When she saw Bumble’s recent anti-celibacy ad campaign, Lainey Molnar felt like she was being mocked, and she was angry. The dating app had just revealed billboards reading “Celibacy is not the answer” and “Thou shalt not give up dating and become a nun.” The backlash of what became known as the “Bumble fumble” was quick, and within weeks, the company had taken down the ads and apologized. Still, Molnar, a voluntarily celibate 35-year-old who posted a response to the campaign on Instagram, wasn’t satisfied.
She said in the video, “It seems like women’s boundaries over our bodily autonomy are so threatening to the entire concept of dating that they need to put up billboards to stop us. At least we’re being seen, I guess?” Molnar has a difficult romantic history. In her early 20s, she was in a long-term relationship with a man who was abusive and demanded sex daily. After it ended, she went through a promiscuous phase that lasted roughly a year, in part, she believes, to feel she had some agency over her body. “I was like a freight train,” she says. “I had no sense of my body. I didn’t own it anymore.” Over the next ten years, she dated around, usually unhappily, and suffered from chronic UTIs from intercourse.
She encountered the idea of celibacy in a TikTok post about sex being an “exchange of energy” between two people, one that should be treated with caution, and she was intrigued. Though she’d had gaps between relationships in the past, her choice to step away this time was more deliberate; she has now been celibate for two years. She didn’t go into it with a firm plan or the intent to make a lifelong decision, but she has very clear guidelines. “My rules are that I do not engage in any partnered intimacy unless it is exclusive or committed,” she says. She is, however, in a relationship with herself: She has a ring tattoo where an engagement ring would traditionally. Plenty of people like Molnar, mainly women, in contrast to the angrier, male-dominated incel community, are eager to call themselves celibate.
Today, celebrities, including Khloé Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson, and Tiffany Haddish, have touted the benefits of celibacy. Melissa Febos, the author of, among other books, a lauded memoir about her time as a dominatrix, is coming out with another memoir next year called The Dry Season, about a year of conscious celibacy. Other women are celebrating their dry seasons, too, even to the point of competitiveness. Lainey embraces the word celibate, though others are less enthusiastic owing to its religious connotations. They prefer to say they are “decentering men” or “boysober.”
While it’s often thought that periods of deprivation lead to greater pleasure in the long run, like the woman who savors a glass of wine that much more after Dry January, most people are pretty indifferent to the idea of the act of sex. Molnar said, “I’m saying this as a very sexual person, but it is out of sight, out of mind.”