Or: “Abstinence is just for conservatives. You probably also think gay people shouldn’t get married.
Or, even better: “Abstinence is just an excuse because you’re not getting any.
At various points during our Princeton careers, we’ve both had periods of abstinence and heard these pieces of wisdom. We both have had sex before marriage (assuming we do marry); one of us doesn’t have sex outside of committed relationships, and the other has spent part of her college career with the active decision to abstain. Abstinence, for both of us, was an important personal choice. It was temporary, but it allowed us to respect our bodies and our boundaries and to make sure that when we did have sex, it was the sex we wanted to be having.
Abstinence seemed logical and not particularly unusual. But our friends were still confused about and sometimes antagonistic toward our terminology. Our use of the word “abstinence” to describe our decisions was often the launching point for a series of assumptions about our political beliefs, our ethical values and our religious traditions. And when we tried to separate abstinence from chastity, we got blank stares.
Abstinence is at the center of a storm of controversy over our campus sexual ethic, but we all seem to be surprisingly ignorant about the different forms it can take. For example, abstinence and chastity are not synonymous. Celibacy, a word that is often invoked somewhat confusedly in these conversations, has even less to do with abstinence. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, chastity is “purity from unlawful intercourse,” while celibacy is the “state of living unmarried.” Both of these ethics imply a moral choice, a view of some forms of sex as categorically impure.
By contrast, abstinence doesn’t need to be connected to sex — you can abstain from doing anything, for any reason. It’s a simple “no” — without moral implications. You can be abstinent for a weekend. You can be abstinent after being in a sexual relationship. You can choose to be abstinent at any point in your life. As a college student, you can be abstinent knowing that you will probably have sex before marriage.
You may have noticed that on campus, this is not the way we usually talk about abstinence. Instead of a broad sexual ethic that can include many different people, abstinence is framed in the context of marriage and portrayed as a list of don’ts: Don’t have sex before marriage, don’t have sex on Valentine’s Day, don’t give in to the “hookup culture,” don’t lose your dignity by having sex. But we believe that abstinence is an ethic that should remain free of social institutions like marriage, political ideologies and religious creeds. For students who are still searching for a holistic and meaningful sexual identity, abstinence can be intimidating if it’s connected with such concepts. Hence the reactions of our friends, who associated abstinence with a particular vision of who can get married, which box to check on a ballot or whether we should teach kids about condoms.
For traditionalists, marriage is the point at which abstinence ends. For us, abstinence was no less of a thoughtful decision. It was simply qualified in different ways. It gave us space to own the decision to have sex, even though we knew it would be outside marriage.
Though we hesitate to project sexual ethics onto others, we believe that abstinence can be a healthy choice for college students. In fact, abstinence can be sex-positive.
There are obvious health benefits to refraining from sex. There’s a reason that every sex education class advocates for abstinence, because it is the only sure way of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Abstinence is easy in the sense that it requires fewer precautions — there are many ways to have safer sex, but no form of contraception is totally foolproof. Health aside, however, abstinence can provide room to step back, assess and control sexual decision-making. Campus sexual culture can be bewildering, and pressures come from many different directions. When you know what your “no’s” are, it’s easier to confidently say “yes.” Abstinence can give you a way to figure out what those “no’s” really are. And it places more value on your “yes.”
So this Valentine’s Day, let’s take abstinence back. Let’s define it as a positive and not a negative: Do own your sexual choices, do value yourself as a whole and sexual being, do realize that it can be empowering to decide not to have sex. Try being abstinent for a day, for a weekend, for a month. If it’s not for you, that’s fine too — but don’t let its popular mythology scare you away. Abstinence doesn’t need to be about marriage, family, sexuality, religion or politics. It’s not just for conservatives, just as sex isn’t only for liberals. Sex and abstinence are both for everyone.
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux is a religion major from Charlottesville, Va. Cristina Stanojevich is a sophomore from Lima, Peru. They can be reached at ajthomso@princeton.edu and cstanoje@princeton.edu, respectively.
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