– And It’s Made Me Completely Rethink My Concept Of Pleasure
By Kayla Jacobs
I haven’t had sex in a year. Just over a year, to be precise. And when it’s been 365 days and counting, every single second matters.
When you’re in the prime of your life, you’re supposed to be having a lot of sex. Isn’t it the ultimate sign of desirability, power, and magnetism? Not having it, by the same token, means you’re… flawed, unattractive, hopeless. Late at night (well, actually, at all times of the day), I’ve tormented myself with these notions.
I derive much of my sense of pleasure from what I give as opposed to what I receive. Flying solo is epic, but, for me, sex doesn’t truly count unless it’s with another living, breathing human. Two months is a dry spell. Twelve months plus is akin to a crime. I’ve allowed feelings of shame to percolate – shame that I haven’t let someone else into my innermost sanctum, shame about being a woman in her childbearing years who does want children but isn’t doing the physical act that brings them forth.
In March, after seven years in the US, I returned to London, drawn back by Covid, wanting to be nearer my family. While the visceral, messy glory of being with another human played like a loop in my mind, I made a pact: I would start to savour the smallest of moments and triumph in that connection with myself whenever I damn well could. I took joy in the fleeting: a pastel-hued sunset, a fat red rose, winks from perfect strangers, greedily inhaling the earthy cologne of passers-by. These teeny tiny moments began to feel like the very largest of pleasures to me, the biggest fireworks in the sky.
I became adept at tracing every inch of my physical body, inviting her daily to cross self-imposed barriers. I raged against my femininity, too, turning away from my reflection so that I couldn’t remember what I’d lost sight of. I thought about decamping to the foothill of the Himalayas to lead a monastic and pandemic-free life while simultaneously imagining what it would be like if I were run over while wearing mismatched underwear, leaving an odorous trail of “Chaste” hanging in the air. Who would ever know?
Why haven’t I been intimate with someone? Besides the circumstantial, Covid made the mere thought of kissing anyone feel as scary as jumping out of a plane with no parachute. Then, I reconnected with an old flame on the other side of the world – he was recording an album in Nashville, and the serenading and seducing through the ether made me feel alive for a hot minute. Ultimately, creativity only took us so far, with audio messages, texting, and image-sharing morphing into a bad country ballad tied up in a synthetic rhinestone shirt.
Having experienced bouts of abstinence before – though I’ve never defined them as that – this time, I wanted to prioritise my pleasure viscerally, care for the things that felt broken, find a voice for the things untouched, unsaid and unseen within me. And so, I experimented with all manner of sex tech – beginning with a pelvic floor trainer (yes, yes, it’s a thing), moving on to unique pastel shapes that gave potent vibrations. I tried an amethyst yoni egg. I read “erotic” literature that ran the gamut from Anaïs Nin to Bram Stoker, DH Lawrence, and Lisa Taddeo, devouring fictional depictions of other people’s sexual adventures and missteps which comforted and sometimes turned me on.< I listened to Dipsea, described as “sexy audio stories that spark your imagination and get you in the mood”, and podcasts such as Melissa Wells’s Love Sex & Magic, Kim Anami’s Orgasmic Enlightenment, and a lot of The Adam Buxton Podcast (I find his voice and thoughts very sexy). I layered all manner of scented offerings on myself, trying to figure out what combination is dynamite to my nose while lighting candles and nearly burning my home down, all in an ode to my favourite sense: smell. I sang along to songs that felt for a few minutes like they belonged just to me: “Unfinished Sympathy” (Massive Attack), “I Want You” (Marvin Gaye), “Glory Box” (Portishead), “The Sweetest Taboo” (Sade).
And I gave myself plenty of orgasms. I fed my hungry skin with self-touch and attention, in a manner entirely separate from reimagining the weight of a man I might fancy the pants off enveloping me.
It’s been interesting watching in slow-motion as the wheels of the world have screeched to a standstill, and how I’ve wanted sex so much more, prioritised it in my head, ruminated on passion and the privilege of permission, especially in the face of fear and anxiety. The lack of physical intimacy has consumed me because it’s the ultimate barometer of what it means to be alive – in a world where we as women are often expected to put ourselves last, enforced isolation has cut to the heart of desire as a thing of uncommon beauty, to be upheld no matter what.
When I reached out to Dorottya Varga from Heroine Journal, an e-zine that amplifies the female perspective through a holistic lens, she congratulated me on not having had sex for a year, which made me smile and then made me feel proud. She said she was new to celibacy but was choosing not to have physical intimacy or be in a physical relationship for the time being because she believed that her desires are shaping her reality. “My desires most of my life have revolved around sex or men. I’m finding myself constantly chasing being in relationships, and I need a perspective shift,” she said. “I believe that sexual energy is creative energy, and if I am to focus all of that energy on me, I know I can build anything I want for myself, create an endless pot, give all that juice to me.”
Giving my fears and desires room to flourish has been challenging. At times, the shame and the pride mingle in a strange stew which sometimes I want to devour and other times completely repulses me. But, on reflection, thinking about my sex life as part of a daily self-care ritual – an inherently solitary pursuit – seems to me like the gateway to genuine connection. Isolation has become more than just feeling sad, lonely, or even the fantasy of a next encounter, but about imagining what it might be like to restart my sex life from a different perspective, the one where I embrace that noble ideal: intimacy with myself, even when I don’t feel like it.
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