Celibacy Renaissance

Like possibly more sexless than the OG Renaissance?

🫖 Hello, subs. Today, I ponder whether the Sex Recession is really a Celibacy Renaissance. On an unrelated note, if like me, you are morbidly fascinated by the downtown/Dimes Square/Red Scare/Vibe Shift discourse, read Mike Crumplar’s latest post “My Own Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual.” If you have no idea what I’m talking about, hold on to your mental health and run in the other direction. 🫖

Virgin Girlboss, Incarnate

Catholic all-girls high school. Yes, we wore little pleated skirts that grazed our mid-thighs and revolted when black opaque tights were mandated our junior year (#FreeTheKnee). Yes, there was a brief banning of grapefruits in the cafeteria when a new eating disorder caught wind: the gals were consuming one chilled, pink half-grapefruit for lunch and nothing else. Refreshing, but not food. And yes, even though this was LA and about 40% of our teachers were gay, and most parents were tax-evading social libs, we experienced year after year of abstinence-forward Sex Ed.

But, this wasn’t your Holy Mother of Mercy’s abstinence education. I say “abstinence-forward” because it was a feat of subtle, feminine trickery. They didn’t jump-scare us with gruesome, infected genitalia. They didn’t talk about how wrong and dirty sex was, nor did they extol the inherent virtues of purity and chastity.

Jump cut to a small “seminar-style” classroom in Butler Hall. 81 years prior, the building had been a dormitory for nuns. In 2012, it was populated by teenage girls with MacBook Pros, flicking through cascading tabs of Wanelo boards of pink and teal impracticalities, Buzzfeed quizzes, and other ungodly distractions. Internet access was nearly unrestricted, though the Tech department imposed its authority from time to time, manually shutting down Facebook tabs. Big Brother of the Sailor Sisters.

Culturally speaking, Instagram posts were sickly saturated with the Nashville filter, people were “dip dyeing” the bleached tips of their hair with Gatorade, fun! reigned the radio, Brandy Melville peddled sunflower patterns and skull bracelets, and YOLO was, ostensibly, the motto.

It was Period 1. Theology. I can’t tell you what time of day it was, since the school boasted a rotating block schedule (you get what you pay for!). We were to have a guest speaker—the Sex Lady.

The Sex Lady wasn’t like the red-faced Drug Guy, who grimly looked back at his wrecked life and regrets. The Drug Guy cried in front of everyone while recounting the day he taught his little brother to do heroin. You felt bad for the Drug Guy. According to the sophomores, the Sex Lady was someone to look forward to. She was cool, nice and young.

A gorgeous brunette entered the room with the thickest bangs you could ever imagine. They were at least an inch thick, framing beachy waves that went halfway down her torso. She was a Jess from New Girl type, back when the girl was new. A 2012 ten.

With a dazzling smile, she introduced herself: Joanna Hyatt.

“My name is Joanna and I am here to teach you how to have the best sex of your life!”

Collectively, we were like: 👁️👄👁️

The ensuing presentation had the grace, charisma, and manipulative meaninglessness of a TED Talk. To gain our trust, she shared a carefully crafted personal narrative, with a story arc that bent toward premarital abstinence. Her thesis was the following: to have the best sex of your life, you should wait to do it until you are married. But, like… You don’t have to be a lame virgin to be abstinent! You can be beautiful and cool like me!

She told us all sorts of stuff. In college, she indulged in other bodily pleasures outside of vaginal intercourse (a classic case of “everything but the”). It wasn’t easy remaining firm in her commitment to virginity, but some things made it worthwhile. After graduation, several male friends confided that she was the only female friend that they actually respected. As opposed to, you know, the sluts. One day, she met the red-haired, tattooed love of her life. He was perfect aside from the fact that he had had premarital sex.

Apparently, this was a hump they could get past. They got married and I suppose had rEaLlY aWeSoMe SeX, which is to say: sex. As proof, she revealed that she was pregnant with her first child!

Joanna presented herself as an open book, but something was glaringly missing. Religion. She left so much room for Jesus, that He wasn’t even in the room. When asked about her motivations to remain abstinent before marriage, she alluded to “personal” reasons. She tactfully avoided any mention of Christianity. To even ask was an uncouth invasion of privacy. To a room of uncertain freshmen, this seemed fair enough. We didn’t probe further. We assumed that her virginity pact was a matter of dignity. Which left an implication hanging in the air: premarital abstinence was superior.

