Re-enchanting Celibacy

How is Christian celibacy connected to feminist ideas about sex? I’ll begin my answer with Perry’s thesis that sex in the post-1960s West has been, as she puts it in her book, “disenchanted.” This is a development of an argument made by Aaron Sibarium in an essay about the Netflix series Cuties (do we all remember Cuties? If not, it’s most certainly for the best) in which he defined disenchanted sex as that which “has no inherent value beyond what consenting adults assign to it.” Following Sibarium, Perry argues that modernity has redefined sex as a merely functional act which carries no meaning beyond whichever extrinsic, pliable one we might choose to fit on it—and, moreover, requires no particular level of psychological maturity to practice. But reality can only stretch so far to accommodate this idea. As she observes in an interview on the subject of sexual disenchantment, those who hold to it firmly and consistently “generally make [themselves] miserable and make other people miserable.”