The Right to Celibacy: Bumble and the Secular Aesthetics of Sexual Liberation

In May 2024, a marketing campaign for the dating app Bumble took to billboards across America with a vicious jab against celibacy, commanding ‘THOU SHALT NOT GIVE UP ON DATING AND BECOME A NUN.’ In this paper, I examine the dynamic contours of religion, secularism, sexual freedom, and capitalism that underwrite Bumble’s anti-celibacy attitudes. This paper is oriented around two questions prompted by their campaign: First, what does Bumble’s choice to use explicitly religious language and imagery mean for hegemonic notions of sexual freedom? And second, why is celibacy—whether or not it’s understood as a religious commitment—posed as such a threat, and as incompatible with queer and feminist politics? I argue that in positioning itself in contradistinction to the perceived regulatory apparatus of religion, Bumble enacts its own regulatory protocol which mandates gendered and sexual self-governance and self-constitution through the pursuit of digitally-mediated sexual intimacy.