History of Celibacy

What did Queen Elizabeth I gain from being thought of as celibate? Why was property so essential to the Christian church embracing celibacy? And what's really behind the 'No Nut November' movement? In today's episode, Kate's joined by Elisa Sobo https://anthropology.sdsu.edu/people/sobo, Professor of Anthropology at San Diego State University, and Sandra Bell of Durham University, to take a look at those of us today and throughout history who have chosen to abstain from sex. Together, they edited Celibacy, Culture, And Society: Anthropology Of Sexual Abstinence https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3239.htm, and you can read more on the subject of celibacy in Elisa's book Dynamics of Biocultural Diversity https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781138589728/dynamics-human-biocultural-diversity-elisa-sobo. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 2:15Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Cade Lester. I am here with Betwixt the Sheets and you are here with your ear holes for us to talk into. But before any of that can take place, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty way of covering ages and subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now that we're all safe and adult and above board, on with the show.

• 2:40Kate Lister?

  Whether it's the Jonas Brothers purity rings, Fleabag's hot priests, Kassak and dog collar, or the 2024 resurgence of celibacy, for health reasons, political reasons, or in many cases, both, we are all more than a little bit intrigued about those among us who choose to live sex-free. But like everything, there is a history to this, and it's more mysterious than you think it would be. For a lot of people over the centuries, celibacy has been about retaining power. By not giving in to those carnal instincts, the thinking is that you're able to be more powerful within yourself and create a dedication and a focus that points you towards something greater. I mean, that does sound a lot better than just you can't get laid.

• 3:26Kate Lister?

  Take Elizabeth I, for example, the so-called, I don't really think so, virgin queen. Yes, there are rumours of dalliances with certain men, but she declared that she was married to her kingdom. Any kind of promiscuity or relationships with anyone else would have threatened to dilute her power. But how have other cultures throughout history cultivated the idea of celibacy? From pagans to Christians and everyone else, they've all had their moments and I want to find out more.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 4:19Speaker 06

  Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

• 4:27Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Admittedly, for the most part, I love delving into the detail of how sex was thought about and done in the past. But what about those who didn't do it? About the people who abstained from sex entirely? Because they are just as fascinating and absolutely deserve a closer look. Well, joining me today are Eliza Sobo and Sandra Bell, editors of Celibacy, Culture and Society: An Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence, to shed more light on this fascinating topic. And without further ado, let's crack on.

• 5:07Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's Sandra Bell and Eliza Sobo. How are you both doing?

• 5:15Speaker 06

  I think I can say we're very well, thank you. We've just had a chat beforehand to refresh our memories.

• 5:22Kate Lister?

  I understand this is something of a reunion.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is. It's a good one, though.

• 5:28Kate Lister?

  I'm very, very pleased that you can be reuniting on this podcast. You, well, you've done so much work, but one of the pieces of work that you've done together is you edited the collection of essays, Celibacy, Culture and Society: Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence. And apart from being quite a difficult sentence to say out loud, what was it that made you two come together to want to edit this collection of essays? What was it that made you want to look at the phenomena of celibacy?

• 6:03Speaker 06

  We were sort of going down memory lane and thinking about that. Sandra was teaching a course called Sex and Love, right, Sandra? Yeah, yeah, Sex Re-Red.

• 6:12Speaker 07

  Sex reproduction and love.

• 6:13Speaker 06

  Oh, sex reproduction and love. And I had just joined her department. And it was just sort of a happy coincidence. We started to explore this. Also, at the time, we were just recalling. There had just been another expose of some kind of a scandal in the church that brought Salasby out to the forefront of the mainstream, thinking what's going on there. So that was one of the factors. And Sandra, you probably have more to say.

• 6:39Speaker 07

  I think I remember first speaking to you over the proverbial photocopy machine, actually, about this. And I'd done my PhD and some subsequent publications on Buddhism in Britain. And I'd studied a monastic order, Theravada monks, who were mainly westernized. They had their origins in Thailand, but most of the monks in this country were either American or British or Australian. And they were very scrupulously celibate. So that's how we got talking about it.

