Are You There, God? It's Me, Celibate
Jennifer Stewart's West Texas college was known for its commitment to conservatism and its high concentration of STDs.
I’m a grown woman and I haven’t had sex since the Obama administration.
My last romp was towards the end of the era of hope and change, the only consolation prize after that awful day in New York when people had to pack up their Hillary Clinton/I’m With Her posters in collective shock and grief. I had sex with two guys in as many weeks. I felt powerful and interesting. And then that was it.
I believed I was the only freakazoid out there with a pussy so deserted my legs would audibly creak if someone tried to open them. I imagine if Miss Frizzle and The Magic School Bus took a trip to my vagina, they'd see it's all boarded up with jagged NO TRESPASSING signs.
‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ was double underlined in every Bible I owned. I checked scriptures the way you check the refrigerator when you’re hungry and expect new food to show up if you keep opening the door enough times.
On a summer day in Houston, over the sound of sizzling, attention-seeking fajitas, I found out a good friend also hasn’t had sex in years. “Sex… what’s that?” she laughed as the fajita steam further moistened her face. A few months later, in New York, with zero fajitas involved, another good friend confessed to going years without sex. Both are attractive, smart, and vibrant women. The Bible says something like, “When two or more are gathered.” I think that’s about faith and sex trends.
If the “Sex Diaries” feature in The Cut is a barometer, then every person with operable sex parts is having sex with at least three different people, sometimes simultaneously. Most of my millennial and Gen Z girlfriends are sex positive and talk openly in a way that was unimaginable when I was a twentysomething in the 2000s. But perception and reality are not aligned. Not only are women not having much sex, but we’re also not having pleasurable sex.
In The Pleasure Gap Katherine Rowland writes, “Between low desire, absent pleasure, genital pain, guilt, shame, quiet self-loathing, and viewing sex in terms of labor rather than lust, it would seem that we have increased sexual quantity without improving sexual quality.” My sexual quantity has dwindled down to zero because I’ve grown tired of looking for sexual quality.
My doubts about sex were lodged in my conscience as a young girl. Fastness—the term bestowed upon sexually active and/or sexualized black girls—seemed fun, scandalous, and overblown all at once. Reluctantly putting my raging hormones aside, I decided to wait for marriage. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was double underlined in every Bible I owned. I continued checking scriptures the same way you check the refrigerator when you’re hungry and expect new food to show up if you just keep opening the door enough times.
Eventually, I latched on to a decidedly better legal interpretation: sex before marriage may be biblically illegal but lustfulness, masturbation (of which I was already a veteran), and rounding the bases didn’t count if you stopped after third base, before hitting home, right? Right?! Right.
The summer before senior year, I gave one guy a handjob in a girls’ defunct restroom at our classical music conservatory but it was so transactional in nature that I struggle to count it as my first sexual experience. We made the arrangements over AIM like we were preparing for a parent-teacher conference.
My West Texas college was known for both its commitment to conservatism and its high concentration of STDs. I relished every hot moment I had to say, “No! I can’t!” to country boys who wanted to go all the way. Still, something told me I didn’t want to learn what sex felt like outside the confines of college.
One night I was hanging out at a house party with Brian, my impossibly cool coworker from the Gap. He motioned for me to keep him company while he smoked on the patio. When we weren’t at work, burdened by customers, we talked about the bands we loved and the shows we hoped to see. We loved driving around the vast South Plains listening to The Killers and screaming Sam’s Town tracks into the endless darkness that is the West Texas sky at night. I respected Brian and knew he respected me. We stood on the patio in the half light listening to the sound of distant dual mufflers ripping all over our flat town.
Watching his smoke vanish in the wind, I said, “Do you wanna have sex?”
He took one more drag, stomped out the rest of the cigarette, and said, “Let’s go.”
Lying on my back while Brian was having sex with me like a human jackhammer, I thought about the magazines I was going to read at Barnes & Noble later on. THIS is what was so forbidden?! I wanted my religious-sacrifice-money back. Years of warnings about the premarital sex boogeyman, only to find out firsthand that it was just… this?
A few months shy of college graduation, I met the ultimate country boy who’d become my husband. We loved each other deeply, but he struggled to make me orgasm. I expanded my catalogue of fake moans. Whenever he’d go down on me (with the frequency of a total solar eclipse), he winced and sighed like it was the greatest sacrifice.
And I just went along with it; no one talked about pleasure when we were growing up — not to me and not to him. Like most American boys born after 1980, he learned everything he knew from watching internet porn. Sex felt like a marriage tax.
My feminist awakening didn’t come from Audre Lorde, bell hooks, or Nikki Giovanni. They’d all come later. It was when fellow Houstonian church girl Beyoncé released her self-titled album that I realized capital F feminism wasn’t a white invention. I questioned my passively patriarchal assumptions about sex, love, and marriage as my own marriage eroded.
Less than a month after my estranged husband moved out, I hooked up with two people. The first one was fine but nagging, repeatedly asking, “Can we do butt stuff?” even though I told him no. Also, he seemed annoyed that I, a person who works in tech, didn’t care that he worked at Google.
