Young people are reexamining their relationships with sex and dating amid a toxic online dating culture and an increasingly volatile gender divide, writes Anne Branigin.
Let’s talk about not having sex.
Some of our hottest celebs are not doing it. Julia Fox, Lenny Kravitz and Khloé Kardashian have all come
Enough women appeared to stop having sex (or at least, stopped seeking it) that in May, the dating app Bumble launched an anti-celibacy ad campaign aimed at them. One billboard read, “Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun.” (Due to intense backlash, the campaign was short-lived. Bumble later acknowledged it had made “a mistake.”)
Not even warmer temperatures could shake the chill. In June, New York Magazine proclaimed it “a summer without sex.” The diagnosis: “Women are sick of dating,” Cosmopolitan UK declared.
It’s a season of celibacy — but not everyone is calling it that. Instead, young people are embracing going “boy sober.”
At first blush, boy sober may appear to be little more than cutesy Gen Z dating jargon — the New York Times deemed it a celibacy “rebrand”.
But going boy sober is about a lot more than abstaining from sex, the people who have done it say. Nor is it about assigning men the blame for the soul-sucking horrors of modern dating.
By channelling the increasingly popular language of sobriety (and its association with wellness and self-help), “boy sober” helps people assess why they seek out certain kinds of partners or fall into certain kinds of behaviours, its adopters say.
It’s about reprioritising your time and attention, away from endless swiping and noncommittal DMs and towards more fulfilling activities.
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Advertise with NZME.It’s about taking accountability for your own bad behaviour.
It’s about healing your relationship to, well, relationships.
Hope Woodard recoils at the word “celibate.” It conjures up Wednesday night Bible study at her small-town Tennessee church; the spiral prayer journal in which she, at the age of 13, confessed to having sex (“I’m so sorry,” she wrote); the shame catching at the base of her throat. “Celibate” is the toaster Woodard decorated for a church assignment — her teacher cautioning her to keep it clean and new: “Don’t let anyone use your toaster.”
“The word ‘celibate,’ it to me does not give empowerment. It gives, like, chastity belt. It gives purity culture,” Woodard said one recent summer afternoon. She had turned to sex and drinking to help cope with the breakup of her family. Over the years, that tangle of shame and escapism continued to characterise her relationship to sex and men, Woodard said — both had become a “vice”.
The tipping point came when Woodard was reeling from her one-sided “situationship” with a man living in London. She had wounded an on-again, off-again ex with her blunt discussion of her dating life on her TikTok. At the same time, she was helping her mother care for her grandmother who, in the midst of her dementia, was constantly texting her grandfather — who was dead.
“My mother will try to help her and my grandmother will scream at her, ‘I don’t need anyone to take care of me except for a man,’” Woodard, 28, said. She worried she might be on the same path.
“I was like, I think I’m ruining my own life with my sex and dating habits. And also just not taking care of people who I claim to really love and care about,” Woodard said. She was the villain of her own story.
Woodard unpacked her fears with her sister, who coined the term “boy sober”. Woodard enthusiastically adopted it. “Boy sober” brought to mind the year in which she gave up drinking: “[It] changed my life. It was the first time I did an open mic. It was the first time I was really able to get to know myself.”
Over the next couple of weeks, Woodard announced on TikTok that she was going boy sober, then shared rules she had set for herself: No dating apps. No dates. No exes. No hookups. (A later addendum: Self-pleasure is fine.)
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Advertise with NZME.“What I loved about ‘boy sober’ is that it had no baggage. Like, it was such a new and modern and almost silly word,” Woodard said.
Sobriety didn’t used to have that kind of appeal, recalls Ruby Warrington, author of the 2018 book Sober Curious. Because of its association with alcoholism and addiction, stigma loomed over it: If you were going sober, it was because you were incapable of moderating your drinking.
“The only language we had to describe unhealthy attachment to alcohol was ‘addiction’ or ‘alcoholism’ or ‘alcoholic’. And those terms just weren’t relatable for the vast majority of people who were questioning their drinking,” Warrington said.
Just as terms like “sober curious” offered a more nonjudgmental alternative for people who wanted to examine their relationship with drinking, Warrington sees “boy sober” as a more colloquial, “more human” way to talk about personal struggles with sex and relationships.
“Having language like that just allows people to kind of open up and feel more comfortable talking about some of these deeper issues they might be grappling with,” Warrington said.
Scroll through social media posts about #boysober and you will see its broad, malleable appeal. Queer men and women have embraced the term. So have straight women who have withdrawn from dating and women who yearn to have sex but have never done so. Straight men have even dabbled with going “girl sober” (though that hasn’t quite taken off).
Jasper Bickers, a reedy 21-year-old producer and songwriter, recently penned a song called “boy sober,” also the title of his EP, which deals with the breakup of a romantic relationship. “I wanted to at least hint that there was, like, a light at the end of the tunnel,” Bickers said. He felt the song’s chorus, “maybe I’ll go boy sober,” pointed listeners toward that light.
