Is giving up sex bad for your health?
Q: Is there any evidence that the health of women who give up sex voluntarily deteriorates over time faster than those who continue to have a sex life? In this case, I talk a woman of 60 who gave up sex seven years ago for religious reasons and now faces a range of inexplicable digestive tract problems and lowered immune system functioning.
Having sex is good for you. We here at Sexploration have said so before and we will say so again partly because it’s true, but also because we are enormously pleased about it.
Yes, yes, yes, there are caveats. Sex is not so good for you if you have it with people incubating STDs, and it might not be so good for you if you like your sex spiced with a dash of asphyxiation or, say, fire, but you get the idea. Humans were meant to have sex.
But just because sex is good for you doesn't mean that abstaining from sex is bad for you.
With the exception of obvious conditions like vaginal atrophy that are directly related to sexual abstinence, no studies directly link celibacy to poor overall health. This could be because the validity of any such link is murky.
For example, some epidemiological studies have tried to make a connection between, say, prostate cancer and Catholic priests, testing the hypothesis that infrequent ejaculation might increase the rate of the cancer in the priests. (One study published nearly 30 years ago showed that priests actually had a lower rate of prostate cancer death.) But that assumes priests aren’t ejaculating. And maybe the rate of ejaculation had nothing to do with cancer incidence but lower stress levels or healthy diets did.
Other studies of monks, priests and nuns — who are supposed to be celibate — have generally showed that they live longer, on average, than us civilians. Is it the lack of sex? All that contemplation? Both? Neither?
After a group of Italian investigators followed nuns for more than 30 years and compared them to lay women, “none showed an increase in diastolic blood pressure … By contrast, the control women showed the expected increase in blood pressure with age … cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, expressed as the outcome of fatal and nonfatal events, were different in the two groups. They were significantly more common in the lay women than in the nuns.” But did sex have anything to do with that or did Italian husbands just aggravate their wives?
Utopian Shaker communities of the United States in the 19th century maintained strict celibacy. This may explain why, at last count, there were three Shakers left in the United States. But while celibacy didn’t do much for recruitment or restocking communities, it didn’t harm the Shakers’ health.
What evidence there is indicates that it is possible to live a long, healthy, celibate life. But we here at Sexploration think somebody ought to do a study on why anybody would want to.
