The Venn Diagram of New Celibacy

Last semester, in my “Rhetoric of Dating and Intimacy” course, one of my students—a hard-left liberal feminist—offered tentatively, almost shamefully, that she’d been following a Christian dating influencer on Instagram. The influencer’s name is Fumnanya Ekhator (@mahamaven on Instagram); she’s a Nigerian-born content creator who also happens to have degrees from Dartmouth and the Wharton School and a J.D. from Penn Law; she interned in the Obama White House. She has nearly a million followers and lists “Isaiah 50:4” in her bio. She preaches the benefits of celibacy.

I was mystified. Students in women/gender studies courses are notoriously liberal and secular, often militantly so. They trend toward radical feminism, rejection of gender norms, and strong opposition to anything that resembles purity culture, steeped as it is in patriarchal values. They generally align their information sources in keeping with those positions. So why was Katie following this Christian who advises young women to delay sex? Isn’t that patriarchal? Isn’t it slut-shaming? Aren’t we not doing any of that anymore?

“I like her message,” Katie shrugged, when I questioned what drew her to this content. “Most of what she says resonates with me.” Several other young women in the class nodded in agreement. Gen Z has had it with hookup culture, and in a lot of cases it’s got nothing to do with Jesus.

In another of my classes that semester—Feminist Literature—there was a different discussion that shook me. That class is always slanted female in gender distribution, but this particular semester there were zero male students, so opinions on sex were shared more freely and openly. On this day we were discussing “the gray zone of sexual consent” in the context of the viral New Yorker story “Cat Person.” The story lit the entire class up in a way I was not prepared for—like I could almost not get a word in edgewise, these young women were so fired up about this story. I finally said something to the effect of, “What’s really going on here right now?” and one student said, “We’re just tired of being choked.” At least six others around her nodded sadly. Pretty much the entire class confirmed that this is how things are now (i.e. “totally informed by porn), and the heartbreaking thing was that they reported this with more resignation than outrage.

It's because of experiences like this that Gen Z is not buying into sex-positive feminism in general. They know it’s a sham, or, more accurately, it’s become one. Sex-positivity was hijacked by the patriarchy and PornHub culture faster than Tinder dates are negotiated in college town bars. Rather than manifesting as the female empowerment campaign it was intended to be, sex-positivity is being leveraged against women, especially young women: you’re either “down for anything” or you’re prudish and anti-liberal. Even Bumble—the self-proclaimed feminist dating app—decided to use the chili pepper to signify sex-positivity, an interpretation so egregiously stupid and simplistic that exactly no one should have been surprised by their soon-to-be-unveiled anti-celibacy campaign.

Here's what Bumble got wrong with that campaign (in addition to “everything”): they assumed women were choosing celibacy in either protest or self-denial; they didn’t understand that, in many cases, women were selecting their own salvation. And whether that salvation manifests spiritually or emotionally or physically or simply as a reduction of worry and stress and wasted time, it’s a form of salvation nonetheless.

So, women of faith are opting out for values-based reasons, asexual women (ACE) aren’t interested, and others are opting out on feminist/political grounds such as the boysober movement or Korea’s 4B; even for women who do want sex and have no religious or ideological opposition to it, the risks of casual sex with men simply outweigh the rewards, especially in a nation that’s currently free-falling backwards in an avalanche of cultural regression when it comes to issues such as reproductive rights legislation and protection from gender-based violence.

I don’t see the increase in celibacy rates changing anytime soon. More precisely, I don’t see it changing until men start changing. And I mean really changing, not just slinging around platitudes about consent or being in therapy and then turning into cavemen the instant the date is procured. “Show me a man who doesn’t talk about sex, and I’ll show you a man I might have sex with,” one of my social media followers recently remarked; it’s not that women don’t want sex, it’s just that our desire to be seen as three-dimensional, whole human beings outweighs our need for instant and contextless physical gratification. Add to that the fact that casual hook ups carry significant risk: of violence, of exploitation, of degradation, of disease, etc., and we have to reckon with the fact that the “value added” by men is too frequently actually a subtraction—subtraction of safety, of comfort, of emotional reward, of excitement, of intellectual intrigue. Hookup culture is a net-negative scenario for most women.

People frequently ask me if I’m going to start an educational initiative for men to complement what I do in my work with women (I created and moderate the Burned Haystack Dating Method group on Facebook and post content @word_case_scenario on Instagram); but I’m not interested in working with men on this. I’m just one person with limited time and energy, and I feel like those resources should be directed toward women. Men supposedly founded all of western civilization. They can cure diseases and engineer bridges and perform brain surgery and teach children and fly jets and organize militias. If they want to improve this situation, then they should work on it. Until they do, the intersection of that Venn diagram is just going to expand.