but he’d been thinking about breaking his “sexual habit” for eight years. “It’d become too much of a pattern: attraction, sex, and a relationship, followed by boredom.” During that time, he married twice and had a daughter, who is now five. “It’s just that I didn’t have the courage to give up sex. I thought you had to make love to fully enjoy someone.”
Today, Daniel says celibacy not only broadens his encounters with women but is actually bringing him more relationships with them. “Maybe it’s because I’ve told only two or three people that I’ve given up sex until I meet the person I’d want to spend the rest of my life with. But these women seem to know intuitively that I’m not ‘after them.’”
“The point is that you don’t have to thrash around in bed to have a great time. I’ve found I can get the same, almost orgasmic feeling by just seeing and listening to a good woman. And the best thing is that I can spend an entire evening with her without ever having to make a decision about whether we should go to bed.”
Daniel’s choice of celibacy is not unique. Interviewed by Penthouse, men and women of all ages (our respondents included persons aged 25 to 60) and from all walks of life report that they have decided to be celibate. A 1984 study of student attitudes at the University of Northern Iowa. in Cedar Falls, showed that only 44 percent of the students surveyed had had sex with someone they did not want to marry: ten years earlier. the figure was 69 percent. Sexual guilt is also on the rise. Compared to 1974, twice as many students — 44 percent instead of 22 percent — said they wished they hadn’t engaged in a sexual act.
What’s fueling today’s celibacy? The growing fear of sexually transmitted diseases showed up as a strong concern among those we interviewed. The threat of contracting AIDS was cited as a “significant factor” by a third of the women and a quarter of the men.
Stephen, who’s had venereal disease twice, feels hounded by the chance of catching herpes or AIDS. “I used to worry about slimy, ugly girls giving me the clap. Now it’s the attractive airline stewardesses who have herpes. Fucking anybody could screw me up for life!”
Not surprisingly, an emotional subject such as celibacy, about which few studies exist. is strewn with myths. Here are the most common ones:
Celibates hate sex. To the contrary, more than half of the celibates we interviewed had “very strong” sex drives. “I like men so much I am frequently horny,” says Jessica, an entertainer who has been celibate since 1980.
Significantly more women than men are celibate. About 40 percent of our respondents were men. Some women said more of their male friends than females are celibate.
Celibacy is a permanent lifestyle. Most celibates say they are simply being discriminating in their relationships. Given the chance and the right person, they usually expect to end their celibacy in a few years.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, psychosexual therapist and author of Good Sex, has found much the same thing. “As a permanent lifestyle, I don’t believe there’s a trend toward celibacy,” she told us. “Most people still want a significant sexual other person. But celibates should keep in mind that if they do start a new relationship, then they shouldn’t drag the memories of a past relationship into it.”
Celibacy may seem like a lonely, extreme way to live. But it can also relieve the pressures that accompany sexual relationships. For Glen, a 37-year-old musician from New York, “going solo,” as he terms it, means not only giving up sexual guilt. “The joy of celibacy isn’t only that it releases you from fulfilling the signals of women who want to be speared. It lessens potential jealousies, too. I can tell a woman friend that I’m going backpacking with so-and-so and not disappoint her.”
Glen has been celibate on and off for 13 years. “Mostly on,” he says. “Sure I get horny, but I can just masturbate. It’s better to masturbate than act on a sexual urge that is not based on friendship. That just creates problems later on.”
“When I’m celibate, I get affection in other ways. I have a lot of platonic relationships with women. When I want to be comforting, I hug them.” Four years ago, though, hugs weren’t enough for the woman Glen had been living with for a year. “I felt required to be sensitive to her sexual needs on a daily basis. It felt like a job — something I had to do. Now that I’m solo, the only person I’m responsible for is myself!”
But not all celibate men are enjoying it as easily as Daniel and Glen. “I miss sex, even though I’m trying to abstain from it,” admits David, a Chicago schoolteacher. “Sometimes I just miss the raw physical contact I used to have with women.”
David, 43, has been celibate for five years after ending a ten-year marriage to “a very voluptuous, sensual, earthy Jewish woman.” During the last year of the marriage, Dave and Stephanie’s sex life plummeted, with the result that the lean, heavily tanned mathematics instructor became impotent.
“I decided that I needed to focus my energy toward the creative part of myself instead of my physical side,” says David. “I became a master at controlling my urges, at channeling my energy away from any potential hunt for a new partner.”
