Polyamory? Celibacy? Today’s sexual politics reveals much about the way we live

A rise in both seemingly opposing choices adds a layer of confusion to the way we conduct our most intimate lives

Three years ago, around this time as summer came with its wasps and heat, I wrote about the return of sex. We were just leaving lockdown – do you remember those days? Of hope and fear, when we had spent many months considering things like the importance and nuance of touch, the mysteries that were other people, the many conflicting facts of a strange, warm body? The adult world was preparing to step feverishly out of its house into the arms, beds and cars of other people, soft and diabolically gorgeous in a way only a pandemic really allows; their minds were dirty though their hands had never been so clean. And then, well, nothing.

As this summer finally arrives and we drag our bare legs through the thick yellow air, newspapers all over the world are breathlessly reporting the rise of celibacy. Yesterday, I sat on a step in the garden, among the strawberries we planted in lockdown, and my phone overheated as I scrolled through the memoirs of women who gave up sex, the articles on the politics of celibacy, the new descriptive terms, like “boysober”, the apologies from dating app Bumble after they mocked it, running ads that read, “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun.” Lenny Kravitz made an announcement about his own sexual abstinence, explaining, “It’s a spiritual thing”, and Julia Fox said, “With the overturning of Roe v Wade and our rights being stripped away from us, [celibacy] is a way that I can take back the control. I just don’t feel comfortable until things change.”

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