Celibate Girl Summer
“I’m going boysober this summer,” shared my friend with me over our Saturday evening drinks date. She said it right there, in front of my Cosmopolitan and her Sex on the Beach cocktails, making me unsure whether it’s blasphemy to speak like that in front of these drinks.
At this point, I was deeply buried in my serious dream-like relationship, so a hot girl summer was as far from my summer plans as it could be, and that vibe shift had undergone its full cycle. I was ready to bring an extra bottle of SPF in my bag and to prefer calmer beaches during all hot days. Pondering her statement for another second, it began to dawn on me that I never really had a hot girl summer per se because of my strict personal boundaries. Then why was I so surprised when I heard someone else canceling that idea?
Photo by Martin Parr / Magnum
In recent years, having a hot girl summer was just like a tradition. And why not? When the media we consume is hyper-suffused with sex, when it’s a part, almost like an expectation, of our adult culture. Everything all around us is about sex, its power and freedom. Owning your body meant being fully in control of your sexual freedom and expressing it. And we can’t blame only the media for that. Isn’t sex an integral part of life, after all? Just this part of our nature is what makes our whole culture so coital.
Since the sexual revolution, hookup culture was only gaining more popularity, with its all-time high being in the past decade, also due to dating apps and the media. Only recently did the disillusionment happen as we started seeing a major shift away from this culture towards more sustainable and healthier relationships - people started describing it as celibacy. This was even felt by the dating apps who are currently suffering from a decline in usage due to this shift, ultimately making apps like Tinder rebrand away from the hookup culture. We are observing a shift towards Celibacy and The City. So, what does this new culture look like?
Some say it’s an effect of Roe v. Wade, making people take back their deserved rights and take control. Others see it as prioritizing other ways to be sexy - through a focus on intelligence, wittiness, style. Ultimately, this celibacy trend might not be as much of a trend as it is a new wave of sexual emancipation and liberation (abstaining from sex NOT for religious reasons, despite the root of the word). And the summer of 2024 is considered a sexless summer.
Julia Fox, Lenny Kravitz, and half of TikTok are going celibate - not just for the summer. People are finally moving away from casual hook-ups and the situationships, those “good for the plot” scenes that actually made the plot a bit miserable yet entertaining for your friends. All those internet influences (such as the Tumblr sexual positivity era) now seem to have been a bit detrimental to us and our love life. Perhaps we were too high on the liberation’s sweet taste and the confidence and freedom that came with expressing it. Don’t get me wrong - we are not going back to the ages when sex was a taboo. We are not taking back all that was said and experienced by Samantha Jones. We are also far from forgetting all the benefits the sexual revolution brought, such as the vital knowledge around sex. Yet people did start building taller walls, setting stricter boundaries around their sex life.
If you are one who enjoys expressing their sexual freedom, who enjoys the hookup culture, getting close to people without expectations, that is totally okay. However, lots of people are going for this (now) traditional hot girl summer culture for validation or as a pacifier to other personal issues. This is what the people who are being celibate are trying to overcome by focusing on yourself and your emotional health. In a world where most TV shows give you a specific guide on how to be provocative and grab attention with sex at its core, today a lot of people are trying to change their perception of provocativeness. It’s not about canceling dating, it’s about establishing other connections first before the sexual ones.
It feels like the era of an aesthetic statement is over. A statement that brought loneliness and emotional manipulation for many. A statement that brought sexual liberation and control over one’s body for many. The new statement is again a freedom of choice, yet in a shifted way - freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the hookup culture without being considered uncool if you don’t. Perhaps that’s the coolest thing about celibacy - it creates this huge open space where you can ponder over the inadequate knowledge of sex you have (be it from hookup culture, the media, or school), and then decide on your own.
