Sexual
Abstinence as a Form of Whole-Body Mindfulness
Clara
B. Jones
Simone
de Beauvoir, French philosopher and intellectual, claimed that women
are not born but made. I begin the present article about my
non-linear path to Sexual Abstinence with a self-disclosure:
my self-presentation as a woman holds a very high position among my
most valued personal concerns. My focus on womanhood as a category
of traits is, in effect, not so much an expression of sensuality in
relation to the spaces that I inhabit, but, to a greater degree,
controlled projection of my own personal statements, including, my
own voice.
Some
philosophers have claimed that most lives are boring, not worthy of
conversion into personal stories for others’ consumption. I am
inclined to agree, primarily because confessional postures seem,
often, to reflect self-absorption, if not overt demands for
attention. In the present personal statement, I attempt to devise a
middle-ground between reserve and arrogance. A concern persists that
recounting elements of my life experience will prove uninteresting
and disappointing to the reader. There is, also, concern that,
following American Indian proscription, sharing private and
individual matters violates my own relationship to self. It seems
appropriate, however, that sharing personal experiences is productive
and justified to the extent that the individual material can be
framed to impart lessons with interest, possibly, significance, to
others. As a modest goal, this essay is intended to employ the voice
of one adult to encourage other adults to consider the topic, sexual
abstinence, in novel ways.
Coming
of Age and Sexual Power
Many
young women of my generation married as teenagers with conventional
expectations about family and their roles in it. I did not have
customary expectations, but I was certain that I could live as my
maternal grandmother, Clara, had, a hausfrau devoted to
husband, children, and hearth. I had not yet read the French
intellectual, Francoise Giroud and had not yet tested my capacities
for independent living. Indeed, the previous choices seemed remote
because I had successfully repressed their possibilities and, in
particular, had no experience with the skill sets required for
personal agency as well as for self-empowerment and self-confidence.
Alternatives to marriage seemed, ultimately, more unsettling than the
lack of emotion I felt for my new husband who, generously, had
offered marriage as I faced expulsion in my second year of college.
I imagined a promising and fruitful future, and, besides, our
children would be physically appealing and bright.
Knowledge
and Sexual Power
At
the time of my marriage, I considered myself a social inferior,
unable to act with self-definition, to confront living from a
“grown-up” posture. It was my fate to marry, to become pregnant
with three children within five years, depending, like a parasite, on
another’s largesse. Martin E.P. Seligman’s “learned
helplessness” experiments demonstrated a correlation between
perceived self-potency and freedom. While a woman’s life is
embedded in a social network, she can learn, like Seligman’s
research subjects, to escape socially-imposed constraints. A female
can combine and recombine physical, biological, social, and spiritual
pathways towards a future that minimizes poor choices and
co-dependence, towards a life that maximizes individual
accountability. Helpless states, familiar to many women, may, also,
promote social phobias and fear of evaluation by others as well as
fear of success. I continue to experience social anxiety as a set of
debilitating emotions, leading me to avoid many situations or to
tolerate a significant amount of discomfort. .
Power
Between Sexual Partners
Men
and women write differentially of relationships, men with a concern
for the universal and the instrumental, women for “local”
relationships. Compare Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich (“I am present
and local, but, I know my power.”). Compare Flaubert and Virginia
Woolf (“Nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and
virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and
sandhill.”). As a graduate student in upstate New York, no book
impressed me more than Giroud’s autobiography, I Give You My
Word. Her talent for communicating time, emotion, and place and
her own role in it revealed a woman wounded by love yet open to
future experience, friendship, and change.
My
copy of the volume became worn as several other female students read
it, each of us making comments in the margins with a pen of a
different color. We were captivated by this singular personality,
who, from 1974 to 1977, served France as the first Minister for
Women’s Affairs and Culture in Valéry Giscard D’Estang’s
cabinet. Writing about Alma Mahler in 1988, Giroud observed, “No,
she was certainly not just anybody, this young woman around whom men
never ceased to buzz. Alma had the feeling that she really was a
perfect example of a superior human being. This lofty idea of
herself, so rare in women, this satisfied awareness of herself, was
one of her striking characteristics.” Giroud might have been
describing herself. This virtual absence of female archetypes in my
life became a sign of my early self, alone and precocious, and
emotionally impoverished. I am less in awe of Giroud today, but I am
grateful for her role, or, my idea of it, in my psychological
progression to womanhood, self-confidence, and, currently, sexual
abstinence.
Sexual
Abstinence Violates Cultural Norms
The
power of conformity inhibits impulses to define, to name, to act
contrary to group norms. As if characterizing females, Shelby Steele
wrote of conformity that “amounts to a self-protective
collectivism” leading to a “diminished sense of possibility”.
Steele advocated “pushing the collective identity out of our
individual space” in order to utilize the classically American and
middle class profile of “hard work, self-reliance, initiative,
property ownership, family ties, and so on”. A problem for many
females (including myself), then, is the problem of personal
identity.