• 7:18Speaker 06

  And now you're reminding me, I was just coming in, having done the project on HIV/AIDS and self-disclosure. And so there would be the question there of whether or not a person with HIV would abstain, would be celibate and so forth. So probably that was part of the reason that we were maybe coming together around this. And then we got involved in the co-teaching. Gosh, it was a long time ago.

• 7:43Kate Lister?

  I suppose I should start with a really basic question, but it's probably one that you guys had to grapple with all the way through. What is celibacy? How do you define celibacy?

• 7:55Speaker 07

  Well, to begin with, you've got to think about whether you're talking about somebody refraining from sexual activity voluntarily, or whether they're being enforced into it in some sort of way. Whether it's a temporary state of affairs, or whether it's going to be longstanding, or even a prognosis of it being lifelong. And Whether or not this is something that people are doing as individuals, or whether they're part of some sort of institution. And you could argue anyway that all sex is not for reproduction anyway.

• 8:37Speaker 07

  So I suppose in the way it's codified is often that you're refraining from reproducing. You go along with that, Elisa?

• 8:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, those dimensions that you highlight, I think, really help us to begin to unpack this thing. So we start a conversation talking about, oh, celibacy, and we could even be talking past one another, because we could be talking about different kinds. Is it temporary? Is it permanent? Is it an individual's proclivity or choice, or is there some kind of an existing social role within that culture that somebody is slotted into? And if there doesn't maybe happen to be somebody who would take that up by choice, does the village come together and even force somebody into that role? Because sometimes you do need a celibate individual to do ritual, spiritual,

• 9:27Speaker 06

  et cetera, whatever, kinds of activities that keep the village going, that keep cultural life, social life going. And it would make a difference whether it's elected or put upon you.

• 9:39Kate Lister?

  Is there a sense that celibacy is defined not so much by what was imposed, but by the acts itself? For example, would you count masturbation as a violation of celibacy? Or is it all sexual touch? And at what point, like, would a hug be okay or not? Or like, where are those kind of boundaries drawn?

• 10:00Speaker 06

  I don't think you can, you have to remember, it's all relative, right? It depends upon in which historical context, in which time, in which culture, which society and so forth. So those kinds of concrete binary, here's exactly specificity is difficult.

• 10:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, the detail, the details of what it entails may well vary across cultures in terms of different institutions. But even if it's being done by an individual who's preparing, for instance, to undertake a vow, then in some cultures it would be all erotic activity should be precluded. And in others, it might just be acts that can lead to reproduction. So it would depend. Celibacy has to be slotted into a whole wider set of understandings about sexuality in the body

• 10:57Speaker 07

  that exist in any one particular context. So it would be read according to that kind of script.

• 11:05Speaker 06

  The script could even be that it's not just sexual expression, it could extend to other areas of life where where one has to shut off other things as well.

• 11:14Speaker 07

  Yes, so sometimes fasting would go with sexual restraint. It might be extended to food or how you comport yourself or whether you might take a vow of silence.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  Or cutting your fingernails or cutting your hair.

• 11:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, it can be associated with lots of other bodily activities.

• 11:37Kate Lister?

  Is there always a sense that celibacy, whether it's the person has taken it upon themselves or it's been imposed upon them, or our friends, the incels, that it's it's a state of denial? That that's what's caught up with it, whether that's elective or that's forcing you? Or does it represent something else?

• 11:55Speaker 06

  No, no, no, I think sometimes it's the opposite. It's a state of it's it's wanting to create in my body, for example. I'm thinking about semen retention amongst, and Sandra can can talk more about this. Or or retaining sexual energies as a way to become more generative in other aspects of life or for other forms of of expression or purity. Or so it's not not denial, it's more a creative state in some situations.