Now revitalized, Dave has engaged in heavy petting and foreplay with two women in the last year. “It’s very satisfying,” he concedes, “but I also feel like a naughty child. It’s tantalizing, playful, and erotic. And weirdest of all, I feel more alive and energetic now that I’m experimenting with ending my celibacy than when I wasn’t allowing myself to touch women’s breasts.”
Our survey found that celibacy is, indeed, often accompanied by an increase in energy. About half of the men and nearly all of the women with whom we spoke said they felt more energized since giving up sex, while most of the others thought they had the same amount of stamina.
“I have more energy, and it’s a finer-tuned energy,” explains Timothy, a 25-year-old writer who grew up in Liverpool, England. He brushes his thick blond mane of hair in front of the mirror of his crowded apartment, then pulls out a scrapbook full of photos of musicians.
“It began when I was playing bass in this band. There was an unwritten code that you’d have more creative energy if you didn’t mess with the girls. Of course, not everybody obeyed this code. There were girls everywhere. I’m talking about total availability. One night, there were ten of us crammed into a room. I was curled up at the top of a bed, trying to get some sleep, while two guys and a girl were making it at the other end of the bed. Guess who was playing better the next day? Me.”
Still, the way our interviewees tell it, before they became celibate, sex was not so much wearing them out as rerouting their time and energy away from things they would have preferred to be doing. And it wasn’t just sex: It was all the effort spent in pursuing their purely physical quarries.
“If you’re constantly hungry,” adds Timothy, who has been celibate for two years, “all your time is spent looking for food. Well, sex was a kind of hunger for me. The more time went on, the more sex became messy and bothersome. Now, I can write or play music without having to worry about where my next lay will come from.”
The majority of the people we talked to also say sexual abstinence is having a calming affect on their lives. Unlike David, Timothy has no anxieties about missing fucking. “The real gift,” he thinks, “is that I’ve become more sensitive. For the first time in my life, I can relate to people without trying to get something back from them. I’m also less volatile and angry now.”
But for others, celibacy reflects their anger. “Burned” by persons of the opposite sex, they choose to shut out the world. Celibacy becomes their protective shield, but their sexual needs bubble inside. Celibacy, for them, is just another label for self-doubt and resentment.
“My sex life could have been better,” says Stephen, a 29-year-old Harvard graduate whose jet-black hair tops a face that could be mistaken for the late, ruggedly handsome actor Steve McOueen. Nevertheless, he”s been celibate for most of his life. “When I was in school, I refused to kiss anybody’s ass to get sex. There’s just too much hassle involved in hopping into the sack. When I do score, I feel like that’s the extent of it. So what? The way I see it — and how many men are willing to admit this? — there are two reasons to have sex: if I want to ejaculate and feel good, or to get someone pregnant. Either way, I may get sick.”
Will, meanwhile, has been celibate for nine of the last 12 years because of the false signals he says he gets from sex. “Kissing or cuddling can be deceptive,” explains the 30-year-old gardener from Wisconsin. “I get turned on, but it has nothing to do with the particular person I’m with. I get that way with anybody. The trouble is, it’s not only biological, it’s addictive, and that’s where you get into a mess.”
Other celibates may steer clear of sex because they need prior commitment, but Will, a short, stocky man with a receding hairline, fears that making love will actually lead to expectations of living together or marriage. “I’m not ready for that,” he says matter-of-factly, “and I don’t want to hurt someone by leading her on.”
Even so, he is now stuck in the quagmire of a relationship that has left him brooding with guilt. “It began a month ago, when my roommate introduced me to Margaret,” he says. “She started cuddling with me. Then I began feeling all cold inside, and told her I am celibate. She said, ‘It’s too bad you feel that way,’ and seemed to accept it. But I still feel like I’m letting her down.”
Will’s biggest problem is that he wants and needs to be held. He suffers from what is known in Transactional Analysis as “stroke hunger.” “I get strokes from my dog and two cats,” he says, “but they aren’t as giving as people.” The ramifications of not being touched enough are quite real: Will feels tense and depressed, and experiences frequent abdominal pain. But he&rsqup;s not willing to trade them for more guilt.
The decision to become celibate is not always a purely emotional response. “Sexual dysfunction can very often lead to celibacy,” says Deena Andrews, a certified sexologist and surrogate partner in Oakland, California. Two-thirds of her clients are single men. “Most of them,” she says, “feel they aren’t functioning well enough to go into a relationship.”
