Voluntary celibacy | Profile

Mount Athos in northern Greece is a place where straight men are guaranteed to have wet dreams, as women, even tourists, are not allowed on the mountain. These are 20 Orthodox monasteries established under their own laws, filled with monks determined to escape Eve’s temptations. To avoid perishing from lack of reproductive activity, they prey on newcomers willing to cross the border and never see a hairless face again. The basic argument in ancient times is that the Virgin Mary wanted the mountain to herself. But what is called archaic has futuristic overtones.

I loved the French anachronism of still calling single people bachelors. In pop music, the old meaning of the word seems to be resurfacing. Hits like Rosalía’s album complete with monkish paraphernalia, quotations from Simone Weil and its creator proclaiming sexual abstinence, half-war sanctified saints staring at us from T-shirts and memes, or more tangential but harmonious gestures like descending to earth in religious garb with a tweeting pope are our daily bread and butter. For Juan Manuel de Prada, when a phenomenon of this kind is judged to be a “Catholic awakening,” there is an underlying “illusion or wishful thinking.” The problem is that, especially among women, the spiritual desire to become a Carmelite monk, devoting themselves only to God, is less advanced than the secular questioning of the classical exchange of fluids. After centuries of prejudice (she didn’t get married because she was ugly, a whore, or crazy), the hope was that Taba would return in a variety of modalities, from a societal reappraisal of single motherhood and the science of paying for egg freezing, sperm banks, and surrogate wombs to youthful slogans like “I’m tired of having boyfriends.” Micro-society is also emerging where people publish their daily lives on networks without men. Will it last for centuries like Mount Athos?

Phoenix Bird tearing down the walls of hermitages and monasteries, returning from ostracism in pink cars and chauffeured Ubers, voluntary celibacy is as old as the idea of ​​God and as new as a Rosalía album.