New book about chasity, “Chastened: No More Sex in The City.”

Read full article in Guardian UK by Hephzibah Anderson

The physical withdrawal is acute at times, but it passes. Now I can see that sex was a distraction that allowed me to ignore pretty much everything else in my life that wasn’t quite what it should or could have been. I became fixated on relationships to the exclusion of friendships, family, any sense of where I was headed.

The question I heard least frequently was the only one I’d really been anticipating: why? Plenty of people, I came to realise, have thought about hopping off the sexual merry-go-round. Sex, and its pursuit, seems to have become such a blood sport, its rules so confusing and its standards so exacting, that it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether it’s worth it. At the same time, sexiness is so ubiquitous it has become a bit of a turn-off.

One of my motivations for embracing chastity was a sense that sex had grown impersonal. Sometimes my decision to have sex seemed to be based more on what was appropriate to the moment than on what was right for me. At a certain point in certain scenarios, a part of me abdicated and gave in to the inevitable. Tipsily noticing that it was after midnight and I was far from home, say, in a dwindling group that happened to include a man I’d found myself in bed with some time before. But whichever bit of me had abdicated, it was never my heart, and I secretly dreaded that I might finally learn to separate sex from emotion.

~ by mentalimaging on June 23, 2009.