Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty
When she saw Bumble’s anti-celibacy ad campaign last month, Lainey Molnar felt like she was being mocked — and she was furious. The dating app had just unveiled billboards reading “Celibacy is not the answer” and “Thou shalt not give up dating and become a nun.” The backlash to what became known as the “Bumble fumble” was swift, and within weeks, the company had taken down the ads and apologized. But Molnar, a voluntarily celibate 35-year-old who posted a fiery response to the campaign on Instagram, wasn’t placated. She was sick of seeing women’s sexuality monetized and taken advantage of by corporations. “It seems like women’s boundaries over our bodily autonomy are so threatening to the entire concept of dating that they need to put up billboards to stop us,” she said in the video. “At least we’re being seen, I guess?”
Lainey has a difficult romantic history. In her early 20s, she was in a long-term relationship with a man who was abusive and demanded sex daily. After it ended, she went through a promiscuous phase that lasted roughly a year, in part, she believes, to feel she had some agency over her body. “I was like a freight train,” she says. “I had no sense of my body. I didn’t own it anymore.” Over the next ten years, she dated around, usually unhappily, and suffered from chronic UTIs from intercourse. In 2021, she ended things with a guy she’d been seeing for a few months because the two were clashing and her UTIs were returning. “I knew that I’d been going around in these circles for a decade, and I didn’t see the end of it,” she says. She encountered the idea of celibacy in a TikTok post about sex being an “exchange of energy” between two people, one that should be treated with caution, and she was intrigued. Though she’d had gaps between relationships in the past, her choice to step away this time was more deliberate; she has now been celibate for two years. She didn’t go into it with a firm plan or the intent to make a lifelong decision, but she has very clear guidelines. “My rules are that I do not engage in any partnered intimacy unless it is exclusive or committed,” she says. She is, however, in a relationship with herself: She meets her sexual needs by masturbating and has a ring tattoo where an engagement ring would traditionally be.
Plenty of people like Lainey — mainly women, in contrast to the angrier, male-dominated incel community — are eager to call themselves celibate. Today, celebrities including Khloé Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson, and Tiffany Haddish have touted the benefits of celibacy. Melissa Febos, the author of, among other books, a lauded memoir about her time as a dominatrix, is coming out with another memoir next year called The Dry Season, about a year of conscious celibacy. Other women are celebrating their dry seasons too, even to the point of competitiveness. “I’ve been intentionally celibate for a year and a half now,” one user wrote in an April post on r/AskWomenOver30, to which another wrote, “Teehee I’m going on 10 years!” (“Definitely a flex,” someone responded, complete with a sparkling-star emoji.) Lainey embraces the word celibate, though others are less enthusiastic owing to its religious connotations. They prefer to say they are “decentering men” or “boysober.” Others use more creative language. “You mean like a dick embargo?” one psychology professor told me a TA said when the topic came up.
She’s in a relationship with herself: She meets her sexual needs by masturbating and has a ring tattoo where an engagement ring would traditionally be.
This Great Abstaining comes amid any number of moral panics about sex, mainly related to young people: They’re texting instead of hooking up, they’re getting off the apps, they’re forgoing marriage and children, they’re deemphasizing traditional romance and instead prioritizing platonic friendships like codependent but chaste Victorian pen pals. It’s also, confusingly, entering the discourse just on the heels of peak polyamory. Despite the obvious differences, University of Florida psychology professor Laurie Mintz sees a common thread. “I think both relate to an underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo of sex in relationships for women and a rejection of rigid rules and boundaries around what should occur,” says Mintz, who also writes books on sexuality and is a therapist in private practice. Anything is better, in other words, than what we’ve had up to now.
The celibates of the TikTok era cite politics as another part of their reasons for going without. A number of them specify the radical-feminist South Korean 4B movement as inspiration. As a means of resistance against the country’s deeply dysfunctional gender politics, women who affiliate with 4B vow not to date men, have sex with men, get married, or give birth. Indeed, the hashtag #4B has frequently been used in social-media posts made by women outside South Korea talking about celibacy.
Sometimes, the target of their anger is the diffuse and pervasive patriarchy — men being uneducated in how to please women sexually, still refusing to pull their weight domestically, and overly focusing on sex at the expense of real connection. “There isn’t a movement out there about what it means to be a good man,” a celibate TV writer in her late 30s told me. “It isn’t about building character. It’s all about power, wealth, and fucking over other people so you can flex.” Men have never been amazing at getting her off anyway, she says, “so it’s, like, why bother?” Her stance is familiar to many of her single female friends, who joke about setting up a feminine utopia where they can co-habit and raise children together (the fathers will be allowed to visit “on occasion”).