• 12:25Speaker 07

  It can enhance your capacities and make you more charismatic to other people. Or it can give you confer status upon you as well. Or create a role in society that's especially yours. So in many ways, it can be, as Lisa points out, generative and creative.

• 12:48Kate Lister?

  Suppose that would be something like the Vestal Virgins.

• 12:51Speaker 06

  Yes, or think about a teacher, a kindergarten teacher, who decides not to have children so that they can be parent, mother, father, whatever, to all of the children in the kindergarten, or in a church, for example, so it can really be an enabling practice in that sense.

• 13:08Speaker 07

  Well, you mentioned the Vestal Virgins, and the Vestal Virgins were really anomalous in Roman society. It was because, on the whole, Roman society valorised reproduction and the creation of the next generation. So they were really exceptional, which meant that they were able to be, get closer to the divine and the otherworldly, so they were closer to the gods. And it wasn't a lifelong, they did retire, I think, at a certain age, I'm not quite sure what it was, but they wouldn't always spend their entire life as Vestal Virgin.

• 13:51Kate Lister?

  And the regenerative power of celibacy that you mentioned there, that's really fascinating, because we still have echoes of that. Today, there is an internet meme that happens every November called No Nut November, where groups of men try not to ejaculate for the whole of November in the belief that this will give them superhuman powers.

• 14:12Speaker 06

  Why not?

• 14:13Speaker 07

  This is global.

• 14:14Kate Lister?

  It is global, yes.

• 14:16Speaker 07

  Uh huh. And do they draw on particular cultural tropes? For example, the, in India, this, this idea that Elisa has already mentioned, but that for man to retain, it's South Asian cultures, and not just India, actually, for men to retain their semen, that gives them more virility. And we were talking before about Narendra Modi, the current Indian Prime Minister, notoriously, he's unmarried and claims his celibacy. It's something that makes him more powerful and it enables him to care for everybody and not just his immediate family.

• 14:59Speaker 07

  So that gives him credibility as a politician and is empowering, both in terms of how he feels about himself and can project. Himself and how others receive him. And then there's been a kind of movement of men following along with that.

• 15:19Kate Lister?

  I don't think that No Nut November draws on many cultural references at all. To be honest, I'm not sure if they really know themselves, the people that write about it, know where it comes from and the influences of it. But certainly that idea of you don't ejaculate, you store up your semen and that this like lights a furnace of energy within your body is a very, very old belief indeed. And I'm just wondering if there's any equivalency for women. Has there ever been any cult that if you don't orgasm, that you become stronger?

• 15:52Speaker 07

  Well, there were, have been and are female aesthetics, but they're not generally in South Asia, they're not generally read in that sort of way. Where in South Asia, while being celibate can provide men with more power, it doesn't tend to have that same reading for women, although women do sometimes use it to assert themselves as having more autonomy in society than they might otherwise be given.

• 16:26Speaker 06

  There are some cultures where retention in the female body is celebrated. I'm thinking of North Africa, some groups where the woman's body that retains and becomes plump and becomes full and is also very sealed off is celebrated. And I'm just wondering out loud about what you've just introduced to us and how those things are connected, because in these groups, women's sexuality is very protected.

• 17:05Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Elisa and Sandra after this short break.

• 17:23Kate Lister?

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• 20:32Kate Lister?

  I suppose the grief of people that I think of immediately when we think about celibacy is the Abrahamic religions, particularly the Christian faith. That's the one that leaps immediately to my mind. I suppose that's the one that I'm most familiar with. But it's interesting to learn that celibacy was not the norm in the very, very early Christian church. That was brought in slightly later. So what was the shift around that? What was the change? What was being associated with celibacy that suddenly the priests had to be celibate?

• 21:06Speaker 06

  I think property.

• 21:08Kate Lister?

  Property.

• 21:09Speaker 07

  I mean, initially, you have to remember the very early church. They weren't thinking too much about the future because they thought the world was about to end and that Jesus was going to return. Everything would be altered. Everything would change. And the world as one knew it wouldn't exist anymore. So when you have these millenarian sects, then having children isn't the most immediate thing. And we have an example in the book of the 19th century shakers in America who were celibate, very strictly celibate.

