Is abstinence the new sexual liberation?

What women are finding when they take sex off the table.

Laura Roscioli is a Melbourne-based sex writer and host of the podcast The Sex That Changed My Life. Her monthly column on Fashion Journal is here to make sex (and the conversations around it) more accessible and open-minded. She believes the best learning comes from lived experience, and she’s here to share hers – and other people’s – with you.

We’re the horniest we’ve ever been and we’re not having any sex. This is the headline I keep hearing and it’s making me sad, but also curious. Why are we not having sex? Is abstaining the answer?

I’ve never gone through a period of sexual celibacy myself, but I’ve also not been single in the current era of online dating slop, so I don’t know if I’m qualified to comment. Not only have we hit an apparently dismal point when it comes to dating culture, but women are also finally being horny out loud.

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We have sex toys that cater specifically to female pleasure. We have characters from smutty romance novels gracing our screens that we’re free to loudly drool over on social media. We have more knowledge and language to talk about our sexual desires openly than ever before.

So it makes sense that with all of this newfound sexual liberation, we’re also readjusting our priorities. We’re asking ourselves: What kind of sex do I actually want to have? Rather than simply: Who’s DTF?

Before I met my current boyfriend, I was pretty over having sex for the sake of it. I had been in a prolonged casual sex era from my late teens to my early twenties, and my love affair with various situationships was finding its natural finish line.

By the time I reached 28, I was ready to not be treated like shit anymore. By a boyfriend or anyone. I remember thinking one night after sleeping with a sexy man in his mid-twenties who had failed to text me after I’d spent hours naked with him: The audacity! So who’s to say that I wouldn’t have taken some time off?

My friend and fellow writer Cait Burke did. After years of dating, she reached a point where the endless cycle of apps, dates, sex, disappointment and starting all over again was making her miserable. Eventually, it got to the point where she just couldn’t do it anymore. “This is making me feel crazy. It’s making me feel upset. I feel anxious and sad all the time… I was not coping.”

Cait deleted the apps and stopped dating and having sex for nine months. She found that doing this allowed her to break the cycle of always chasing the idea of ‘The One’ and actually start living her life.

“It was just a time to go inward and figure out where maybe I had a role to play in the way my dating life was panning out,” she says. “I recalibrated, did some inner healing and got really clear on, like, what do I want out of dating? What do I want from a partner?”

Dee Salmin, author of It’s Not Love, Actually and Triple J presenter, had a similar experience. When Melbourne went into lockdown, she went “boy sober”. At first it was forced celibacy, until she realised she fucking loved it.

“The peace and happiness I felt was like nothing else,” she tells me. “All that energy I spent being anxious or sad or disappointed on men, I used on myself.”

She went to therapy. Journaled. Started new hobbies. Travelled solo. Made new friends. Studied. Grew her career. Basically, all of the energy that had previously been funnelled into men went somewhere else. Eventually, she got to a point where she was totally okay with the idea that she might be single for the rest of her life.

Weirdly, I relate to this feeling. Although I didn’t go ‘boy sober’ to get there, I think genuinely feeling content with being alone might actually be the key ingredient to finding love (an infinitely annoying cliché, I know).

I found peace in being alone through my desire to end a relationship. Realising I’d allowed my light to be dimmed by someone else’s insecurities created a visceral rage in me that was extremely helpful. I woke up one day and decided that if this was what a relationship looked like, I didn’t want it. It allowed me to deprioritise being in one, because I’d experienced a relationship that looked perfect from the outside, but didn’t make me happy.

Perhaps another way to do this is to remove yourself from the world of sex and dating entirely?

Jess Matthews calls her version of this a “boy detox”. She started experimenting with taking breaks from men, dating and sex in her twenties, despite, as she puts it, loving “men and sex” and believing in love and relationships.

“Having that time and space away from men helps to recenter yourself and put the energy back into yourself,” she says.
Similarly to Cait, Jess found that removing sex from the equation removed the distraction of constantly wondering who might come next. “It just cuts out a lot of the noise, right? You’re really forced to sit with yourself.”

Okay, so maybe abstinence gives you clarity. I can see that. But do we actually need to stop having sex to get it? As a sex writer, I like to live in a world that feels erotic and indulgent, where I can lust after things and people and moments of connection without it all being attached to marriage, kids or male validation. That, to me, feels empowering.

And a big part of that is having sex. Not all of it, though. Eroticism is so much more than the act of bodies intertwining. It’s a lifestyle choice. But sex sits at the epicentre, like the big cartoon cloud in the middle of a mind map.

I guess I’m afraid that if we’re not engaging with sex, we’ll forget how to be horny. That we’ll become more susceptible to control and restraint than indulgence and enjoyment. Eroticism, at its core, is really about noticing things, relishing them, feeling it all. We need that kind of presence and connection now more than ever.

But I also understand the need for a reset, especially if you’re a woman who dates men. When I put a callout online asking women why they were abstaining from sex, the answers ranged from “too many disappointing men,” to simply: “returning to myself post-separation.”

What stood out to me was how little it seems to be about a lack of desire. These women weren’t saying “I don’t want sex”. A lot of them seem to be saying they don’t want the kind of sex that leaves them feeling uncared for. Sex with people they don’t trust. Sex that becomes another avenue for disappointment. Sex they’re having because they’re lonely, distracted, looking for validation or hoping it might turn into something else.

I’ve come to realise, through talking to so many women who have taken sex and dating off the table, that celibacy isn’t necessarily the opposite of sexual liberation. It can actually be a tool for getting closer to your own sexuality, particularly if the sex you’d been having had become more about being desired, chosen, validated or simply participating in the dating cycle than your own desires.

Keep up with Laura here.