“Premature ejaculation and nonerection are the most frequently reported problems. They see me first because they don’t want to see a urologist. They fear a urologist might tell them they’ll never get hard again. They don’t want to hear that they prefer to believe their problem is psychological.”
Most of her male celibates “talk about staying away from forming a relationship. Some feel that if they need an outlet, they can go to a [prostitute] at a massage parlor. The women, on the other hand, stay away from sex and relationships at the same time.”
Women become celibate, says Andrews, “most often because they’ve become hurt in a relationship. But some women have met rejection because of past [sexual] performance. Women can have performance anxieties, too!”
Men, though, “are more likely to become celibate a substantial percentage of the time because they are reacting to the fact that they have a sexual problem,” says psychologist Daniel Goldstine, who founded the sex therapy clinic at the University of California at Berkeley and is now a therapist at the Berkeley Therapy Institute. “In a significant percentage of cases, sexual dysfunction has something to do with a man choosing to be celibate, whereas for women it’s usually a reaction to being hurt in relationships. You just become hurt so many times you say, ‘Enough already.’”
Like Andrews, Goldstine believes “sex therapy really works. The problems are almost always fixable, especially if the person is still masturbating. It’s a question,” he says, “of keeping the plumbing going. The preponderance of people we see are ones who’ve stopped masturbating. If you’ve been celibate for ten years, the chances are that you’ve stopped masturbating. These people just give everything up.”
Celibacy may be an effective solution to certain problems or a way of skirting them, but celibates are often viewed as peculiar or as having serious psychological problems. The women we spoke to said they frequently found men reacting to their admission of celibacy with suspicion and hostility. (It is interesting to note that three of the celibate men we spoke to, Daniel, Glen, and Timothy, said that women were very respectful and accepting of their decision.)
“It’s very difficult for my dates to accept my celibacy,” says Erin, 29, a New York cable-television producer who has gone without sex for three years. “As soon as a man makes a pass, I tell him I’m looking for commitment before sex. They think I’m a freak and say, ‘Are you studying to be a nun?’ One man asked if I’m a lesbian. Another asked, ‘Are you a manhater?’” Jane, a 32-year-old counselor who recently migrated from Cincinnati to the West Coast, had a similar experience when she told Henry, the man she’s in love with, that after two years of a “cleansing” celibacy she still wasn’t ready to sleep with anyone. Jane’s sexual withdrawal stems from a previous relationship that didn’t work out. She came out of a 12-year marriage feeling “there was something missing, mainly my own love for my body. For years I’d been my husband’s caretaker. Now I wanted to rediscover myself.”
But Henry’s patience and understanding were limited. “Last Saturday night, he started putting his arms around me and said he wanted to go to bed with me. I knew he’d waited a long time for me, but I thought if we made love, I’d wake up the next day hating him. So I said, ‘Look, we’re not ready yet. You just want to fuck me. I need you to celebrate the whole me first, to be friends and soul mates.’” If there is anything that all the celibates we interviewed share, it’s mistrust: “Henry says he’s my friend,” says Jane, “but it’s more like he’s infatuated with me.”
“He called me ‘bitch’ and every name in the book,” she recalls. “Then he said he couldn’t wait for me, that I’m too scared and wrapped up in feelings, and that in the end feelings don’t mean anything. I said, ‘Henry, I can’t sleep with you but I certainly can hold you. Why don’t you spend the night and we’ll cuddle?’” He just looked at her and walked out the door.
When Jane decides to resume sexual activity, she may find it more difficult and jarring than it might have seemed to be. For this reason, celibates often choose good friends as their bed partners. But even so, the experience can be very distressing.
“I still cry after sex,” says Maude, 37, of Tampa, who just ended two years of celibacy after a ten-year marriage. “Even though my lover has been my friend on and off since college, it just comes gushing out. I feel great and terribly scared at the same time.”
Deborah, a 30-year-old lawyer from San Francisco, became celibate because “I was sick of dating. People hit on me all the time, but I don’t want any part of it. All you do is go out, fuck, and wonder, ‘Is that all there is?’”
After a year of celibacy, the first month of which was the hardest (“I missed waking up with some sort of physical reassurance”), Deborah decided to make a compromise with herself. She decided to stay “dateless” but started sleeping with a close friend occasionally. “That’s all we do, or maybe go out for a pizza,” she says. “He’s my friend and I’m his. In fact, I look at men now as human beings instead of as potential fucks. I’ve also become my own best lover. I’ve learned how to depend on myself.”