I
recalled Hans Christian Andersen’s, The
Emperor’s New Clothes,
while reading Steele’s book. The fairy tale, also, was a lesson
about conformity. The Emperor’s subjects complied with the
opinions of others, praising his non-existent robes, as women in the
United States comply with traditional roles, socialization,
authorities (parents, partners, labor defined by gender). The
subjects of Shelby Steele’s essay conform to a political and social
agenda demanding a construction of reality in which women are
perpetually victimized by a hostile, dominant culture. In both
accounts, individuals modify their beliefs, attitudes, values, and
behaviors to match those of people and institutions influencing them.
As if speaking of the status of women,
Thomas Henry Huxley stated, “If individuality has no play, society
does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society
perishes.” The foregoing ideas highlight states-of-being and
challenges facing many women who may envision alternative paths to
“compose” their lives.
Costs
and Benefits of Sexual Abstinence
Sexual
abstinence has offered me opportunities for reflection about my own
relationship to self, my relationship to a potential partner, my
relationship to my internal and external spaces. As a result, I have
acquired the tools to evaluate these relations in an individual
stimulating my aroused physical states, feelings, emotions, and
thoughts, including, impulses to act on them. These processes of
mindful presence facilitate my guided search for quiet observation,
whole presence, uninterrupted concentration, and measured focus.
These intentional exercises are not, in themselves, a search for
“balance”, but, rather, a search for experiential symmetry and
congruence, including, harmony of spirit, inside myself and with
another person. Extending the philosophy of Perceptual Psychologist,
Eleanor J. Gibson, these paths strongly influence my decisions to
respond or not to respond to a potentially intimate relationship,
however defined.
Since
the 1980s, the aforementioned intentions have been immeasurably
guided by a meditation technique, and by Paramahansa Yogananda’s
teachings. I do not think that meditation or yoga is a necessary or
sufficient element for intentional sexual abstinence. I do believe,
however, that a necessary, though, not, sufficient, skill for women
choosing sexual abstinence as part of their natural toolkit is the
capacity to say, “No.”, calmly and believably, to herself and
another person, even when strong emotions propel her to a different
response. In my experience, this skill required 2 years of conscious
and aware self-instruction and self-care, a learning program
initiated by loving communication from a valued female acquaintance
rather than by subjective insight. The narrative outlined in this
essay has comprised multiple stages, leading to intentionality
combined with serendipity whereby I surrendered fear of speaking with
my own voice, an empowering process yielding self-confidence and,
sometimes, overconfidence, a decidedly undesirable consequence.
From
my perspective, other costs have resulted from my choices to abstain
from sexual congress in any form. Perhaps the disadvantage of
greatest concern to me is the degree to which that program requires,
not only, physical, but, also, emotional detachment from a potential
partner. Realization of emotional and mental intimacy is fundamental
to friendship that, at my advanced age of 69, is not as challenging a
task as it might have been when I was, for instance, 35 or 45.
Nonetheless, I offer the idea that sexual abstinence need not be
viewed as a long-term or, even, a mid-range state, but, rather, as an
option used to enhance self-exploration and self-agency, similar to
the goals of a transformative spiritual retreat. I am not advocating
sexual abstinence, per se, but asserting, simply, that,
combined with self-pleasure in many forms, this process of conscious
and aware forbearance has significantly enhanced my abilities to
heighten whole-body mindfulness and time devoted to life events other
than sex. This arrangement constitutes the self-presentation that
has worked for me for 14 years.
It
must be obvious to readers that the skills detailed in this essay
require deliberation as well as problem-solving. Many women are
likely to view these characteristics as undesirable if they suppress
spontaneity and, simply, fun. These issues require adjustment to
individual personalities, temperaments, styles, and other factors,
but I don’t consider these challenges oppositional to a sexually
abstinent lifestyle. To the contrary, challenges can be motivating
and intellectually, as well as, experientially, stimulating. It is
neat, for example, to redefine one’s expressions of sexuality via
individual styles, in, for example, clothing, home design, food, and
other civilized alternatives.
Sexual
abstinence as a lifestyle will not appeal to everyone. However, the
option might be viewed as a new set of possibilities, enhancing a
woman’s capacities for intimacy in a variety of forms. In essence,
“Sex and the City” folkways and decisions may have their place as
precursors to sexual activities, but, so might emotional restraint,
reflection, and periods of information-gathering benefit our
long-term expressions of pleasure.
Suggested
Readings
Giroud
F, Lévy B-H (1993) Women and men: a philosophical conversation.
Boston: Little, Brown & Company (English translation, 1995, by
©Richard Miller)
Koch
PB, Weis DL (eds.) (2000) Sexuality in America: understanding our
sexual values and behaviour. New York: Continuum
Rothblum
ED (1994) Transforming lesbian sexuality. Psychology of Women
Quarterly 18, 627-641
Sobo
EJ, Bell S (eds.) (2001) Celibacy, culture, and society: the
anthropology of sexual abstinence. Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press
Originally published in WNC Woman.
