Hephzibah Anderson - Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex

Table of Contents

Stuart Dybek, We Didnt

MIRANDA: I cant have dinner with you;
I dont even know you!
BARTENDER: But you slept with me!
MIRANDA: Thats a different thing.

When you decide to give up sex and begin a year of chastity, its not something you rush to tell people. In a supersexualized society that uses orgasms to sell shampoo and produces pole-dancing kits for kids, in which a sensual account of brother-sister incest goes unremarked upon in a respected broadsheet and even online avatars are having affairs, opting out feels like the last conceivable taboo. In my own case, Id assumed I was retreating into a more private sphere. It never occurred to me to blog about my quest, and the book you are holding in your hands was an idea that arrived late in the journey. For a while, I didnt tell my friends, either. When I did tentatively step out of my chaste closet, I found that others didnt quite see it the same way. In fact, they felt licensed to ask all sorts of questions that theyd ordinarily have kept to themselves.

What do you do? wondered one girl, squinting at me in disbelief. Masturbationis that allowed? an older male friend wanted to know, leaning closer and flashing a red-wine grin. Is it because of me? asked a guy whod once invited me home with him (I hadnt taken him up on the offer, but maybe he was muddling me up with a girl who had). And then there was the question that came up most oftenwhat did I have planned for my years end? As an ex put it, There has to be some kind of payoff, right? If there was going to be a party, nobody wanted to miss it.

The question I heard least frequently was the only one Id really been anticipating: why? Plenty of people, I would realize, have thought about hopping off the sexual merry-go-round. Sex and its pursuit seem to have become such blood sports, their rules so confusing and their standards so exacting, that it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether its worth it. At the same time, sexiness is so ubiquitous, it has become a bit of a turnoff. In the past decade, everything from political dossiers to ballroom dancing has been sexed up. You neednt even be getting any to feel jaded, and thats perhaps part of the problem: its not so much sex thats everywhere, but a toned, tanned, airbrushed pastiche that verges on neutering and has less and less to do with the real thing.

Id thought those thoughts once or twice, but it would never have occurred to me that Id actually go ahead and voluntarily eject sex from my life. It took a bizarre serendipity, a torrid affair and a chance anecdote to make me realize that the kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a postfeminist, twenty-first-century Western womana casual sort of intimacy without intimacywas not working for me. To explain fully, I need to beckon you back in time to a sunny afternoon in New York City. But first, those other questions.

What do I do? It turns out that there is much that doesnt involve sex. It is impossible for a human being to endure more than three days without water. With water but no food, you might make it to three weeks. Shelter and warmth are additional necessities, sunlight a boon, and peace and love will ease your years. But one thing not remotely essential is sex, though youd never guess it from the material that bombards you whenever you switch on the telly, flip through a magazine or delete another screenful of spam. All right, in most circumstances its still just about required for lifes perpetuation, but we can lead perfectly healthy and, indeed, happy existences without nooky, whoopee or bonking. People canand dogo decades without sex. Some live their entire lives without it.

While the birds and the bees and the penguins on the rocks are busy doing it, nuns, mystics and athletes-in-training have found plenty else to be getting on with, and they arent the only ones. Elizabeth I was known as the Virgin Queen, and there was nothing metaphorical about the title, history assures us. Gandhi became celibate at age thirty-six, despite still being married. (What his wife thought of thisor of his late-life decision to test his resolve by sharing his bed with a procession of nubile young girlsis not recorded.) The Shakers even founded a faith based around chastity. Interviewed on the eve of her 105th birthday in October 2008, Cornwall resident Clara Meadmore attributed her longevity to having remained a virgin. On the subject of relationships, she added, I imagine there is a lot of hassle involved and I have always been busy doing other things.

But I dont think this was what my friend had in mind when she asked me what I did. Where did I draw the line, she meant, which segues neatly into that second question: was I intending to pass up all sexual pleasure? One of my motivations for embracing chastity was a sense that sex had grown impersonalthat it was nothing more than a game of tennis, as a thirtysomething marketing whiz insisted to me while I was researching a magazine article on casual sex. More than what hed said, it was his tone that got me: matter-of-fact, without any frisson of joy. He wasnt even trying to shock.

Ive never been any good at tennis, whether on grass, clay or high-thread-count Egyptian cotton. Yet I felt like I was the one at fault, so I kept trying. Sometimes my decision to have sex seemed to be based more on what was appropriate to the moment than on what was right for me. At a certain point in certain scenarios, a part of me abdicated and gave in to the inevitable. Tipsily noticing that it was after midnight and I was far from home, say, in a dwindling group that happened to include a man Id found myself in bed with sometime before. That was intense, hed said afterward, as if intensity were something unexpected in sex. But it was intense, and whichever bit of me had abdicated, it was never my heart. Wouldnt it be fun to have sex that was purely, deliciously physical? It would certainly smooth some of the more tempestuous aspects of dating, but at the same time I secretly dreaded that I might finally get the hang of bedroom tennis. Once youve learned to separate sex from emotion, how simple is it to put them back together?

So when it came to making rules for my experiment, they were unabashedly personal. What Id discovered was that I could deal with any amount of orgasmic foreplay along the way, but it was last basewhat sex-ed instructors brave sniggers to term penile penetrationthat tipped me over the edge. I had given something of myself, and accordingly, that was the moment at which I started needing more than I might ever have wanted from the man in question, the moment he went in my eyes from being an unassuming frog to being a shiny prince.

It seemed illogicalpossibly also biological, psychological, sociological. And yes, it had to do with numbers as wellthose tallies we each carry around with us, inscribed in our minds (because they dont always belong in our hearts) in the faintest pencil lest anyone see them. Mine is a greater number than Id like and contains some names Id rather forget. I wont tell you exactly what it is, because a note of coyness here seems more instructive: while were no longer supposed to be judged for our sexual conduct, we all know that the double standard lingers on. Even if men have got over it, we women have not. A tiny bit of me cant help judging myself, nor, presumably, can those women who consistently shave their own tallies in sex surveys. Perhaps its just that we know that not every one of those strikes is without regret; that as we count them off, we pause over this one or that, recalling how the fun was seasoned with something that made us feel less good about ourselves. Liberated women that we are, well blame Victorian morality and its outmoded, repressive moreswell blame ourselves for succumbing and well deny our feelings. Because penile-penetrative sex is what it took for me to add to that list, it was also where I drew my line. (And put in such blunt termswell, it didnt sound all that desirable anyway.)