Here's a news flash in case you missed it: Lady Gaga has quit having sex. "I'm celibate," she recently told Britain's Daily Mail. "Celibacy's fine." Her reason? Quite simply that she's single and so she doesn't feel the need to bonk a random for the sake of it. "It's OK not to have sex," she said, "It's OK to get to know people." Indeed it is. Yet, while her anti-sex declaration might seem at odds with her overtly sexual image, raunchy outfits and habit of gyrating on stage to lyrics so crude that some countries have blocked them from their airwaves, it seems she's not the only one going on a sexual diet.
Serial singletons the world over, who are tired of all the emotionless romps, seem no longer to enjoy casual sex, random encounters or drunken escapades in the name of a little "ooh ahh" as they once did. While it was once deemed to be "liberating", "empowering" and orgasmic to do the dirty with someone you just met at a bar, it has turned into Groundhog Day with forgotten names, awkward goodbyes and emergency STD tests the following day ...
That's why, along with Gaga, a coterie of women in New York City have decided to jump on the celibacy bandwagon. "No sex!" is their new motto, the New York Post newspaper reported. And leading the way is dating blogger Julia Allison, who, after being a serial dater for way too long, has decided to dump all dates and sex for as long as it takes.
She writes in Lifecast on NonSociety.com that it took cancelling four dates with three guys to realise that there was a reason she kept not wanting to go out. "It had nothing to do with the men themselves ... Honestly, sometimes a girl just needs a break."
But, said the Post, if you thought that holding off was hard in your city, try saying no in New York where "men declare frustration over having to wait more than one date for sex" and where "hooking up is as simple as waiting for a train. Or showing up for a job interview." Yeouch.
Yet it seems that, where there's a celibate will, there's a way. So said a woman by the name of Hephzibah Anderson, who decided to go sex-free for a year after spotting her ex-boyfriend coming out of a jewellery store with a hot blonde.
She chronicled her sexless journey in a book titled Chastened: No More Sex in the City and said that, without sex, men began to treat her differently. Instead of the blokes getting turned off, she received flowers, offers of home-cooked dinners and plenty of romantic gestures.
"At other moments during the year, men offered to carry me over puddles, and sent me poetic emails. I even received a marriage proposal - a jokey one, but still, it was a first."
No wonder she found herself wondering: "Were our grandmothers on to something when they held out in order to coax men into wooing and even wedding them?" Perhaps they were. Sex as a bargaining chip? Maybe not such a bad idea after all.
Anderson also says there was a shift in the type of men she was attracting.
"Because sex was out of the question, I wanted someone I could talk to. Instead of flirtatiousness, I looked for unglamorous traits like loyalty and kindness," she writes.
While she admits there were moments of intense "physical longing" during her chaste year, she realised it wasn't for sex, but "for companionship, affection, the joy of knowing that you've found someone to accompany you through life".
Her ending? You'll have to read the book to find out. But, either way, her story, Gaga and the New York women have got me wondering: is having no sex such a bad idea?
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