I transitioned from being confident that I would find my true love and get hitched to taking a stand against the entire romantic and sexual dimension of my life because there has always been something in me besides romantic longing. It’s a part of me that feels free of the surface identity I have as a woman—free of needing and wanting something to know who I am. There’s also something very attractive to me about a renunciative life—the nobility, dignity, and strength required to withstand the wild sexual force that only wants and needs, that will use anyone and anything to get want it wants, and that supplies an identity. I wanted to find a deeper purpose, and by following that interest I was led on a spiritual journey. As I meditated and learned about habitual ways of thinking and being, I saw that there were other options I could choose—free choices, conscious choices.
Being a celibate is one of those conscious choices that allow me to create something new. I’m always amazed when I think I’m one of the comparatively few women in the history of women, thousands of years, billions of women, who even has the option to not get married and bear children. Until recently, if I’d wanted to follow this path, my only choice would have been to become a nun and withdraw from the world. If I wasn’t going to become a wife and mother, my only other option was to take myself out of the game and live an asexual life. Basically denying my gender. And there are still many places in the world right now where this is the case. For example, if your husband dies, you’re sent to live in a widows’ prison because you’re “unmarryable” and therefore serve no function in the social system. (It’s true—see the film Water.)
So, for those of us who choose to not get married and to not have children, we are bucking up against a centuries-old structure. This is uncharted territory. It’s much easier to imagine a late-in-life romance or adopting a bunch of kids, Angelina-style. But to say, “I want to create a NEW OPTION for what it means to be a woman. An option that isn’t tied to our sexual role, not a mother, not a wife, not a lover nor a mistress nor an asexual, uptight nun” well, there aren’t a lot of models out there for this type of lifestyle. Not models of strong, bright, successful, attractive, vibrant women who choose this over relationships and children. Usually when I see a woman who is manless and childless in her fifties, part of me feels bad for her and imagines she feels bad too. But what if there were women who, because of our unprecedented freedoms, education, wealth, opportunity and social support, could forego the path our mothers and sisters took and create a new women? One who coexists with women and men in a way that doesn’t involve sex and responding to the sexual forces and motives within us?
Right now, it exists as a potential—one I’m excited to explore and help create. It’s one small step for woman, one giant step for humankind. Preferably in fashionable heels.
By Holly Mandel