Have you known the peace of going to your annual Well Woman’s exam with zero concerns about being pregnant or having STDs from a dude with no bed frame? There’s nothing like it.
The second boy was a chef. We made out as we walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, then had sex three times. More accurately, he had sex three times. I laid there and moaned. He went down on me, but he wasn’t good at it. I closed my legs on his head and said, “That’s enough,” then sexily suggested we call it night.
I journaled about it when I got home: “Do I feel guilty? Not at all. If anything, I’m more excited about my quest to come. Haha.”
That was in 2016. And here I am today, perimenopausal in 2025. I’ve survived the first Tr*mp presidency, a global pandemic, an earthquake in New York, and a host of other noteworthy events without having sex. I’m less weirded out by the fact that I haven’t had sex all this time and more weirded out by my undeniable contentment.
Adult homo sapiens physically, spiritually, and emotionally require sex. I’m a 40 year-old woman who should need sex, but I don’t. I am childless and I don’t like pets. I am a content, single lady. To 50 percent of the American electorate, I am a mutant. Steve Harvey would find my entire lifestyle appalling.
I have some suspicions as to what keeps me unbothered about being unpartnered. The world of sex has become dangerous to me. Risking revenge porn, being secretly filmed, or old fashioned murdered just for the prospect of mid-at-best intercourse? No thanks.
I also find the role of technology in intimacy to be disturbing. Last time I had an active sex life dick pics weren’t a thing. I haven’t typed nasty things into an electronic device since 1999 when I pretended to be 19/F/San Diego in pre-social media chat rooms.
Despite my misgivings about technology and sex, I have downloaded Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder dozens of times. Four days is my current record for keeping dating apps on my phone before deleting them and getting my life back. But last year I took matters into my own hands. I made an honest Hinge bio:
“Hi! I’m just here for safe, normal, and good sex. Please don’t be weird!”
Within minutes, my phone actually grew hot. There were hundreds of men saying, “Hey.” One guy’s message said, “I’ll send a car to pick you up.”
The volume of response was overwhelming and, frankly, dubious. Either the sex was going to be safe, normal, or good. I found it hard to believe all these men could supply all three.
My therapist suggested I reconsider keeping the bio so that I wouldn’t end up the main character of a Law & Order episode. I wish the odds of having consensual and mutually satisfying sex were higher, and limited to highly recommended people.
Do you or someone you know wanna have sex with me?
‘All this feminist body positivity,’ he told me with the tone fathers use to warn kids about the monster under their beds. ‘Keep going on about all that and you’ll end up alone! You don’t want that, do you?’
Here’s what my next sex partner must understand:
I’M NOT FAKING IT ANYMORE. Be prepared. I’ve been listening to Megan Thee Stallion all these forcibly chaste years, so trust and believe I now know I’m not obligated to fake it. Not even any introductory mood-setting moans! If I’m not feeling it, I’ll just collapse like Woody and Buzz Lightyear whenever humans enter the room.
DON’T TALK TOO MUCH. I’m an avid runner but this is why I don’t like running groups. Talking in… word couplets… is… annoying as hell.
NO WEIRD POSITIONS. I haven’t printed a Yoga With Adriene calendar since January 2020. Make it do what it do at 90 degrees.
YOUR PLACE, NOT MINE. I will be leaving afterwards. I have hobbies, a full life, and a full-size couch. I’m busy the next day. But do ask me if I want to hang out, as I like feeling needed.
This list has thrust me back to square one.
The pursuit of good sex requires effort — and any effort is too much. Sex is good, but have you ever taken a perfect Saturday afternoon nap while it’s raining outside? Have you ever driven across West Texas while listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell!? Sex is good, but have you ever read a good book, uninterrupted?
Have you known the peace of going to your annual Well Woman’s exam with zero concerns about being pregnant or having STDs from a dude with no bed frame? There’s nothing like it.
One night, for some twisted reason, I had drinks with a coworker who was full of Breitbart and conservative Caribbean machismo.
"All this feminist body positivity," he told me with the tone fathers use to warn kids about the monster under their beds. “Keep going on about all that and you’ll end up alone! You don’t want that, do you?”
I thought, well, yeah...that's better than this.
Well-meaning family and friends say, “You don’t want to die alone, do you?”
I think, do people know how dying works? You don’t get to take your partners with you.
If a man who can make me orgasm exists, he has to find me. Though I can’t be too sure since I oscillate between waiting to be found and saying to hell with it.
If we’re going to be wiped off the face of the earth by climate change, PFAS, nuclear bombs shot from space, or the National Guard, then maybe I should just do it. Maybe I should be more “you and me baby ain’t nothin but mammals but let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel” about things. Then again, I’ve waited all this time.
Jennifer Stewart has written for Texas Monthly, Electric Literature, Texas Highways, DAME, Runner’s World, and other outlets. She is a Texas Tech University and Columbia University graduate who currently lives in Houston.
Had me nearly spit out my coffee with laughter more than once. Sharply intelligent read and also incredibly relatable.
What a smart, funny, GREAT essay. I can relate so much. I like(d) sex. I miss it sometimes. But I no longer can be bothered. And do not even speak to me about a boyfriend, or a live-in partner who might upend my solitude and well-being.