Although most people I spoke to identify as heterosexual — and direct much of their ire toward straight men — there is also an established “celibacy-to-queer pipeline.” A woman pledging celibacy today may come out as queer next year (as Chappell Roan would say, Good luck, babe). “I thought I was called to celibacy,” the former Disney actor Alyson Stoner said on the podcast Two Dykes and a Mic of their sexless teenage years before they came out as pansexual. Co-host Rachel Scanlon could relate: “I know a lot of closeted queer people who were raised in Christianity or these religious spaces, and they’re like, A better option is leaning deep into virginity, because they’re like, Well, I certainly don’t want to have sex with men.” On Reddit, straight or bisexual women often say that if they find themselves single again, they’ll become celibate or exclusively date women. “I’m Bi and if it doesn’t turn out with my male partner, I don’t think I’ll be wanting to be with another man,” one user wrote. “If it can’t work with the best one I’ve met, why bother?”
Numerous women I spoke to said they decided to become celibate after a sexual trauma. When Makhaylah’s first serious relationship ended in the summer before she entered college, she went out with six men she met online in rapid succession, the last of whom raped her. “It was a very traumatic experience,” she told me. She has now been celibate for 11 months. After getting divorced, Tobey — a mother of two in her mid-40s from Boston who has been celibate for around a year — dated more than 50 men over a two-year period (she kept track) to get back in the game but then got into a violent relationship she had to escape. Em, a 30-year-old woman who lives in Ireland, says being molested as a child meant her inner monologue was dominated by self-criticism. She had a male voice in her head deciding whether she qualified for happiness that afternoon, she says, or if she should Google breast implants and eyelash extensions. This gradually faded after she became celibate.
Others I spoke with had sworn off men not because they were horrible but because they simply weren’t worth the time. Wading around in these conversations online, you’ll see a huge amount of therapy jargon — the terms healing and journey and protecting your energy pop up frequently — and a lot of people touting the physical and psychological benefits of refraining from sex the way others hype meditation or dopamine fasting. “I’ve never felt so at peace and so safe in my body,” Lainey said in her Instagram video in response to the Bumble ad. Others told me they feel less pressure to look nice when they go out or feel free from the drama of relationships. Makhaylah said her mood is no longer dictated by a love interest’s attention. “When I’m alone, I get to be more in tune with me,” she says. “Like my body, my emotions, how I feel. I regulate how I feel versus putting all of that on a man or a partner.”
And abstaining from sex, many say, has given them time for other pursuits. Makhaylah journals, while Tobey volunteers and focuses on being a present parent. “I got in the best shape I’ve ever been in, made more time for my friends, joined a cookbook club, and I’m taking tremendous care of my health,” Em told me. For a while, she swore off masturbating as well (most people I spoke to were enthusiastic about it) because she didn’t want to fantasize about men. But she has since started again, often “to music and sometimes the sound of rain.” She sees it as a return to the innocent sexual exploration of her youth: “It’s simply a trick I can perform that feels nice, and most importantly it’s mine.”
The new celibates don’t see their decision as a throwback to previous eras in which women were expected to be virginal. They view themselves as pushing back against the compulsory sexuality of the past decades and exercising their right to choose an unconventional lifestyle. Even those who don’t broadcast their sexual activities or lack thereof on TikTok are heartened that celibacy has taken center stage. “I haven’t really talked about it,” Tobey told me, but “it doesn’t feel shameful. I’ve also heard that Gen Z is having much less sex than previous generations, so maybe we’re all just having less sex all together and it’s just taking up less mental space.” She thinks this is a good thing: “I remember that period vividly in the early 2000s when Sex and the City was really popular, where it felt like there was so much pressure to have sex and you were a loser if you didn’t have an active sex life.”
Some were more circumspect. While Em says she personally finds being celibate “wonderful,” she thinks the trend should be seen as an overall negative because it’s indicative of our broken cultural attitudes toward sex. “We’ve made sex transactional, predatory, competitive, and punitive,” she told me. “It’s no mystery more and more women in particular are revoking their candidacy.” Still, it seems unlikely that this new version of celibacy will provoke major change, as some suggested to me, especially as the major motivator for most people seems personal, rather than political. And contrary to how big a trend the algorithm says celibacy is, most younger people I spoke to said they feel hookup culture is alive and well among their peer group. When Makhaylah got to college two years ago, she was surprised to discover that most girls she met were not interested in celibacy at all. “So honestly, it’s looking like it’s only a me thing,” she says.
Em was one of the only people I spoke to who said they plan to be celibate long term. Most expressed some sadness about missing out on romance and companionship and said if they found someone great, they would reconsider their stance. A few said they would wait longer to have sex to ensure a potential partner was truly committed. “If I don’t feel like I can trust you with my whole heart, my whole being? Oh, absolutely not,” Makhaylah says. “And then on top of that, even if I do feel like I can trust you, I’m gonna wait just a little bit longer just to see if you stay for anything else other than having sex with me.” Until then, there are always vibrators.
While it’s often thought that periods of deprivation lead to greater pleasure in the long run, like the woman who savors a glass of wine that much more after Dry January, most people I spoke to seemed pretty indifferent to the idea of the act of sex. “I’m saying this as a very sexual person,” Lainey told me, “but it is out of sight, out of mind.” Tobey agreed: “I haven’t really missed it. I think there are lots of ways to be turned on in life, and sex is only one of them.”
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