Accidental Celibacy - more than you expect
The following is an article from this site. I happened to discover the mag itself in a men's room downtown. It coins exactly what I'm going through for the last year-plus of no sex.
Paul is a handsome 30-year-old investment banker who lives in a large American city. He has a nice car, a six-figure paycheck, and the cut of a triathlete's jib. By any objective standard, one would assume that he has the pick of the ladies, but one would be wrong. Turns out Paul is getting less action than a pedophiliac priest in a saltpeter cell. Oddly enough, he's barely noticed. Ask him about his yearlong sex drought and he just shrugs. "I still have the drive," he says, "but the trouble it takes to get laid outweighs the fun it is to get laid." Many men would think that this kind of statement renders Paul one screwed-up guy. But the fact that he's not having sex-it's actually been 14 months since his last time-puts him in good company: the startlingly large but rarely acknowledged world of the Accidental Celibate (AC).
According to a 2003 University of Chicago survey, more Americans went without sex last year than at any time since the first Bush administration. That includes better than 20 percent of men between 18 and 39-thereby answering the question "Are we not men?" with a "Nah, not so much."
"Just think about all the men you know whose uptime is spent browsing TushyLickers.com. Douglas, for example, an in the-prime-of-his-priapic-life accountant who's spent the last three years sinning against the temple that is his body. "I jerk off all day," he says, sadly meaning it. "By evening, I'm just not in the mood."
"Nowadays, work can be dehumanizing," says our unlucky Paul. "That's hardly the time to go to a bar, wink at girls, and think you're the man."
And yet, that's what we're conditioned to think. We, each of us, is the Man. Making us ideal, presumably, for a woman (or, as the case may be, a man). At any time, all the time, all night long. We are gigolos of the American variety, are we not? No, we're not. At least according to Elizabeth Abbott, the author of A History of Celibacy, a recent book that catalogs sexual abstinence starting with a handful of curiously un-Greek ancient Greeks and arriving at today's born-again virgins. "The aftereffect of the sexual revolution is that we went a little too far and now everything is sexualized," she says. "People are held up to standards that aren't real."
The following is an article from this site. I happened to discover the mag itself in a men's room downtown. It coins exactly what I'm going through for the last year-plus of no sex.
Paul is a handsome 30-year-old investment banker who lives in a large American city. He has a nice car, a six-figure paycheck, and the cut of a triathlete's jib. By any objective standard, one would assume that he has the pick of the ladies, but one would be wrong. Turns out Paul is getting less action than a pedophiliac priest in a saltpeter cell. Oddly enough, he's barely noticed. Ask him about his yearlong sex drought and he just shrugs. "I still have the drive," he says, "but the trouble it takes to get laid outweighs the fun it is to get laid." Many men would think that this kind of statement renders Paul one screwed-up guy. But the fact that he's not having sex-it's actually been 14 months since his last time-puts him in good company: the startlingly large but rarely acknowledged world of the Accidental Celibate (AC).
According to a 2003 University of Chicago survey, more Americans went without sex last year than at any time since the first Bush administration. That includes better than 20 percent of men between 18 and 39-thereby answering the question "Are we not men?" with a "Nah, not so much."
"Just think about all the men you know whose uptime is spent browsing TushyLickers.com. Douglas, for example, an in the-prime-of-his-priapic-life accountant who's spent the last three years sinning against the temple that is his body. "I jerk off all day," he says, sadly meaning it. "By evening, I'm just not in the mood."
"Nowadays, work can be dehumanizing," says our unlucky Paul. "That's hardly the time to go to a bar, wink at girls, and think you're the man."
And yet, that's what we're conditioned to think. We, each of us, is the Man. Making us ideal, presumably, for a woman (or, as the case may be, a man). At any time, all the time, all night long. We are gigolos of the American variety, are we not? No, we're not. At least according to Elizabeth Abbott, the author of A History of Celibacy, a recent book that catalogs sexual abstinence starting with a handful of curiously un-Greek ancient Greeks and arriving at today's born-again virgins. "The aftereffect of the sexual revolution is that we went a little too far and now everything is sexualized," she says. "People are held up to standards that aren't real."
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dead on! I read something similar to this a while back.