Looking back, Joanna’s lesson feels so insidious because it was a standard, conservative, Christian abstinence lecture in the packaging of sex positivity. Her opening line about having the best sex of your life could have introduced a very different lecture, covering any number of topics such as anatomy, pleasure, consent, unpacking shame, birth control, and STI prevention. While sex positivity was certainly not the educational or cultural norm in 2012, the path was leaning in that direction. Religious conservatism wasn’t cool, so Joanna coopted the aesthetics of empowerment to make premarital virginity seem appealing.

I sincerely wonder if the school’s administration asked Joanna to pose abstinence as a rational decision, rather than a religious one. Did they think that this would be more effective, given the audience? I certainly think it was. We were smart enough to roll our eyes at traditional lectures on celibacy, but more susceptible to the layers of slut-shaming applied to her stories, smooth as icing on a cake. As an insecure 14-year-old, there was no siren song more bewitching than that of a confident, happy 28-year-old. Being 14 is the worst. Joanna’s life was aspirational. Maybe abstinence wasn’t just for radical religious folks. It’s also for quirky brunettes!

Interestingly, it seems that Joanna has owned her Christianity in recent years. The Word of God is now infused into her personal branding, as a “mama of four beauties,” “a nerd who loves to talk about controversial issues (abortion! sex! Jesus!),” and a “Person of the Cross who lives with Grit & Grace.”

Perusing her website, I encountered her self-published booklet entitled “A New Position on Sex” (pun surely intended). I couldn’t resist inserting my email for the free download. It’s a jumbled, 22-page manifesto against allegedly modern pillars of wokeness, like consent or the existence of trans people or prioritizing personal pleasure. She attempts to take down the historical flaws of both the secular and Christian approaches to sex, to forge a new path. This new position boils down to the idea that it’s okay to enjoy sex in the context of a marriage between a cis man and cis woman. It’s sophomoric, full of typos and does not dignify much of my time here.

At the same time, it was oddly cathartic to read. If she had just presented herself as a conservative Christian advocate for premarital abstinence, her lectures wouldn’t have left such a bad taste in my mouth. It was Catholic school. Of course they were going to push abstinence education. There’s nothing wrong with believing that sex should integrate the mental, physical and spiritual self. Live your truth, Joanna.

Frictionless

There’s a perception that we’re living in a more sexless time, both statistically and anecdotally.

Statistically:

Since 2018, there have been sweeping declarations that Americans have entered a Sex Drought, a Sex Recession, or even *gasp* a Great Sex Depression. This all sprung from data from the General Social Survey, conducted every other year since 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The statistics pointed to emerging trends: young adults were having sex later, less, and with fewer partners than prior generations.

Anecdotally:

A 2018 Atlantic article listed many of the “modern blights” that might be to blame: dating apps, the prevalence of antidepressants and vibrators, the way our hormones are getting fucked up by all the plastic in our drinking water.

In the pandemic years, writers have thoughtfully added to the conversation. The general consensus is that the internet is the primary puppetmaster. Last week, Daisy Alioto wrote a compelling post for Dirt about the blueballing of Instagram’s userbase. Amidst the 2021 “hot vax summer” that never was, Dean Kissick published a piece titled Rediscovering desire in the panopticon of virtual pleasures. In February, Haley Nahman wrote an intriguing article about The death of sex, which contextualized the trend toward celibacy in the post-Vibe Shift world. The writers lament the malaise that has prevailed as our online lives have become more gratifying than our embodied ones.

Dean: “What’s left is the new aesthetic of lifelessness and void, a consumer culture of throwaway experiences that wash right over you like an Ambien. It’s made to be experienced without friction: seamless post-death entertainment from an empire ruled over by a sleepy, old man.”

Haley: “[Sexuality] is the ultimate euphemism for earthly pleasures and all its attendant qualities: desire, touch, anguish, longing, satisfaction, thrill, connection, presence. Essentially everything the internet can’t meaningfully give us.”

But, despite the despair of cultural commentators, some folks are choosing a transgressive reclamation. I never thought we’d be in the midst of a Celibacy Renaissance. But, I’ve learned to forgo all expectations in the increasingly post-woke, post-MeToo, post-Trump, post-CultureWar New York.

Incels, Femcels, and just Cels

The figure of the incel has loomed prominently in the public imagination for a decade, even if we haven’t always had the word for it. From Newtown to Parkland to Q-Anon to the Capitol Riots to Uvalde, the past decade has been punctuated by horrors committed by incel archetypes, radicalized, isolated, validated and conditioned on the internet.

The last few months have brought the concept of the “femcel” to the fore. I struggle to describe what the feminized involuntary celibate looks like, and I think that’s because it’s not actually an archetype.

