The Anti-Sex Startup

Silicon Valley has discovered chastity. Not the old, church-basement kind, but a sleeker version—celibacy with a pitch deck. Sex, we’re assured, is a distraction. Desire’s a bug. Bodies are bandwidth hogs. The serious men are “locked in,” the lights are off, and Love Mode has been toggled to disabled.

The new creed goes something like this: build now, touch later. Code all day, lift all night, sleep just enough to repeat. Romance is treated like a side quest you unlock after Series B, preferably once your valuation has learned to walk upright. It’s monkhood without the monastery, abstinence without transcendence. A life pared down to protein shakes and pull requests.

Against that backdrop, two men—Nick Fuentes and Pastor Joel Webbon—recently discussed celibacy as a kind of masculine superpower. Fuentes, a self-described virgin, framed abstinence as focus. Webbon framed it as discipline. Whatever one thinks of either man, the conversation landed because it rhymed with the moment. Control yourself, conquer the world. Shut the door on desire and watch the numbers go up.

There’s a strange confidence in that idea, and also a quiet fear. Sex is unruly. It makes claims on your time and attention. It introduces another person with their own needs, moods, and stubborn humanity. Startups like clean systems. People refuse to behave like them. So the system votes no. But something important gets lost when sex is framed as an indulgent distraction.

A defense of sex doesn’t require turning indulgence into a badge of liberation, let alone an Eyes Wide Shut fantasy. It doesn’t require pretending that attempting to sleep with as many men or women as possible is a worthwhile endeavor. It requires saying something simpler and less fashionable: sex, rightly placed, is a stabilizing force. It binds people to reality. It interrupts the fantasy that you’re a self-contained unit, sufficient unto yourself, accountable only to a spreadsheet and a mirror.

There’s a reason the rhetoric of celibacy now sounds heroic. It flatters a culture already trained to see restraint as virtue and connection as liability. Silicon Valley didn’t invent this reflex, but it refined it. When every interaction is measured for output, intimacy looks inefficient. When time is money, affection looks like theft.

The obvious joke is that the same culture that once marketed free love as fuel for creativity now sells celibacy as fuel for productivity. What changed wasn’t the fixation, only the branding. Yesterday’s cuddle puddles have become today’s monk mode. Same obsession. Different costume.

Sex, like food, doesn’t disappear just because you declare it a distraction. It waits. It finds substitutes. Work becomes eroticized. The gym becomes ritual. And when desire finally resurfaces, as it always does, it tends to do so sideways—through power games, resentment, or a biting contempt for those who didn’t make the same vows.

None of this is an argument for recklessness. I’m not encouraging anyone to live like Charlie Sheen. But sex isn’t the problem. Sex, at its best, is one of the few experiences that reliably pulls people out of abstraction and back into reality, into the present moment.

There’s also a quieter truth the self-denial evangelists rarely admit: some of the most durable builders in history weren’t renunciation enthusiasts staring at walls. They were married men and women with someone waiting at home—people like Darwin, who paced his study after dinner with his wife; Einstein, whose private life was anything but ascetic; Marie Curie, who built a scientific dynasty with her husband; or Steve Jobs, who, for all his eccentricity, lived firmly in the realm of appetite and attachment. They had someone who saw them fail, age and doubt. Someone unimpressed by their metrics. That friction matters. It keeps the ego from floating off (though Steve Jobs’ ego remained, by most accounts, mildly airborne).

Celibacy can offer discipline. For some, it may even be necessary. But turning it into a universal badge of honor is a mistake. It confuses denial with mastery. Abstinence isn’t an achievement; it’s merely absence. Sex isn’t the enemy of focus.

You can lift heavy, write clean code, and still share a bed without the world ending.