• 21:48Speaker 07

  And then, of course, as the expectations recede, adjustments have to be made accordingly. And Elisa's right, that it did take quite a long time for it to become part of the vow that certainly in Roman Catholicism, that a priest has to take. So it was the kind of Middle Ages before it was fully codified, 11th, 12th century before it was fully codified, that the priest, male priest, should be celibate. And that did, as Elisa says, have to do with property, because as the church became richer and more wealthy and had lands and farms and blocks and so on, and treasures.

• 22:33Speaker 07

  Therefore, if your priests were reproducing, then their descendants could claim some of that property and it wouldn't be kept within the institution of the church.

• 22:46Kate Lister?

  That can't have been how they sold it to them, though. They must have given them a spiritual reason. They can't have just said, because we want to inherit.

• 22:54Speaker 07

  Well, of course, they did. They used Bible. But the Bible is not very explicit on this, because certainly in the Old Testament, you don't get anything of it, because Judaism doesn't approve of celibacy.

• 23:07Kate Lister?

  Well, there's quite a lot of sex in the Bible.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 23:10Kate Lister?

  I mean, there is celibacy in the Bible. There's eunuchs.

• 23:13Speaker 07

  Yes, but Judaism doesn't really approve of celibacy. God wanted you to go forth and multiply. That's the injunction that's taken seriously within Judaism. But in Christianity, things worked out quite differently, and they used two particular texts. One is the letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians. Again, addressing the very early church, who were expecting everything to suddenly change completely, and saying, well, if you must marry, but it's better to be celibate. And they use a very brief text from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus seems to be saying the value of the eunuch.

• 23:58Speaker 07

  But there is very flimsy scriptural evidence for the requirement of celibacy, yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 06

  No, I love that word. You chose Sandra, flimsy, because it is very flimsy. But there's a lot of things that happen in churches and religions that aren't necessarily codified in scripture or written down. And some of the ideas that would be circulating link back to these ideas about serving your whole church and being there. And I think, Sandra, you talked about modi, using this same idea, that if I don't have my own children, you are my children, I can be there for you, I can be there for everybody here.

• 24:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, hence, and so Catholic priests came to be called father, again, using these kinship terms, and that you are my flock and you are my children, or the children of the church.

• 24:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, and the use of kinship terms is really useful lever in various social groups where you want to invoke these kinship-type relations that don't necessarily hinge on DNA, right? But they're very, very powerful. And then getting back to the issue of property and the church, that's another part of the female celibacy amongst nuns and so forth, and keeping property, in this case, sometimes in a family, you have a certain amount of property and you don't want it to all get split up or go to another family. And so the daughter gets sent off to the church to be in service that way, and the family gets to retain control over the property, rather than having it go off.

• 25:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, that happened a lot in the Middle Ages. Families would found convents, but it would be done in such a way that they still held control over that property. It wasn't fully alienated, property wasn't fully alienated from them as sponsors of, say, a convent. And that way, often, their relatives would become, the daughters they sent to that convent would become priresses. They would have quite high status. Sometimes they'd have the ear of princes and kings and become advisors and could become quite powerful women.

• 26:16Speaker 07

  And that way, they kept the property within their control and also could have people who relatives who became powerful in the body politic as well. So it was double sided really.

• 26:32Speaker 06

  So it's another example of the productivity, the productive aspect of celibacy or abstinence to produce these kinds of power or to feed power relations or status for the family to be raised status. And I'm I'm sure you've seen old movies where the son becomes a priest and that is, you know, wonderful. The mother is so happy because now I have a son who's a priest. It's like, you know, the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, because it's status to the family.

• 26:58Kate Lister?

