Ruth Institute Blog

I’m pretty sure a couple of movies have been made with topics similar to this. The difference here, of course, is this woman’s plan was not for the sake of comedic effect.

by Carolyn Moynihan

Maybe something is changing for the better out there among Generation Y. A British journalist in her early 30s has written a book about renouncing sex for a year in order to get control of her emotional life. It’s called Chastened.

OK, so it was only a year without sexual intimacies and Hephzibah Anderson is still a little confused about what it all means, but let’s give the woman credit for seeing that there was a problem in the first place. She had spent her twenties falling into “a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy” with successive dates, not receiving so much as an “I love you” in return (let alone before), and began to see that sex was clouding her judgement.

In an interview with The Atlantic (which seems to have adopted female disillusionment with modern sex as a theme — see Lori Goldstein’s and Caitlan Flanagan’s somewhat muddled manifestos) Anderson says:

I think we’ve lost any sense of healthy emotional entitlement. I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it’s not nothing, however much we try to say it’s nothing. Whether you’re a man or woman, you’re absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain. She doesn’t quite get it that “rights” are irrelevant to uncommitted relationships, although she does go on to admit that it is a question of need rather than “entitlement”, and that it is women themselves who have “made it a rule” not to express their emotional needs.

Anderson also faces up to the way she has following the crowd: “you know, passive and always going along with things because that was always sort of what was expected.”

Keep reading.