So, confession: I’m not really interested in celebrities or pop culture. Keeping up with the lives of famous people has little appeal to me. However, when I stumbled across a BuzzFeed article about Justin Bieber being a born-again virgin, I was intrigued. In the aforementioned article, Bieber makes a grand declaration of wanted to control what he believed is a sex addiction, and his statements have led many to believe that the reason he and Hailey Baldwin married so quickly was so that he could have sex with her. As someone who is celibate myself, I have fears that Bieber’s outlandish comments could lead to confusion over my life choice, so I want to clear some things up.
First of all, celibacy is not a means of controlling sexual urges or sex addiction. It is a conscious decision to not have sex, and temptation is very real sometimes. Sex addiction is a serious problem that cannot be corrected by simply choosing to not engage in sexual activity. If you think you have a sex addiction, I really urge you to see a psychologist or therapist.
Alongside his comments about celibacy, Bieber has also said a lot of things about “finding Jesus”, which brings me to my second point: celibacy isn’t always for religious reasons. My religious beliefs did play a factor in my choosing celibacy, but so did being taught that sex was both an emotional and physical act and the fact that I’m not into hook-up culture. Some people choose not to have sex simply because they don’t feel ready for it. There are a million reasons why someone could be celibate, and most of them have nothing to do with religion.
I made my decision to be celibate when I was a freshman in high school, and since then I’ve had people make a lot of assumptions about me based on that. The two that annoy me the most are that I’m a prude and that since I don’t have sex, that I’m not interested in a romantic relationship. Surprisingly, I have a really dirty sense of humor that has earned me the reputation of the friend who turns everything sexual, and I’m a hopeless romantic who has had too many crushes to count. There’s also this annoying notion that some people have that celibacy is somehow anti-feminist, but last I checked, feminism is all about choice. If women should be able to choose to be sexually active, then shouldn’t we also be able to choose to not have sex? It’s simple logic, really.
Justin Bieber’s comments about celibacy are, in my opinion, a bit misleading. He makes it seem as though celibacy is a last-resort decision made by people who have serious issues around sex, or something that only super-religious people do. These are the kinds of things that lead to misinformation and stereotyping, so I can only hope that I’ve clarified some things, and that maybe everyone will stop associating celibacy with sex addiction and Jesus.