What are the advantages and disadvantages of celibacy?

By Michelle Peters

What are the advantages of celibacy?

1. A whole load of worries are taken off your mind. You don't even have to think about contraception, venereal disease, physical compatibility, who sleeps on the wet patch, impotence, frigidity, bizarre sexual injuries, whether to swallow, whether your partner is good in bed, sexual fidelity, how to stop the bed from creaking, shave or not shave, wash or not wash, whether you know enough positions, orgasm faking, whether to experiment or which flavour of condom to choose. This must surely free up several cubic inches of brain tissue.

2. The enormous amount of time and effort that other people expend in order to get laid is freed up for other things. No more hanging around in sweaty nightclubs. No more searching through 'lifestyle magazine' articles for the latest and cleverest way to pick someone up. No more garotting your body with tight underwear. No more worry about whether you are adequately filling out your bra/shorts. No longer will you go to a dull party just because there's someone there that you fancy.

3. People you talk to will know that you're not interested in them for their body.

4. If you don't have sex, you can't have any Sexual Disasters.

   None of those embarrassing moments like when you just can't undo her bra, or when you can't get out of your bondage gear, or when you knock over the bedside table, or when your parents come home earlier than you expected, or when you realise that your partner is in fact amazingly ugly, or when you smear them all over with peanut butter and them remember that you don't like peanut butter, or when you wake up the next morning and you've forgotten their name, or their gender.

5. You will save money. How much money you save depends on how you were getting your sex in the first place.

6. Nobody will be able to blackmail you with photographs of you in flagrante delicto. James Bond would be more effective if he were celibate, because then attractive enemy agents would not be able to seduce and capture him.

7. I don't believe in God myself, but there are a lot of folks out there who think that God will look on you more favourably if you are celibate, or if you avoid recreational sex. Remember "Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate."? Seriously though, celibacy may contribute to a greater peacefulness and spirituality if undertaken in the right context.

8. Celibacy significantly decreases your chances of becoming pregnant. That is, unless you're a man.

9. You have a reserve of energy that you can expend on other things. Life will come into a more sensible perspective when it isn't dominated by the search for a mate.

10. If you spontaneously combust, you don't take anyone with you.

What are the disadvantages?

1. You don't get any sex.

2. Cliff Richard is your role model.

Speaking of which, who are the celebrity celibates?

1. The Pope... okay, I'm not going to mention the religious ones.

2. Stephen Fry, the British actor, comedian, writer, critic, novelist and taxi driver, was the UK's most prominent and vocal celibate for several years, although he has since rediscovered the alleged joys of wanton carnality.

3. Isaac Newton, the mathematician and scientist (said by some to be the greatest scientist ever), was a virgin all his life. He was also very unpopular. Let us move on.

4. Cliff "no soul" Richard, purveyor of family-acceptable and totally non-threatening pop tunes, is one of the most vocal celibates of modern times. It may well be this fact which has held back the cause of open celibacy.

5. Cosmopolitan agony aunt Irma Kurtz has been a celibate for years and years with no regrets. Perhaps a Cosmo reader can fill me in with some more specifics.

6. Simone Weil was one of the best known European political thinkers of the 20th Century and, as far as anybody knows, a lifelong celibate.

7. Also rumoured to be a lifelong celibate was the Dutch philosopher and theologian Baruch Spinoza.

8. Dr. Temple Grandin, the American academic whose empathy with animals has led to her being a highly successful designer of humane animal management systems, is a voluntary celibate. The reasons are too complex to go into here, but those interested can read the final chapter of Oliver Sacks' "An Anthropologist on Mars".

9. Stevie Smith, poet and novelist, was celibate all her life, after sampling and rejecting romance and sex in her youth. She was fiercely critical of those who thought that her life must be emotionally impoverished by not having sexual relationships anymore, emphasizing the depth of her friendships, especially her bond with the aunt with whom she lived.

10. Pitt the Younger, legendary British Prime Minister, is generally agreed by historians to have died a virgin.

11. Nikolai Tesla, who developed the system of alternating electrical current that is the standard nowadays worldwide, was a self-proclaimed celibate.

12. Carole Channing, the Broadway musical star of "Hello Dolly"

13. fame was celibate in her marriage to Charles Lowe for 41 years.

14. Morrissey, the British singer and former member of the Smiths, was openly celibate for several years.

15. G. H. Hardy, twentieth century English mathematician who made ample contributions in number theory and who co-authored the famous Hardy-Weinberg law of population genetics. He was also the mentor of legendary prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan (who was probably also a life- long celibate).

16. Paul Erdos was the most prolific mathematician in history, having participated in more then 20,000 papers. He was born in Hungary but never held a home or a job, relying instead on the hospitality of other mathematicians with whom he collaborated and on the money he received for conferences. See The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman (Hyperion, 1998).

17. Antonio Gaudi, the spanish architect most famous for the Segrada Familia in Barcelona, is said to never have had sex.

18. Alan Christie Wilson of the blues-rock group Canned Heat was a voluntary celibate in the later part of his life, according to his authorised biographer Krisna Radha. The reasons seem to be a mix of medical, spiritual and issues from childhood.

19. "Divorced novelist Beryl Bainbridge revealed that she gave up men because, when she was 56, she felt having a physical relationship with a man was 'no longer dignified', and anyway her life was far too full of other things like writing, children and friends." - quote from a Daily Mail article by Jenny Nisbet (approx.) 1st December 1998.