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

In May 2024, an ad campaign for the dating app Bumble took a vicious jab against celibacy. Plastered on billboards in bold black font against a yellow background, the suite of advertisements brazenly proclaimed ‘YOU KNOW FULL WELL A VOW OF CELIBACY IS NOT THE ANSWER,’ and ‘THOU SHALT NOT GIVE UP ON DATING AND BECOME A NUN.’ Against the text, the ads featured images in which a young femme-presenting, racially ambiguous person looks towards the camera smiling. ‘Fed up with dating?’ they implicitly implore towards an imagined feminized audience ensnared in the pitfalls of modern love. ‘Try again,’ they sneer, ‘because celibacy is not an option.’ 

Unsurprisingly, Bumble’s anti-celibacy campaign was not well-received. Critics—mostly young women— were quick to point out the glaring assumptions that underwrote Bumble’s misguided advertisements: that dating was synonymous with sex, and that subsequently celibacy was synonymous with joining a convent of nuns; that celibacy wasn’t a viable choice for the modern sexual woman, and instead represented some kind of unimaginable failure; that, for Bumble, women were the products, and men the clientele. Amongst the slew of social media backlash aimed at Bumble, one Twitter user wrote “The fact that @bumble released all these ads that are low key coming at women for our decision to either not be on the apps, not date, be celibate, but aren’t addressing the behavior of men on these apps speaks volumes.” TikTok user @emangetalife posted a video decrying “Your campaign delegitimizing celibacy is an absolute threat to women’s safety, and I will not be using an app that encourages males to be so entitled to my body. . . Fuck you guys.” “Bumble sees you as a product,” user @imdaven proclaimed on TikTok. “And now you’re a product that stopped working.” 

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. 

In thinking about celibacy, I am indebted to queer theorist Benjamin Kahan (2013) whose engagement with celibacy complicates the repression/liberation, normal/queer and, I would add, religious/secular binaries that structure the realm of the sexual. In contrast to Freud’s repressive hypothesis, Kahan’s expressive hypothesis (a sibling of the Foucauldian productive hypothesis) seeks to wrest celibacy and its attendant ‘repressive’ discourse from the clutches of conservatism. By doing so, Kahan strives to counter the tendency within queer theory to read any absence of sex as an indication of closeted homosexuality or repressed desire. Attentive to absence in its own right, this approach to celibacy rejects purity culture logics wherein celibacy or abstinence is understood as a momentary sacrifice in pursuit of future intimacy and enactments of sexual desire—or, as Lauren D. Sawyer and Victoria Houser (2023) write, “a promised return on their investment of celibacy.” I situate my analysis in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism which has witnessed the mass commodification of intimacy, largely through the ubiquity of dating apps which compel users to self-constitute as heteronormative sexual subjects, lest they become coded as sexual failures or icons of sexual repression. Against the paradoxically sex-oriented telos that purity culture expresses, non-temporary celibacy is incomprehensible. 

I take particular interest in the explicitly religious language deployed by Bumble’s marketing campaign which frames any decision to abstain from sex—which for Bumble is synonymous with dating—as a rejection of secularized notions of freedom, and an embrace of cultural and religious conservatism. Bumble’s decision to rhetorically link the absence of sex with religious regulation rehearses the hegemonic split that Janet Jakobsen (2020) implores us to destabilize between “sexual freedom and religious commitment.” In this regard, I take interest in how Bumble’s campaign indexes a broader cultural impulse that treats religion as a site against which a certain brand of self-conscious, secular sex-positive discourse is generated in order to license its own harms. 

Finally, my paper dialogues with the emerging field of asexuality studies which critically engages the framework of compulsory sexuality, or the set of social norms which naturalize the assumption that all humans experience sexual desire and will take up sexual identities. In disavowing the coherence of celibacy within discourses of sexual liberation, Bumble enacts compulsory sexuality attitudes that erase the feminist and queer resonances within acts and relations of celibacy. Drawing on historical examples of anti-racist, feminist, and lesbian enactments of celibacy such as Cell 16 and The Black Panthers, I demonstrate that, whether or not in explicit pursuit of political transformation, celibacy enacts political critique of sexual politics underwritten by compulsory sexuality and secular notions of sexual freedom. Echoing asexuality studies scholar Ela Przybylo (2019) and her engagement with asexual erotics, this paper seeks to put forth a framework that understands celibacy as erotic in its own right, and as central to queer and feminist revolution, sexual liberation, and collective struggle (Lorde 1978).