Although I’ve yet to determine Idiot Parade’s exact purview, I can confidently claim that it is not and will never be a publication about contemporary sexual culture. This isn’t because I’m anti-sex. Sex is fine. It’s an indispensable part of life and art, and I genuinely enjoy writing about it through the lens of the latter. But on the whole I would just rather write about other things, which is easy considering I don’t particularly care for current sexual mores anyway.
This is also why, late last summer and after spending multiple pages of my diary essentially saying I wonder if this energy would be better spent elsewhere eighty different ways, I quit sex altogether. I deleted the dating apps off my phone and promised myself that, barring some serendipitous rom-com meet-cute, I would not date, not look to date, and not have sex until further notice. It came as a bigger relief than anticipated. I was—and remain—uninterested in being treated like dogshit. And the simple truth is that it’s very difficult to have heterosexual sex as a woman in today’s cultural climate without that happening.
Turns out I was ahead of the curve. Women consciously abstaining from sex is the hot new thing. We’re calling it going “boysober.” First coined by comedian Hope Woodard on TikTok, boysobriety has made it to the New York Times, CNN, the Times of London, you name it. Its adherents insist that it’s not celibacy, and given celibacy’s monastic and mass shooter associations I absolutely understand why, but boysobriety is also not not celibacy, in that its central tenet is the conscious abstaining from sex. But, according to Woodard’s viral TikTok, true boysobriety (not unlike, dare we say, traditional chastity) is achieved not only in deed but in thought: “You’re not single if someone is taking up your brain space.”
As a trend, boysobriety is a direct response to the dominant dating model of our ongoing era, a.k.a. the situationship. A situationship is a relationship in which you do couple-y things—have sex, cuddle, hang out, even argue—without labeling it as such or demanding exclusivity or monogamy. The overarching idea is that you enjoy the benefits of a relationship without the responsibilities of agreed-upon commitment, thus leaving you able to end it without guilt the moment the next and presumably better person comes along. The first person to insist upon semantic clarity and sexual monogamy loses.
In her latest essay on Many Such Cases, Magdalene J. Taylor calls the situationship “a sign of our mass immaturity, our inability to feel things honestly and wholeheartedly.” I agree, but at the risk of doing a little women’s agency erasure, I’m having trouble with the first person plural. Like hookup culture before it, the situationship caters first and foremost to straight men’s gratification. It lays bare their immaturity. The responsibility-free sexual companionship of the situationship is the descendant of “sowing your wild oats,” that centuries-old socially permissible phase of sexual libertinism and promiscuity allowed and even expected of young men. Put another way: there’s a reason the girls are calling it boysober and not celibacy. The sex itself isn’t the problem. The boys are.
The boys, it bears mentioning, did it first. MGTOW (short for Men Going Their Own Way) and male-dominated incel and volcel (voluntary celibate) communities have long thrived on the internet, primarily inhabited by far-right men who feel feminism has deprived them of sex by turning women into bitter misandrist crones and/or heartless money-chasing bimbos who only put out for alpha males. Without countenancing the manosphere’s trademark misogyny, I’d argue that MGTOW and its associated subcultures were a fairly predictable reaction to the weirdly open misandry of the cultural moment that brought us the girlboss, the MALE TEARS mugs, and books like How To Date Men When You Hate Men.
Whether or not that misandry was warranted, it was most certainly performative. Women bought the mugs and used the vocabulary of man-hating but did very little that could be classified as actual female separatism. Boysobriety was nowhere amidst the girlbossing and mansplain-scolding. Andrea Dworkin did not shoot to the top of the bestseller lists. Man-hating snark, despite setting the tone of 2010s commercial feminism, eventually went out of style, relegated to the back of the proverbial closet with the pink pussy hats and the “Nevertheless She Persisted” t-shirts.
That the cultural acceptability and appeal of female celibacy (sorry, boysobriety) is rising well after pop feminism’s man-hating heyday is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this shift. Boysobriety isn’t rooted in misandry, and the boysober will tell you this outright. In one TikTok tagged #boysober, user marial0vesy0u begins, “I literally fucking cannot deal with men anymore. I hate them,” before immediately doubling back and saying, “I obviously don’t hate men, but I do hate the whole courting in 2024. I just don’t like the way it works. I don’t have the brainpower to hold a situationship anymore.”
Boysobriety is remarkable because it refutes what I’ll call the Lysistrata model. The Lysistrata model is the idea that (non-religious) female celibacy is always a tactic women use to achieve their own ends. In other words, female celibacy is the deliberate withholding of sex from a man, consciously enacted as a way to get what she wants from him or otherwise make him suffer. In this understanding of the sexual marketplace, which Freddie deBoer calls the deprivation model, men are takers who want sex and women are givers who don’t want to provide it. Framed in these models, female celibacy exists solely to deprive men.
And yet the #boysober tag is replete not with schemes to make those boys pay but the language of self-care. Women describe going boysober primarily for their own mental and emotional health and for their own self-preservation. In contrast to the Lysistrata and deprivation models, these women readily accept that they are sexual creatures with inborn sexual desires. But they’ve also had enough, and they’re choosing celibacy for its own sake.
None of this reflects well on contemporary sexual culture, to put it lightly. A growing cohort of young women who enjoy and desire sex are choosing celibacy not as a way to get something out of men but because the emotional price of having sex has become too high. These women have engaged in the dominant sexual model of the situationship and found it so detrimental to their lives that they feel the only remaining option is to bow out for an extended period of time. Can we all, just for a moment, recognize how insanely bad sexual culture had to get for an entire group of women in their sexual prime to say, “Screw this, I’m out,” even temporarily?!
Despite my own withdrawal from the dating pool and its discontents, I still occasionally wonder if boysobriety is one more nail in the sexual revolution coffin, which is already so far underground at this point that we really ought to quit hammering. But mostly I think it’s a net neutral for society, a logical enough reaction to years of dating apps begetting situationships, swindling men and women alike into thinking someone even better is always a swipe away, and that to love the one you’re with is to rob yourself of the Actually Right Person waiting just around the digital corner. I remain convinced, however, that the situationship is a net negative that has held on specifically because of its disproportionate servicing of male desires. The proof is in the female revolt against it.
If that makes me an advocate for going boysober, so be it. If young women’s options are either going boysober or feeling “That feeling” in another soul-sucking situationship that ends in despair, then I’m all for the former. I’m not sure what the secret third thing will end up being—a return to some version of sexual normalcy in which relationships are relationships and hooking up is hooking up?—but I know it can’t be worse than this.