It’s what you like. Not what you are like.

As a writer put it in an i-D article: “the social media femcels of today use the term less as an indicator of how much sex they’re unable to have, and more as a way to express their personality traits that are perceived as pathetic or manipulative or toxic in some way.” It’s apparently about identifying with Mitski, Sylvia Plath, Fleabag and Catholic iconography.

Like so many things these days, the concept of the femcel is metaironic. It’s both joking and sincere: we are living through a statistically less sexual time, so why not flirt with fringe culture for shock value and cultural cachet?

I think it’s important that the term femcel loses the “in-” prefix. It seems that this new celibacy is, well… voluntary.¹

One facet of femcel-adjacent culture that intrigues me is the downtown Tradcath revival. The kids are going to church. It’s a meme but it’s also not. It’s a fashion aesthetic but it’s also creeping into people’s language and values. Walking near Dimes Square a few weeks ago, there was a group of scenesters congregating near a venue. I literally overheard a punky dude say: “Peace be with you, brother in God.”

Back in April on the Wet Brain podcast, Walter Pearce, Jordan Castro and some guy Pat held a joking-but-not intervention for Honor Levy’s crisis of faith. In their conversation, Honor grapples with “living in a state of sin.” The way they engage with religious topics is earnest and thoughtful, even when softened with irony.

Honor: I just like, you know, I’m like having premarital and like doing all sorts of things like that … Cause we’re trapped in the material world. What else am I supposed to do? Like she already bit that apple.

Walt: It was bussin.

Honor: Yeah, I’m fallen.

The conversation is funny and edgy because it feels so bizarre for a cohort of artsy young literati to be speaking this way after a decade of cool falling on the side of secularism and sex positivity. Listening to the episode, it’s pretty clear that none of them think premarital sex is actually a bad thing. This may seem like hypocrisy, but Catholics have been having premarital sex since Catholicism was invented.

It’s tempting to speculate whether these people are actual believers, or if they are just participating in a trend for clout. But, this distinction doesn’t really matter. What’s more interesting is how this moment is a reaction to the flatness of a shame-free, sex positive world. I watched one episode of the Netflix atrocity “How to Build a Sex Room” with friends, and we all laughed at how empty and sexless the show felt. Sex columnist Dan Savage often talks about how a shame-free world is a distinctly unsexy one. It’s hotter to break the rules.

Joanna Hyatt’s Virgin Girlboss approach was transgressive because it taught premarital abstinence by using the aesthetics of the movement that was cooler in 2012: sex positivity.

Now that sex positivity isn’t cool, the latest way to transgress is to coopt the aesthetics of conservatism. Whether the downtown Tradcath scene is just being edgy for edgy’s sake, is actually trying to espouse Christian values or something else entirely… it’s too soon to tell. Regardless, it’s interesting how many roads lead to no sex.

5 Songs for the Sexless

Sometimes music is about other things!

“Trying To Make Heaven Home,” The Gospel Chimes

• Because if anything is sexless, it’s religion. Right guys? This song is just crawling with longing, fervor and desperation. Listen to it really, really loud.

• 🎶 I started to make heaven—a long, long, time ago—my home. 🎶

“Fight This Generation,” Pavement

• Pavement has always struck me as a pretty sexless band.

• 🎶 God damn the guts and the gore. Nobody’s crying cause there’s no one to score. 🎶

“Blue Red and Grey,” The Who

• Ok this song isn’t completely sexless, but it’s mostly about embracing life.

• 🎶 Some people go for those sultry evenings sipping cocktails in the blue, red and grey. But I like every minute of the day. 🎶

“No Surprises,” Radiohead

• Gotta throw one in for the incels.

• 🎶 A heart that’s full up like a landfill; a job that slowly kills you; bruises that won’t heal. 🎶

“Newspaper,” Fiona Apple

• Fetch the bolt cutters, femcels!

• 🎶 I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me to make sure that we’ll never be friends. 🎶

Quote of the week:

“When you operate from a place of insecurity, your whole life becomes focused on alleviating that feeling.” (Is New York overrated? —Haley Nahman)

🫖 Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying the newsletter, toss me a like, send me a reply, or consider sharing it with a friend. As I continue to build my audience, I look forward to launching some new, exciting features which will be available to PAID subscribers. More on that soon… 🫖

1. Why am I tempted to call it something like “Volcel,” when it could just be called “Cel?” It’s like how at McDonald’s you can order an “Unsweet Iced Tea” rather than just… “Iced Tea.” The long and winding road.