  Would you read a difference between somebody that was celibate for religious reasons and some of the examples that we've got of religious priests castrating themselves? And thinking about the Roman cult of, is it Calibi? I always pronounce that wrong. There's some evidence that early Mesopotamian worship of Ishtar, that her priests, some people have suggested they might have been castrated. The Hidra in India castrate themselves. Is that about celibacy or is that about something else?

• 27:28Speaker 07

  Well, certainly not among the Hidra. They have a whole different Hidra. It's it's not one single phenomena anyway. Different Hidra, some are homosexual, some are asexual because they have gone through this process of coming eunuchs. In a way, that's the prototypical notion of the Hidra. And then they would go and perform ceremonies, say at weddings, where they would be a kind of channel for the deities that could bring good fortune to the couple that were getting married and so on. And they would earn their keep in

• 28:07Speaker 07

  that kind of way. So it's not a hugely homogenous. Some fell into prostitution. So it's not really a homogenous institution at all.

• 28:19Kate Lister?

  Just moving slightly away from religious celibacy, which is fascinating, and I could talk to you about it forever, but thinking about something, if there is such a term, as political celibacy, and Sandeep, you alluded to it just there, that the Prime Minister of India, but if we're thinking about someone like Elizabeth I, how important was the concept of celibacy to her and to her queenship?

• 28:42Speaker 07

  Very important. She was the Virgin Queen. She created a cult around herself. I mean, she came to the throne in a very, she was very vulnerable when she came to the throne. She was a Protestant. She was the daughter of Amberlyn, who'd been executed. She had at one point been annihilated from being able to accede to the throne. There'd been all these unstable regimes before her, her sister Mary before, known as Bloody Mary. It was all up for grabs, really. And so the council of state was always advising her, wanting her to marry.

• 29:26Speaker 07

  And she was not necessarily always disagreeing with them of that, but she was very canny about it. She knew that any consort of hers could easily usurp her. So eventually, she began to realise that what would make her safe and secure was to stay unmarried and retain her power through this notion of herself as being married to her kingdom, and therefore the cult of the Virgin Queen. She was very clever.

• 29:57Kate Lister?

  Well played, Elizabeth, I think. Because she's absolutely spot on, isn't she? I mean, what happened with Mary when she got married? She had to split everything with Phil from Spain, but by laying off completely.

• 30:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Well, they tried to marry Elizabeth to him as well. Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 06

  And this plays out too in regular life for regular people, if they happen to have property. People do make these logical decisions about retaining their power, retaining their property and so forth, and not squandering it by Making these kinds of affiliations or associations.

• 30:32Kate Lister?

  It's interesting that Elizabeth was completely right. She was more powerful by not getting married, by staying celibate. And that would be an example of virginity being empowering, as you were saying. And I'm just trying to think if there's examples of kings doing the same thing of refusing to marry.

• 30:53Speaker 07

  Well, there's examples of ordinary people doing it in Albania and Montenegro. They have this institution of the sacred virgins.

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Sworn virgin.

• 31:04Speaker 07

  The sworn virgin, that's right, sorry. And and they are kind of surrogate men.

• 31:12Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 31:13Speaker 07

  They usually want to do it. Often their parents might want them to do it too, especially if there aren't any brothers. Or in a a society where there was violence between men, often brothers could have been killed in feuds. Blood feuds and so on. So it wasn't unusual to have a daughter, but the daughter wouldn't be able to inherit. So then the daughter becomes a sworn virgin and then can take on masculine attributes. And can wear men's clothes and smoke and hang out with the men, but must remain celibate.

• 31:53Speaker 07

  Otherwise she blows it completely. And then she can inherit the farm.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  So she would live as a man.

• 32:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 32:01Kate Lister?

  Wow. That's just made me think of Saint Wilgathortus. And there are a few other virgin saints that took on masculine attributes during their martyrdom. Saint Wilgathortus was a virgin. She was about to be forced to marry. She prayed to God to say, make me hideous, and she grew a beard. And then she got out of the the marriage, but her father was so angry that he had her crucified. But that's an interesting tradition, the virgin woman as becoming more masculine somehow. I'd never thought of that before.

