History of Celibacy
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Whether it's the Jonas Brothers purity rings, fleabags, hot priests, cassock 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.

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.

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 abstain from sex entirely because they are just as fascinating and absolutely deserve a closer look.

Well, joining me today are Elisa 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.

Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's Sandra Bell and Elisa Sobo. How are you both doing? I think I can say we're very well, thank you. We've just had a chat beforehand to refresh our memories. I understand this is something of a reunion. Yeah, it is. It's a good one, though. I'm very, very pleased that you can be reuniting on this podcast. 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 to come together to want to edit this collection of essays? What was it that made you

want to look at the phenomena of celibacy? 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, Reproduction and Love. Oh, Sex, Reproduction and Love. And I had just joined her department and

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 Salisbury 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. I think I remember first speaking to you over the proverbial photocopying machine, actually, about this. Yeah.

And I'd done my PhD and some subsequent publications on Buddhism in Britain, and I'd studied a monastic order of 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. 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

We got involved in the co-teaching. Gosh, it was a long time ago. 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?

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 long-standing 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

All sex is not for reproduction anyway. So I suppose the way it's codified is often that you're refraining from reproducing.

You go along with that, Elisa? 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

a celibate individual to do ritual, spiritual, 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. 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? 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. Yeah, the detail, the details of what it entails is

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 at

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

The script could even be that it's not just sexual expression. It could extend to other areas of life where one has to shut off other things as well. 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. Or cutting your fingernails or cutting your hair. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It can be associated with lots of other bodily activity. 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 a state of denial that that's what's caught up with it, whether that's elective or that's forced on you or does it represent something else?

No, no, no. I think sometimes it's the opposite. It's a state of it's wanting to create in my body. For example, I'm thinking about semen retention amongst and Sandra can talk more about this or retaining sexual energies as a way to become more generative in other aspects of life or for other forms of life.

expression or purity. So it's not denial, it's more a creative state in some situations. It can enhance your capacities and make you more charismatic to other people, or it can give you status on 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. I suppose that'd be something like the Vestal Virgins. Yes, or think about a teacher, a kindergarten teacher who decides not to have children and

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. But you mentioned the Vestal Virgins.

And the Vestal Virgins were really anomalous in Roman society. It was because on the whole, Roman society valorized reproduction and the creation of the next generation. So they were really exceptional, which meant that they were able to get closer to the divine and the otherworldly, so they were closer together.

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

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.

powers. Why not? This is global. It is global, yes. And do they draw on particular cultural tropes? For example, in India, this idea that Elisa has already mentioned, but that for man to retain his

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 proclaims his celibacy.

It's something that makes him more powerful and enables him to care for everybody and not just his immediate family. 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. 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 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?

Well, there have been and are female aesthetics, but they're not generally in South Asia. They're not generally read in that sort of way. 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 power.

themselves as having more autonomy in society than they might otherwise be given. 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

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

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I suppose the group 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 there?

around that? What was the change? What was being associated with celibacy that suddenly the priests had to be celibate? I think property. Property. I mean,

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 things,

sex, then having children isn't the most immediate thing. We have an example in the book of the 19th century Shakers in America who were very strictly celibate.

And then, of course, as the expectations recede, adjustments have to be made accordingly. And Elise is right that it did take quite a long time for it to become part of the vow, certainly in Roman Catholicism, that a priest has to take. So it was the kind of Middle Ages before it was fully complicated.

codified, 11th, 12th century, 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 and

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.

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. 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. Well, there's quite a lot of sex in the Bible. I mean, there is celibacy in the Bible. There's eunuchs. Yes, but...

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 St. 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. But it's very flimsy scriptural evidence for celibacy.

the requirement, the center of the fear. 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

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. Yeah, hence, and so Catholic priests came to be called Father, again, using these kinships.

terms and that you are my flock and you are my children or the children of the church. 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. 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. That convert would become prioresses. 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 sometimes.

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.

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 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. 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 Kylibi? 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 Hedra in India castrate themselves. Is that about celibacy or is that about something else?

Well, certainly not among the Hedra. They have a whole different Hedra. It's not one single phenomena anyway. Different Hedra. Some are homosexual. Some are asexual because they have gone through this process of becoming eunuchs.

In a way, that's the prototypical notion of the hijra. And then they would go and perform ceremonies 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 that kind of way so it's not a hugely homogenous some fell into prostitution so it's not really an homogenous institution at all

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 Sandra, you alluded to it just there, that the Prime Minister of India, but if we think about someone like Elizabeth I, how important was the concept of celibacy to her and to her queenship?

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 Anne Boleyn, who'd been executed. She had at one point been executed.

bomb 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

the counsellors state were always advising her wanting her to marry and she was not necessarily always disagreeing with them over that but she was very canny about it she knew that any consort of hers could easily usurp her so a

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.

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. Yeah, yeah. Well, they tried to marry Elizabeth to him as well. 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. 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. Well, there's examples of ordinary people doing it. In Albania and Montenegro, they have this institution of the sacred virgins. Sworn virgin. The sworn virgin, that's right, sorry. And they...

are kind of surrogate men. Wow. 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 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 it

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. Otherwise she blows it completely. And then she can inherit the farm. So she would live as a man. Yeah. Wow.

That's just made me think of St. Wilger Fortis. And there are a few other virgin saints that took on masculine attributes during their martyrdom. St. Wilger Fortis 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 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. Yeah.

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

To their advantage. It doesn't always work that way. 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 Theravadan societies, 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 says,

goes off track and has found out that she did have sex with a man, then it's all over. And in fact, she'd probably be killed.

Let's talk about celibacy as a punishment. It's so interesting. There's so many different scripts 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. Right. With the assumption, there's always the assumption there because you have this sex segregated, right? So there's the assumption of what equals, what qualifies as sex. But yes. Yeah. There's a lot of prisoners who aren't going, oh, well, there's no women here. I guess I 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?

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. 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, usually have small prisons with only about 70 inmates and stuff, then it's manageable and regarded as a way of a 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 byproduct than I think that powerful people will sit and think, oh, how can we introduce some sort of sexual withdrawal as a punishment per se?

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

that conjugal visits had been posed as a solution to make prisons less violent. But I think he is coming to the conclusion that it wasn't going to function in that sort of a way. So that was really the main point of that article. I'll be back with Aliza and Sandra after this short break. Ryan Reynolds here from Intmobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

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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.

Well, I mean, you know, twas ever thus, depending on how you define celibacy. But think about that play Lysistrata. Yes. Right. Yeah. And that's not necessarily that's absent. 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 organized

extensive it is. But 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.

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, 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 a 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. I hope so. But I think right now, and even maybe since the 60s and the 70s 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, there was 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 come to a space where, oh, yeah, you know what?

It's not and it doesn't need to be. 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 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. Yeah, and also it doesn't account for the life cycle, you know, when there are stages in people's lives when they really may feel more controlled by the urge to have sex, to have more sex, when you've just had a baby or when you're older and your partner dies, well, you just don't,

need another partner because you're past it or children or children yeah children nobody would say a child is celibate no exactly that's a very good point 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 and sexualisation is the norm in our society. When you might see that, is that in fact a little bit of a distortion? 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?

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 correctly,

2001. You'd still find me on the University of Durham website because I am in the anthropology department, an America professor, but it's just that I went on to study things that were a million miles away from celibacy. 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. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Aliza and Sandra for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever 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 betwixt at historyhit.com.

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 DeLarge and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound. Selling a little or a lot?

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