free love, celibacy, and identities

julia fox is celibate- why aren't you?

I’m afraid we’re trapped in a societal cycle. To counter the centuries-old oppression of women on the basis that they don’t experience sexual desire, and those who do are in need of an exorcism, a lobotomy, a Xanax: we push for sex as progressive. Having sex ends up being seen as an inherently feminist act, bonus points if you embody the ‘fuckboy mentality’ and claim to have no feelings. After a while, some women find this mindset is harmful for them. They retract entirely, spiritualising their libido, healing their inner child, having more ‘wholesome’ fun with their loved ones, focusing on themselves, protecting their peace. Then, because most human beings experience desire, this can give way after a while to the same self-worth-defined-by-pickup-rate as before. The carousel seems to be spinning faster and faster. I’m getting dizzy.

We don’t seem to be able to find a balancing point between the extremes; between Madonna and whore. After all these years of knowing that one of the weapons used against women on a cultural level is their sexuality, we still can’t reckon with our own. We can’t extricate ourselves from the bigger picture.

We might be forgetting our roots- forgetting and outgrowing are different. In the mid-19th-century, American feminist Victoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for US president) was a pioneer of the Free Love movement. This was intended to counter the strictness of societal conventions, championing contraception, women’s control over their own bodies, and sex outside of marriage as being necessary, rather than the evil they were depicted as until then. The idea that love- and, therefore, sex- should be able to exist without the financial or legal requisite; should be able to exist as separate to religion. Revolutionary, at the time. It didn’t necessitate promiscuity, and became a torch for socialists, feminists, and suffragists alike. By the sixties, alongside the development of the pill, free love was associated with Beat poetry, jazz, and, critically, anti-war protest. Love- of which sex was a denomination, illustrative- became the antithesis to the Vietnam war. It was a tool of hippies to rail against everything associated with the traditional ways of being. Maybe it was still unequal- there was enough misogyny at the time that women still weren’t necessarily safe, or the main beneficiaries of a relaxed attitude to sex (unlike now, of course). But it had purpose, it had intention.

The hedonism we associate with sex has shifted in its significance. Here’s the problem: if you want to acknowledge in any way that’s wider than yourself (or even as wide as the studio audience in your prefrontal cortex) that you want to have casual sex, suddenly your value is determined by how easily you can have it. Can you snap your fingers and scratch another notch? Is one Instagram story enough for another conquest?

This particular strain of choice feminism isn’t something I subscribe to, in the same way that I don’t think getting a breast lift or lip filler in the name of ‘self-love’ is intrinsically feminist, despite the rhetoric that floats around. Are we doing ourselves justice by presenting progressive, feminist sex as the same as the sex we stereotype for men? Unfeeling sex, disengaged sex, sex for the sake of sex? Get yours and ghost?

It’s a temporary discomfort, being found unattractive. Or simply not being noticed. But being noticed is a temporary comfort in itself- both can deepen the need to be wanted if you have them in high quantities. And yes, you might get a kick out of declining attention in the name of an above-it-all personal narrative where you get the best of both worlds- you’re wanted, but you’re better than that. I’m not convinced that’s useful either. It’s hard work to separate your self worth from how attractive you’re found, and particularly difficult where you base your perception of your appearance on how many people want to sleep with you. 

The semi-recent rise of love and appreciation for messiness, for allowing women to be anything other than strong and put together has felt gratifying. But let’s not be mistaken, we also don’t get a feminism gold star for having months-long, years-long situationships where we pretend the emotional side of sex can’t touch us. The way that torturous connections characterised by suffering and depleting self-respect are seen as the chill, modern way to treat your heart is concerning. Yes, it’s important to know that plenty of people, plenty of women, can have sex without getting attached. Grand! But I’d posit that a high percentage of those who are having ongoing sex with a particular person- particularly if that person’s your friend- aren’t experiencing things that way. If you’re having sex that you enjoy (and I hope you are), you’re probably thinking about the way you connect with that person, you’re considering their desires and feelings and how those can ignite your own. If you’re doing this over an extended period of time, it’s not treacherous to the “heartless” “do it for the plot” “Serena van der Woodsen era” to develop feelings for that person. Am I screaming into the void?

It’s hard to admit feelings, especially if you don’t want to do anything about them. But you’re hardly embodying hedonism if you’re not indulging your emotions. The point of the feminist angle to sex positivity, much like free love, is to enforce that womens’ reputations shouldn’t be ruined by their sex lives, to acknowledge the gender difference in how this is received, and to emphasise that women can and do have desire. We’re not winning by encouraging a culture where young women and girls value themselves based on how easy it is for them to engage in casual sex.

