Celibacy Martin

I'm always thrown for a loop when asked why I wouldn't have sex. I don't have any great sexual urges, so the act of mutual membrane-agitation seems so arbitrary: the question makes little more sense than "Why not regularly stand in a big tub of yoghurt?" I can be impressed -moved, even- by a woman's beauty, but I fail to make the connection between that and a need to do something to her. When you see a beautiful flower, you don't need to go up to it and lick it, do you?

To be comfortable as a celibate, I had to go through very gradual process of throwing away the preconceptions about sexuality I had been brought up with. That process started after adolescence and has continued to the present (I'm in my mid-twenties). I had readily absorbed the idea from the surrounding culture that the whole quality of your life depends on sex. I gradually saw through this and eventually realised the benefit of being celibate: I no longer regard myself as "on the hunt" and women as potential "quarry". At university I was on a male-only floor and got to know every little aspect of the love lives of some very heterosexual blokes. The fact that they seemed pretty sad and unsatisfied even when they were getting what they were after convinced me that missing out on sex maybe isn't a great loss.

On that theme, it seems to me that all the pleasure associated with sex seems to be the pleasure of delicious expectation. Whether you get any real pleasure out of the exercise seems to be irrelevant. Ever been to a party which was actually quite uneventful, where nothing really good happened, but everyone was really excited and hyped up because it was a party? It's just my (rather uninformed) perception that sexual pleasure works like that.

I wish I'd had a celibate role-model in my late teens: when my reactions to women did not match the reactions of my more heterosexual friends, my first reaction was that there must be something wrong with me. Eventually I realised that society disproportionately reflects the attitudes of very sexual people. That's one reason why I'm so openly celibate right now.