In 1994, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq published Whatever, a novel about two involuntarily celibate men. It involves a lot of railing about the market conditions that deny these men the sex they deserve, particularly the ugly one, who in a more communitarian age would have just found a similarly ugly woman in his village. In the modern world he’s forced to compete against other men who aren’t ugly, so when he kills a woman (whoops, spoiler!), that is fine, actually.
The book was extremely fashionable: everyone had read it, some people called it Peu Importe to indicate they’d read it in the original French, which was funny, because its French title was actually Extension du Domaine de la Lutte. We gave it the time of day because, who knew, perhaps it wasn’t about sex at all, perhaps it was all just a metaphor for libertarianism, and the slain woman was actually maman.
But it was also original, running directly counter to the dominant narrative: this was the high watermark of ladette-ism, and the fundamental question of western culture in its most general sense was, why should women be seen as the gatekeepers of sex? Why should “slut” be an insult, why should chastity – or at least selectiveness – be considered feminine virtues, why shouldn’t women pursue their own sexual destiny? These fictional incels posed the opposite question: what if women shouldn’t be allowed to gatekeep? What if men have a right to sex?
What I was not expecting was for this to come around 30 years later as a serious question. The Philadelphia activist and Democrat politician, Alexandra Hunt, this week called for just this. “We should be moving toward a right to sex,” she said, highlighting a 2019 Washington Post graph showing that 28% of men and 18% of women aged 18-30 had reported no sex at all in the preceding year. In the UK, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles released a mini Covid study earlier this year, which showed similar, though less precipitous drops in sexual activity and not as much of a gap between men and women.
Hunt’s tricky framing of sex as a rights-based notion inevitably instigated a number of spinoff conversations, most of which were means – varyingly sophisticated – of sticking the blame on women. Was this the result of the #MeToo movement, in which women had problematised every aspect of the initiation of sex, while declining to do the heavy lifting of initiating themselves? Was it because women actually didn’t like sex, preferring nail bars and mocktails, and TikTok had given them the courage to finally say so? (I may have compacted two arguments there, but never mind.)
Then there were those who situated the problem, instead, with men: had they just lost the custom of socialisation, through some combination of Call of Duty and Deliveroo? It is quite difficult to go straight from solitude to sex without some kind of couch-to-5k training programme. Are the cultural demands of masculinity simply too unrealistic, too contradictory? When Instagram wants you to be respectful and seek equality, while Jordan Peterson wants you to be tough and forceful, and eat steak without a knife and fork, at what point does this all become just too much?
While a lot of the angles were silly, none of this is trivial: the notion of men having a right to sex sits at the heart of the incel movement, which is a full-blown terrorist philosophy, with real people killing other real people, predominantly women but sometimes men who get in the way, in its name. Frequently, incels leave behind screeds of text detailing why “Staceys” have brought them to this pass by withholding sexually. Such ideas are then taken up by mainstream conservatism which concludes, sadly, that while it would be wrong to force a woman into sex, if one of the ladies had taken Elliot Rodger for the team in 2014, six innocent people would still be alive.
There is no point approaching these arguments at a granular level, like, “What if someone had shagged Elliot Rodger and it hadn’t gone very well? Would that have resulted in less gratuitous murder, or more?” The case isn’t designed as a practical fix to a security issue, but rather as a waypoint on a return to a primitive understanding of sex and gender, where equality has been a hoax. Men must hunt, gather and dominate, women must, I don’t know, tidy up and submit? Violent misogyny is plainly dangerous in itself, but it also overlaps with white supremacist ideology which views the empowerment of white women as leading to the unwanted celibacy of white men, and thus contributing to the coming replacement of the race.
The sad thing is, we were actually getting somewhere in the 1990s, in tearing down the idea of any essential difference between men and women’s sex drive or agency. We were inching towards a collective understanding that tropes of masculinity and femininity didn’t map neatly on to any of us, that desire and its intensity, preference and its idiosyncrasy were decided at the level not of the chromosome but of the self, and we therefore didn’t have to think of sex as something one group owed to or withheld from another. It is only from a non-adversarial standpoint that you could ever have a fruitful conversation about celibacy, involuntary or otherwise. If you pose men and women as enemies, ultimately everyone (heterosexual) ends up celibate.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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