• 32:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it doesn't always have to go that way, too. And sometimes a teenage girl in a society where they'll put you to marry, you know, some person that she doesn't want to, will elect to say, mommy, I'm going to become a nun or what have you. So she gets out of that horrible marriage. Then the parents can't say no because the nun is such a wonderful thing to become. Do you see what I mean? So people play, people use culture when they can to their advantage. It doesn't always work that way.

• 33:04Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 33:05Speaker 07

  But gender always intervenes in these things because we have a couple of chapters in the book on Buddhist nuns. One in Tibetan area, it's actually in Zanskar, it's still in the Indian side of the border, but it's Tibetan Buddhism that's being practiced. And the other one was in Myanmar, formerly Burma. In both those instances, though the kinds of the traditions of Buddhism are really quite different in many ways, but in both those examples, the women do not become equivalent to male monks. For instance, in Theravada Buddhism, the example in Myanmar and in other Theravada societies,

• 33:48Speaker 07

  the most senior, long-serving nun will always be inferior to the most junior of the monks and have to bow to him. So then gender plays its part very much in how these things are articulated. And so, for instance, if the sworn virgin goes off track and is found out that she did have sex with a man, then it's all over and in fact she'd probably be killed.

• 34:19Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about celibacy as a punishment. It's so interesting, there's so many different script and interpretation around this one act. On the one hand, it can be powerful and it can be associated with an increase of life force and energy, but then by the same token celibacy can be imposed as a punishment. And I was really interested in your book, you make the very good point that prison is basically an imposed or an attempt at an imposed form of celibacy.

• 34:50Speaker 06

  Right, with the assumption, there's always the assumption there because you have this, the sex segregated, right? So there's the assumption of what equals, what qualifies as sex, but yes.

• 35:01Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I, I, there's a lot of prisoners who aren't going, oh, well, there's no women here, I guess, I guess I'd best just not have sex. There's plenty of sex going on, but isn't it interesting that as a punishment it's used? I mean, is that across cultures? Have you found examples of that where celibacy is imposed as a punishment?

• 35:20Speaker 07

  We didn't have any other examples in the book. And in a way, you could say that celibacy, at least heterosexual celibacy, is a sort of byproduct of incarceration, rather than it's an intended part of the punishment. And you do get societies that permit conjugal visits as part, and I think in some prisons and state prisons in America, they do. But it's more rare, but in Scandinavian countries where they have small prison, usually have small prisons with only about 17 inmates and stuff.

• 35:58Speaker 07

  Then it's manageable and regarded as a, as a way of, in prisoner, keeping the family relationships going. So it's imposed celibacy to a degree, but we all know that it's only heterosexual celibacy that is abstinence that's being imposed. And it is more a bright byproduct than I think that powerful people will sit and think, oh, how can we introduce some sort of sexual withdrawal into, as a punishment per se?

• 36:33Speaker 06

  Right, I think that's an important point, the byproduct. The intent is to lock the people up, it's not, it, it just comes as, it, it comes with that, but it's not, wasn't the initial punishment.

• 36:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think the chapter in the book that the point that he was making really was that in these very large and extremely violent often prisons in America, that conjugal visits had been posed as a solution to make the prisons less violent. But I think he is coming to the conclusion that it wasn't going to function in that sort of a, a, a way. So that was really the main point of that article.

• 37:20Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Elisa and Sandra after this short break.

• 38:09Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 38:51Kate Lister?

  What about celibacy as a form of protest? And I'm thinking about what's coming out of South Korea at the moment. I don't know if you are aware, there's something called the 4B movement, and I won't attempt to pronounce it in Korean because I'd just offend everybody, but it's basically women that are saying they're not going to marry men, they're not going to date men, they're not going to have sex with men, and they're not going to reproduce with men because they are so angry at the state of the patriarchy in South Korea. It's a small movement, it's mobilized mostly online, but they are using celibacy as a form of protest.

