Melissa Febos’ ‘A Dry Season’: Celibacy as Self-Actualization

Celibacy is not necessarily a radical act. Yet within our patriarchal society, women choosing to abstain from sex — specifically with men — has been historically interpreted as subversion, as an act of rebellion to the social scripts and strictures that have conditioned all of us into adopting what French feminist Monique Wittig referred to as “the straight mind,” the ideology espousing that women’s primary purpose is that of procreation. As case in point, recall last year’s social media trend of women vowing to withhold sex with men after President Trump’s re-election, an effort inspired by the separatist 4B Movement in South Korea.

The media’s reception of award-winning writer Melissa Febos’ new book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, similarly focuses on the shock value of her choice to give up sex for a year. But Febos is quick to decry the idea that her vow of celibacy was a form of deprivation, or even very shocking. “I preferred to think about celibacy in terms of self-actualization,” she writes. “I liked the idea of choosingcelibacy, not as a last-resort treatment of my depression, not as deprivation, but as an attempt to grow my world.”

She admits it was a choice made out of necessity. Physically and emotionally ravaged by a two-year affair, followed by a succession of five flings that “had a frantic tinge, like the last handful of popcorn you cram into your mouth after you decide to stop eating it,” Febos chooses to extract herself from a 20-year pattern of serial monogamy and the “treat-based economy” that has dictated most of her life’s trajectory, from work to relationships.

The Dry Season is a masterclass in the craft of memoir. Febos demonstrates that self-creation, like self-writing, is fundamentally an act of collective creation, or cocreation. Celibacy, just like writing, does not demand solitude. In fact, it requires an ethical commitment to developing and refining one’s critical consciousness about how they live and express themself and engage with other people.

The trope of self-exploration so essential to the memoir genre acquires a satisfying feminist ethos in The Dry Season: Self-creation, as I have defined it, is the process of how we intentionally design our lives with other people. It is not something we do on our own; rather, our freedom to create our own lives depends on the freedom of other people to do the same. Our lives are codesigned, cocreated. Self-creation is world-building — which is another way to interpret the famous feminist mantra that the personal is political.

Spoiler alert: Through writing an inventory of past relationships and reading it aloud to her spiritual advisor, Febos learns that she is codependent. “It was not out of love that I sought to please, but an effort to placate others so that I might be released from my own obsession with pleasing, my own intolerance for their disappointment,” she determines, in reflection upon her spiritual advisor’s impassive comment that she uses people:

“I thought I was a people-pleaser,” she replies.

“People-pleasing is people-using,” her advisor retorts.

To evoke the words of my wise mentor, the late Harvard literary theorist Barbara Johnson, in the epilogue to her book Persons and Things, using people is a form of objectification that is not uncommon in human relationships — “it is treating other people as things that we normally do, and that reassures us.” Febos interprets this reassurance variously as both freedom and safety. It is not that she or her ex-lovers are “bad” people. Such a naïve reading of the Sartrean line “hell is other people” is a misunderstanding, as Sartre himself later clarified: “If my relations are bad, I am situating myself in a total dependence on someone else. And then I am indeed in hell.” Febos herself acknowledges this — the root of the problem in the relation and not the person — in her appellation for the two-year-affair: “the Maelstrom.”

For Febos, this realization takes shape in her decision to “find new idols.” Not unlike many other feminist and queer writers, she had found artistic and personal inspiration in the lives of women writers like Colette and Edna St. Vincent Millay. These women epitomize the Romantic ideal of the tortured artist — the fallacious notion that one must suffer to create good art. These art monsters, along with “a treasured collection of alcoholic[s] and junkie[s]” like Patricia Highsmith and Marguerite Duras, had been her role models: “I worshipped all these short women with abandonment issues who were also creative icons because they gave me hope for myself,” she explains. “They provided me with a chorus of validation, evidence of the connection between addiction and art.”

In turning to study celibacy, she finds new mentors in female mystics and saints, the Benedictines, beguines, and other religious laywomen for whom celibacy was “a route to freedom.” As Febos writes, “Exempt from the servitude of marriage and motherhood, their world and their futures grew far beyond the circumscribed limits of female life at the time [in the Middle Ages]. At least until men of the church realized what freedom they enjoyed and began persecuting them.” For these women, “celibacy had less to do with sex than with conviction, and a hunger for a more authentic way of living.” From them, Febos undertakes celibacy as a practice in “self-love” and “redefinition,” to “close the distance between the private self and the self I created in relationships …. The goal of celibacy was to relate to myself.”

In addition to Saint Catherine of Siena and Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen (who is believed to have written “the first description of the female orgasm”), Febos finds mentorship in the Black feminist writers Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde. The thread connecting all these women was the eternal pursuit of alignment with “a higher power,” whether articulated as a singular God or the dignity, or divinity, of all life. “It was what Audre Lorde called the erotic, and what the Benedictines call a consecrated life. It was agape.” As Febos quotes Lorde’s famous essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.” The erotic is in many ways the very same life force that defines Hildegard’s viriditas, “a Latin noun that indicates greenness, fertility, lushness, and all vital life-giving properties,” Febos explains.

In studying the work of these women, Febos realizes that “I had been thinking of this time as a dry season, but it had been the most fertile of my life since childhood. I had run dry when I spent that vitality in worship of lovers. In celibacy, I felt more vital, fecund, wet, than I had in years.”

Importantly, the erotic informs our critical consciousness, Lorde wrote, by becoming “a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” From this consciousness we can choose to live otherwise, create our lives and build relationships and communities with intention.

Febos’ redefinition of self is constituted by this community, this communing with women across time that informs her present-day relationships with friends and former lovers. (“I had the uncanny sense of Butler reaching through time, speaking directly across it to me,” she thinks while reading Butler’s papers at the Huntington Library.) She concludes, “My attempt to replace dependence with independence and interdependence, to share my questions and answers with the women who came before and after me, was the radical basis of all feminisms. It was the basis of all freedoms. It was my inheritance.”

Stylistically, this self-creation as co-creation materializes in Febos’ emphasis on the lyric I, “the voice of experience, a voice that includes the reader, that speaks out of a collective first person — a kind of first-person plural,” she writes. The effect, to evoke her recurring metaphor of lighting a lamp to describe the liberatory jolt of the erotic, is electric, and very clever: Febos situates herself as the very same textual mentor for her reader that Lorde, Hildegard, and others have figured for her. The reader not only serves as a witness in her taking accountability for her role in her previous relationships, not unlike the spiritual advisor, but becomes an extension of the feminist community that comprises her own self-creation. The book’s concluding words — an invocation of her new mentors who tell her to “begin here” — is also an enjoinder for readers to do the same in becoming the writer of their own self-creation.