The Misogyny of Intentional Male Celibacy

Men and women abstain for very different reasons.

Celibacy is having a moment. The other day, I stumbled across the results of a new survey conducted by the dating app Flure that found that 59 percent of adults had tried or considered celibacy. The #celibacy hashtag is trending on TikTok, too.

The reasons for intentional celibacy vary drastically by gender, however. As we know from popular movements like 4B and Boy Sober, female celibacy is often a response to oppression. Many women refuse sex because their libido has dropped due to a build-up of marital resentment, because they are sick of being treated like the lesser sex, or because their sexual needs aren’t being met by their partner.

Of course women will stop wanting sex if their needs aren’t being met or even considered. Recently, I had sex with someone who orgasmed before me and then gave a resigned sigh when I said I wanted one too. When men do consider female pleasure, it’s often out of a sense of obligation rather than true interest. That’s ….. really not sexy.

Compared with women, the discourse around voluntary male celibacy is almost the exact opposite. Men who join popular anti-ejaculation movements like NoFap or No Nut November are choosing to eschew masturbation, pornography and/or sex because they’re experiencing too much pleasure. Saying no, for them, is about replacing hedonism with self-discipline. They’ve been living in a world that is so focused on satisfying their sexual needs that they have literally gotten consumed by it.

On the popular anti-masturbation subreddit r/NoFap, for instance, one male user laments that it’s all too easy to “indulge myself and waste a couple hours in lustful pursuits.” For men, in part thanks to the abundance of porn, sexual indulgence is so easy it’s become a societal problem. As a friend of mine put it, “what a privilege to have your sexuality be so catered to that you have to start a movement to not get off.”

It gets worse, though, because the “self-discipline” these men are hoping to achieve is really just a code word for male power and (ugh) masculine energy. Life optimization bros like Tim Ferriss and Andrew Huberman have said that abstinence results in higher testosterone levels, which, apparently, is something all men should want. God forbid guys not have androgens coursing through their veins at all times! The degree to which men obsess over biologically differentiating themselves from women makes it all too clear who they believe to be the lesser sex.

It’s no coincidence that the men who advocate against masturbation include The Proud Boys’ founder Gavin McInnes as well as David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. (Maybe Mark Zuckerberg should start banning employee ejaculation to build up more workplace “masculine energy.”)

But it’s not just that these men believe they are better than women — it’s that men (and their semen) are also considered magical. Chris Bale, a self-described “energy worker,” runs “sexual energy cultivation and semen retention workshops” designed “for any man who is wanting to understand his masculine potency & how to apply it.” NoFap founder Alexander Rhodes has said that the movement is for men who want to “to seize control of [their] sexuality and turn it into superpowers.”

According to the New Statesman:

The origin point of No Nut November came from pick-up artist and conspiracy theory sites – ones where the forums’ influential leaders argued that there was some inherent power in men that could be “focused” by not masturbating….such as the idea that semen has magical properties, and by storing up as much of it as possible men will become more attractive to women.

I love the irony — men stop ejaculating in order to have more sex. But it’s not just that abstaining will make them more attractive; it’s that abstaining will give them sexual power and control, which they can then wield over women. As one guy wrote on r/NoFap, after eschewing ejaculation, women “look me in the eye longer than normal, smile at me, move closer to me, don't move when I stand closer to them.” Gross.

I’m not saying that every celibate guy is a creep. There are plenty of non-sexist reasons men might decide to stop masturbating or having sex. But the rhetoric of the broader intentional male celibacy movement — and the simple fact that men feel overwhelmed by the degree to which our culture caters to their sexual pleasure — is certainly worth highlighting, especially when you consider women’s vastly different experiences.

Women refuse sex in part because they want to be treated as human beings, not sex objects. Many men abstain because they want to tap into their superhuman qualities to wield more power over the women they consider sex objects. I can’t say it’s surprising to me that men feel so entitled. If my needs and desires had been catered to my whole life, I might feel superhuman, too.