This article is taken from Vanity Fair number 50 on newsstands until December 16
Having sex often, and good. One of the wellness mantras we grew up with is about to fall. Emmanuelle Richard, a thirty-five-year-old French author, is convinced of this The abstinent bodies he reversed the issue, becoming a case in France. Starting from his story: “I had a chat with those who, like me, no longer make love,” read the original subtitle. The result is about forty stories of ordinary people – who normally don’t talk about it – who tell in detail the absence of shared sex, neither suffered nor for religious reasons.
Why is it taboo to talk about sexual abstinence? Why are we ashamed?
«Because in the collective imagination this means not practicing it at all, as if masturbation did not exist. Since the 1970s and the sexual revolution, we have gradually gone from a liberation – which, incidentally, has only benefited men – to an injunction, the obligation to “be satisfied” in intimate life. It has even become an indicator of happiness and good health … ».
Doesn’t being abstinent also have a negative connotation?
«Also: it associates de facto abstinence from both a lack of opportunity and a great loneliness, an idea of ​​failure … Instead I discovered, talking to many people, that it is often a conscious and happy choice ».
Who is the “abstinent”?
«Anyone who does not conform to a whole series of obligations: to be in a couple, to enjoy everything, always, and not just sexually. In the consumerist, capitalist society that we know well, the true rebel of our age is the abstinent ».
She writes that she never imagined she would be abstinent for five years, still as a young man. Is it a finite period?
“Let’s say I am most of the time, few people attract me, and the unconnected sexual experience interests me less and less, even though I am able to radically separate sex and feelings, which does not happen to most people. : this aspect that emerged from my research surprised me very much ».
What attracts you?
“I start with what I don’t like: there are so many things that repel me, by now, in the behavior of cisgender men with respect to sexuality – machismo, brutality – even as regards the sum of burdens that weigh only on the shoulders of women, from contraception to treatment, which I hardly even experience as abstinence anymore. Simply, sex is usually absent. Without lack “.
Don’t you like the men of today?
«It is a complex speech. Long story short, sex with patriarchal men – male domination produces unloving men en masse – is super boring, basic, yucky. They do not know their body, and since they are no longer the only masters of sexuality, since it is no longer their exclusive good, they are puritanical, frightened, in panic. Many men spend their time sexualizing every slightest exchange, opening their mouths (and here I am thinking of street harassment) to tell how they will rape women or what they will do to their bodies, but as soon as they find themselves face to face with a person who does not fear them , they are afraid ».
No hope?
“Luckily someone gets lost, often they are those who have been raised, or in any case have been surrounded by women. But it is still a minority. Today, what excites me is respect, kindness, sweetness. Equality. I can’t wait for our values ​​to change and for us to move towards new masculinities, and indeed it is happening ».
She tells of 20 percent of happy, longtime couples who no longer have sex. Yet he only found one man, Paul, who confessed to it.
“He was the only one to talk about it, but it is very likely that the official figure of 20 percent is actually higher. The question is so taboo, that such a thing is really difficult to confess, even if in the new generations it seems to me that something is starting to move in this direction. Asexuality has normalized, for example. If we talk about it, we know that there are people who do not feel any carnal desire. It seems to me that in younger people sexual orientation is less and less perceived as an identity, it is simply a taste. A few years ago it was unthinkable ».
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