Like Deborah, Helen — a celibate, 23-year-old Minneapolis secretary — regularly masturbates. “If I hadn’t discovered vibrators, I don’t know what I would have done,” she shrugs, pointing to her egg-shaped pleasure machine on the nightstand. “Before I got one, I tried to touch myself, but even that was difficult. Why a vibrator? Vibrators don’t take advantage of you. There’s no fear of being dominated by your vibrator.”
Before withdrawing from partners four years ago, Helen, who has deep-blue eyes and an alluring smile, was a very scared bisexual. Her uncle had molested her when she was a child. “If I didn’t know my lover well, I felt exposed, vulnerable, and very insecure,” she says. “People would pressure me into sleeping with them when I wasn’t ready. I felt like a baby being taken advantage of.”
Worse still, more and more of her friends were contracting herpes, causing another scare that eventually led to Helen’s experiment with celibacy. “But like the other celibate people I know, I don’t look on this as a permanent thing,” she says. “It’s an old-fashioned idea, but I believe that if I find the right person, then sex will be okay.”
To Jessica, a 38-year-old actress, it wasn’t a shortage of good lovers that caused her to stop sleeping with people, but an overabundance of bedmates. “I overdid it. My entire life was based on sex. It had become a hobby, the main thing that interested me.”
But after a 15-year marriage to the man she began sleeping with at age 18, and ten “quickie affairs,” including one that produced an illegitimate child, she decided she’d had enough. “For the last five years I’ve been concentrating on things that don’t relate to fucking. My child. Friendships.” Most importantly, for the first time, she now feels she can be herself around men. “Before, I’d clean my room before they came over. Now I can be a slob. It’s time to just be me.”
Yet another reason for being celibate is voiced by America’s burgeoning crop of single parents. Mary, 40, who works in a Seattle health-food store, has come full circle since her days as a free-loving “hippie of the sixties.” Two marriages and one 15-year-old daughter later, she has been enjoying what she says is “an introspective relationship with myself.” She has been celibate for the past six years.
“It took not having sex for me to realize how much I’d been shutting my daughter out of my life,” says Mary, who has medium-length, curly brown hair. “I also became aware of how my style of life influences her. If I’m trying to set a good example, why should I be bringing men home?”
Compared to Deborah, it took her a lot longer — a full year — “to get over the pure habit of being sexual.” She’s also less sexual with herself than most celibates. “I rarely masturbate,” she says. “And I disagree with Deborah. If you masturbate, sure, you love yourself. But isn’t it the same idea? You’re still acting physical rather than spiritual.”
For Mary, celibacy carries with it a certain amount of anxiety. On the one hand, she never worries about getting pregnant. “I don’t have to use birth control pills anymore,” she smiles. (Mary has had three abortions.) “But there’s nothing to really replace the physical affection. Sometimes I pick up the phone to tell a friend how bad I feel and then just hang up. I don’t want to bother anybody with such a personal problem.”
Celibates and noncelibates, it turns out, may be after the same thing: genuine human contact through intimacy. Whether this is gained spiritually or physically, the result may be the same. “Sex and celibacy,” says one female respondent, “are two sides of the same coin.”
There’s a certain pride, though, that successful celibates — the ones who make it through the first, uncertain, cold-turkey months of horniness and stroke starvation — seem to have. “Celibacy is like living alone,” says Deborah “Everybody should try it at least once.”
Nods Helen: “Our songs are full of this crap that you’re not anybody unless you’re with someone. It’s not true. You are who you are. You are worth something. I’m trying celibacy because I want to recapture the feeling that I’m worth something, and I want to do it before I enter a relationship. I don’t want to start a relationship just to make me feel worthy. It’s got to come from within.”
Ironically, the changes coming from within are also casting celibates as seemingly meek people because of their lingering fear of sexual encounters. In general, however, they have become more assertive. They know what they want from themselves and are refusing to settle for less than what they think they deserve from others.
“I’m not giving myself an ultimatum that says I can’t have sex in the future,” adds Helen. “I also don’t know whether exactly a year from now I’ll celebrate the anniversary of my celibacy by fucking someone. But I can tell you this much: My next lover will have to be loyal, caring, appreciative of who I am, and, on an unconditional basis, somebody who is there for me in all ways.”
These days we have a war brewing with the incel crowd, yet celibacy by choice still appears to be holding strong. Ironically, the fact that women choose celibacy more than men probably contributes to the brewing anger. A society where people believe the world owes them something will be a scary place to live.