Had he been boy sober during the making of the album? Yes, Bickers said — he may not have been able to complete the project without it. Bickers wrote a song “every day,” he said, and learned how to produce his own music. “That’s what really helped me cope with the loss that I was feeling.”
For Alexis Doss, a 33-year-old life and business coach with a “tough love” bent, going boy sober was an opportunity to validate herself outside of a romantic relationship. “I want my relationship with myself to be so strong that a man trying to compete with that would be a challenge,” Doss wrote in her journal.
Phatima Kabia went through a boy sober period at the start of her freshman year. A no-nonsense 18-year-old, Kabia eschewed romantic study dates and hooking up at parties for watercolors and crocheting.
Coming off a high school relationship where she felt she had compromised her boundaries, Kabia was wary of the kind of casual dating that many of her peers have come to expect from their college experience. Instead, Kabia wanted to reconnect with her “inner-child,” whom she felt she had let down.
As a kid, “I loved being creative,” Kabia said. “I wanted to pick up those things I used to enjoy when I was younger, and really just pour into myself.”
When Christy Nguyen, a bubbly 26-year-old veterinary technician and content creator, went boy sober earlier this year, she realised how much she was prioritising other people’s comfort. When Nguyen took herself out on a solo restaurant date, journal in hand, she worried she was making the staff nervous — what if they thought she was a food critic?
“I was catering to their feelings,” Nguyen observed. Going boy sober helped her be “okay with taking up space”.
Still, when Nguyen shared a video about going boy sober online, she was met with a few derogatory comments from strangers — all men, it seemed.
They told her, “You’re only saying that you’re going boy sober because you can’t get anyone,” Nguyen said. “Or they’ll say things like, ‘Well, have fun growing old and dying alone with your cat.’”
Tales of love deferred and soured are as old as time — or at least, as old as our ability to tell a story. Still, for many young people, the dating pool seems to have reached new levels of toxicity.
Technology has expanded our dating options with its conveyor belt of potential mates. But with that has come a loss of accountability, some young people say, and the normalisation of bad behaviour. Dating is now a world of ghosting and situationships, breadcrumbing and lovebombing, catfishing and wokefishing. Physical intimacy can be weaponised in the form of revenge porn.
Just as young adults are questioning — and turning away from — supposed rites of passage such as binge drinking, Warrington sees a parallel assessment happening with dating culture: “There’s something about this that doesn’t feel right. You know, it doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t feel good.”
Seismic changes in gender and power dynamics over the past several generations have also impacted dating. In the US, more women have college degrees than men. Young women in cities such as New York and Washington outearn their male peers. As Alice Evans, a social science lecturer at King’s College London, recently told the Atlantic, “demand for male partners has plummeted because of that economic development and cultural liberalisation.”
In turn, a small but vocal group of men has vilified women for these gains on their social media platforms. Talking heads on Instagram and TikTok complain that women have become too “greedy” or “materialistic.” Male supremacist groups such as Incels (shorthand for “involuntarily celibate”) and “Men Going Their Own Way” stoke feelings of persecution among their members. Influencer Andrew Tate built a millions-strong following by openly embracing misogyny. Elsewhere, people like Elon Musk fret that lower birth rates (a consequence of women’s growing economic power) will lead to “population collapse”.
Woodard has been observing this growing rift between men and women. Perusing “boy sober” on Reddit, she stumbled upon men complaining that it was a separatist movement.
“Men are feeling like they’re not getting what they deserve and women are literally losing their rights — and everyone’s sort of blaming each other,” Woodard said.
Woodard never intended for “boy sober” to be a bullhorn for straight women “telling men to f*** off,” she said. Rather, she wants it to be a bridge for people across the gender and political divide to talk about sex and relationships.
She has put together a string of boy-sober shows, in which she invites comedians to tell stories about relationships and dating, but she wants to retool the structure a bit — maybe invite more crowd participation.
Since publicly sharing that she was not having sex, Woodard said, “everyone would come to me and just be like, ‘This is what’s happening in my sex life.’”
“And I loved listening.”
They would talk about the sex they weren’t having, even if they were partnered, and why. One girlfriend who was raised religiously shared that she didn’t feel she ever “had the option not to have sex” while dating.
She also encountered straight men who were boy-sober-curious, “who maybe felt a bit of relief about it … like, oh, what an interesting way that I can also talk about my dating and sex habits.” Whether it was the nonjudgmental language of sobriety, her disclosure that she wasn’t having sex or both, “their guard came down,” she said.
“It was the first time, even for me, where I was like, neither of us have to actually perform in any kind of way,” Woodard said. “Nobody loses if we don’t hook up or date or whatever.”
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