The idea that there could be more to who you are than who you have sex with resonates with a lot of women, who were choosing, in turn, to abstain. This, much like free love, is fine in theory- having a label for something done in the name of your wellbeing can be useful. But, in practice, it can become another box in which to confine ourselves, another way of reducing down the fluid, nuanced aspects of sexuality.

Enter: Bumble.

If you’re anything like as chronically online as I am, you’ve seen the ads. Bumble plastered billboards across LA with patronising slogans including “You know full well celibacy is not the answer”. It’s clear who the audience of these ads were. Dating apps are already over saturated with men, and women deciding internet-based hook ups aren’t what they want isn’t great for business.

On a TikTok about the billboards, the oracle herself, Julia Fox, commented “2.5 years of celibacy and never been better tbh”. Other comments included “I almost got kidnapped thanks to bumble :)”, “I’m a single mother bc of bumble lmaoooo”, “just deleted my bumble account”, and, my personal favourite, “Its not a ‘vow of celibacy’! We’re just happy alone!”. Isn’t this the whole point?

There’s endless discourse about how willingly we attach ourselves to narrative labels, attempting to understand the world better, but often leaving ourselves clutching identity tags to our chests in the hope that things can make more sense than they do. You’re either in your ‘hoe phase’ or you’re celibate. Calling it celibacy sounds a whole lot nicer than the disparaging ‘dry spell’ or frigidity that you risk being labelled with otherwise. Isn’t it exhausting needing a name for everything before someone else sticks one to you?

Labels can be useful when they form movements- powerful even. Many American women are picking up South Korea’s ‘4b’ movement, in which they “boycott men”- abstaining from sex and relationships with men, marriage, and having children. The movement started on Youtube, and has quickly spread across social media, with proponents citing high violence and murder rates against women, that aren’t acknowledged as being gender-based, as their reason. 4b and free love are arguably two sides of the same coin- they demand standards for agency and respect, acknowledging that sex is a key factor in these things. The collective holds weight, has impact, demonstrates solidarity; it’s not just a personal narrative or a title used to box someone else into their behaviour.

Much of the way we discuss our sex lives is the same way we’d describe a character in a sitcom. It’s so that we can be ‘the one who goes on a lot of dates’ or ‘the kind of woman who prioritises her work over dating’. It’s all a story we’re building. Importantly, it’s not as though women outside of South Korea aren’t at risk from men, or don’t operate within unequal structures of government. It’s why free love- in the nuanced way that many choose to interpret it- still manages to replicate systems of patriarchy. Are you really ‘free’ to engage in casual sex if you can’t safely access contraception, sex education, abortions? 

This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with either way of being. It shouldn’t take trauma, or even just a string of disappointing sexual or romantic partners to ‘commit’ to celibacy. You should be able to just not have sex. The connotations of the world are obvious: purity, religion, saving oneself for something worthy. A healthy way of viewing sex lies somewhere between women’s bodies being sacred, alabaster, dirtied to the touch, and a woman being permitted to explore and express her sexuality without tying herself to a lifestyle shift, or making it a hobby. Maybe dedicating yourself to not having sex is a good move if you’ve found yourself seeking validation through it, as Julia Fox detailed was the case for her. It’s not that her decision doesn’t make sense (all you have to do is listen to her reading her own book to feel happy that she’s getting some control and peace in her life). It’s not even her choice to be celibate that’s notable: it’s the fact that it’s the centre of every headline. It could be that there’s something deeper to work on as well as eliminating sex, rather than attaching another term to your already long list of identities, but that’s up to you.

Maybe I occupy a microcosm of this cycle. On both an individual and cultural level, it’s normal to switch between extremes until you can find a sustainable point. It’s normal to enjoy phases, communities even. But it feels like we’re reaching a point of futility where on a wider scale, behaviour that falls outside of a categorizable pattern is invisible. If you’re not epitomising the single girl, or, conversely, someone who’s above it all, you’re not really computable. And all the while we’re glorifying casual sex, we’re losing interest in the fun bit, the exciting bit. We’re forgetting about the value of personal interactions, the fun of potential. Or the actual point of knowing you’ll only have sex if you really want to, because you have other interesting things filling your life. If we don’t see ourselves as flexible, malleable beings, we’re not embodying anything other than caricatures of connected dots, reflections of archetypes. If we want to be free- to be casual or celibate in our own personal lives- we have to be free of the boxes, too.