• 39:26Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, you know, twas ever thus, depending on how you define celibacy. But think about that play Lysistrata.

• 39:34Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 39:34Speaker 06

  Right?

• 39:35Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 06

  And that's not necessarily, that's, I guess it's temporary until the men stop with the war. Right? Stop with the war and then we'll give you sex kind of thing. So that has always been, and it's just a matter of how organized is it? And how institutionalized and how extensive it is. But it just, I like this phrase that Sandra brought in, byproduct. It's a byproduct of gender relations and patriarchy and social arrangements that people would even think to use that as leverage and that people would need to use that as leverage.

• 40:11Kate Lister?

  Do you think going forward, just my final question, because I still see that there's a lot of taboo around celibacy. I mean, even if you're somebody like a nun or a monk or a priest and it's part of the deal, is it still has an impact on people who aren't part of that, that they go, oh, oh, that must be quite difficult, or I don't know how you do that. Or I don't know if that's a stigma or taboo or what that is. But do you think that moving forward, we will see less of that and more acceptance of different types of celibacy?

• 40:41Speaker 06

  I hope so, but I think right now, and even maybe since the sixties and the seventies and the quote unquote sexual revolution, as we've got into this new millennium and all this sort of, we're now we're blowing up categories of gender and sexuality and very pro-sex, pro-sex, pro-sex. In fact, I was, there was a show, there's a show on TV called Hacks. And there's a scene where the older person says to the younger person that they should just not, don't have a relationship. Just get yourself a vibrator. And the younger person says to the older person, gosh, it's so sweet that you think I don't have one. Right? So what I'm saying is it's so, our society is like sex is everywhere, that we need to, you know, come to a space where, oh yeah, you know what? It's not and it doesn't need to be.

• 41:23Speaker 06

  And here's where your asexual person or your person who practices celibacy will become less invisible. Because right now, you're right, I think that it's kind of invisible. Or when you hear about it, you think, oh, that must be really hard. So that in itself is a cultural construction.

• 41:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, and also it doesn't account for the life cycle. You know, when the stages in people's lives and they really may feel more controlled by the urge to have sex, to have more sex. What about when you've just had a baby? Or when you're older and you're, you know, your partner dies, well, you just don't need another partner because you're past it.

• 42:05Speaker 06

  Or children.

• 42:06Speaker 07

  Or children, yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 06

  Children. Nobody would say a child is celibate.

• 42:10Speaker 07

  No, exactly.

• 42:12Kate Lister?

  That's a very good point.

• 42:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So there are life stages, ways and circumstances where it is actually very normal not to want to have sex. But because sex is and sexualisation is the norm in our society. When you might see that is in fact a little bit of a distortion.

• 42:37Kate Lister?

  Guys, you have been amazing to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?

• 42:43Speaker 07

  Well, I'm a retired emeritus professor and I went on to study energy and environmental anthropology. So I suppose our legacy is the edited volume. We were saying earlier that it's very interesting that there's been so little since, which relates to the question you asked about, you know, why is it so invisible? Because even among people like anthropologists who are always looking for the odd nooks and crannies to go and poke their noses into, there still hasn't been anything anthropological since this volume, which was published, if I refresh my memory, two thousand and one.

• 43:26Speaker 07

  You'd still find me on the University of Durham website because I am in the anthropology department and emerita professor. But it's just that I went on to study things a million miles away from celibacy.

• 43:39Speaker 06

  Well, I'm not quite retired yet myself. I am a professor of anthropology and director for undergraduate research and a bunch of other hats at San Diego State University. So I am easily findable because of my unique last name, S O B O, S D S U, and you will find me there.

• 43:58Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for talking to me today.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 44:01Speaker 07

  You're welcome.

• 44:07Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Elisa and Sandra for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then you can email us at [email protected]. Coming up, we've got the next instalment in our limited series, The Secret Lives of the Six Wives, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets for History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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