Melissa Febos Tells Emily Ratajkowski What She Learned From Her Year Without Sex

In her fifth book, The Dry Season, Melissa Febos trades sex for sovereignty, reframing celibacy as a radical act of self-ownership. Her new memoir chronicles her year of “withholding” in the wake of an intense relationship, the end of which prompted the Girlhood author to turn her attention inward as she reckoned with desire, control, and what it means to belong to oneself. “I wasn’t depriving,” she explained to the writer and model Emily Ratajkowski. “I was holding onto my energy.” When the two got on a call last month, Ratajkowski, the author of The New York Times best-selling memoir My Body, had just went through a chapter of celibacy herself, an experienced she found added clarity to her own writing (and made her a particularly scrupulous reader of Febos’s book). “There’s a really beautiful sentence about when you no longer have to acquiesce to men, you can dedicate your life to thought,” she told the author. In conversation, the two went deep on the art of seduction, the work of Sally Rooney, and a culture that turns intimacy into a barter system.

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EMILY RATAJKOWSKI: First of all, it’s just great to see you.

MELISSA FEBOS: Oh my god, I know. To meet you. 

RATAJKOWSKI: To meet you, because we have a lot of mutual friends.

FEBOS: We do.

RATAJKOWSKI: And it was fun reading The Dry Season because you describe New York, and it feels like we’ve probably walked by each other multiple times on the street.

FEBOS: Almost certainly.

RATAJKOWSKI: This morning I was thinking about your past work and the ideas and themes that run through The Dry Season. I reread your essay about consent for The New York Times that I just love so much. You reference empty consent a lot in The Dry Season and in the essay. For those who haven’t read it, you go to a cuddle party and it ends up being this amazing exercise in saying “no,” setting boundaries, and connecting to yourself. Would you say that choosing to be celibate was an extension of this exercise at the cuddle party?

FEBOS: Oh god. You are my dream reader. Everything I write, I’m basically writing it for you.

RATAJKOWSKI: I feel that sometimes, honestly.

FEBOS: But yeah, if in a cuddle party you’re doing a kind of role play, and then I went and did some research to figure out how to do the role play differently, this was yet another activity that would help build the instincts so that when I was in the moment, I wouldn’t fall back on my old conditioning to agree. I know this stuff is so deep for both of us. You write about it a ton in your book, how we’re sort of coerced to do things we don’t want to do—not just by a person in front of us, but by the story that’s living inside of us.

RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah, by ourselves.

FEBOS: Exactly. That it’s dangerous to not give people what they want from us. In The Dry Season, I had this horrific breakup after this horrific relationship, and I was like, “How have I been in relationships basically my whole life and be this bad at it?” I thought, “Okay, what’s wrong is not what’s happening on the surface of my thoughts, it’s in the basement. And I have to slow down so I can crawl down there and see what the fuck is going on.”

RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah. I feel like there’s a deep understanding of self that you’re reaching, not just in figuring out how you’re complicit, but what instincts have been built up in us to either disassociate, or the ambivalence we develop to protect ourselves essentially from touch or from love or from sex.

FEBOS: Yeah.

RATAJKOWSKI: I feel like indulgence is such a big part of the zeitgeist right now. It’s like, “Get that one more drink, girl! Buy that thing.”

FEBOS: “You deserve that little treat.”

RATAJKOWSKI: I’ve never been in addiction therapy, but I have friends who have, and I know how much withholding is a part of their life. I wanted to hear about what withholding means to you.

FEBOS: Well, I like the word withholding rather than celibacy, because one of my fears with this book was that people were going to be like, “Celibacy? That sounds dry and grim.” And when I think about the word “withholding,” I think about my process of taking my sexual energy, my romantic energy, my spiritual energy, and withholding it from other people, which is a way of keeping it for myself. I was withholding that energy and not spending it in those very familiar places and bankrupting myself. In the very early stages it felt like a kind of resistance But pretty quickly it felt like, “Oh, I get to keep all of this.”

RATAJKOWSKI: I guess translate it to abundance.

FEBOS: Totally. What do I want to do with all of this extra energy? Instead of being curious and obsessed with other people, I can be curious and obsessed with myself, or about my friendships or the world or art. And it really ended up being directed in all of those places over the course of the year. It was also my experience with sobriety where I thought, “Oh no, I’m going to give up drinks and alcohol and then I’ll never be able to laugh again. I’ll never make art again.” And it was exactly the opposite, where I had so much more fun. I had more to give to the things I actually cared about. I don’t look at my pattern in love and sex through the rubric of addiction, but it did really share that thing where it felt like, “Oh, I’m going to have less.” And then actually I had so much more.

RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah, one of the things that stuck with me is where you talk about not belonging to someone, but you belong to god. It’s funny, I remember saying to one of my good friends, “Sometimes I just want that person. I have to have them.” And she was like, “I don’t believe in having people.” And it made me think of this desperation that you find through this year of celibacy, whereas people are not something to have. You can experience another person.

FEBOS: That was really, really deep for me. 

RATAJKOWSKI: I wanted to ask you this really broad question, because I’m really curious.

FEBOS: Go for it.

RATAJKOWSKI: How do you think we connect and love while remaining singular? How does one do that?

FEBOS: Well, I think this book is in many ways the story of me figuring out how to do that. How do I not limit my love to one person and kind of dump it down the drain of obsession and actually remain available to the world through art, through activism, through communing with nature? An interviewer recently used the word “selflessness.” That idea is just so fraught for women because, across centuries, we’re taught to give ourselves away and sacrifice ourselves at the altar of other people’s needs. I actually think that behavior—compromising my own boundaries, safety, and really my basic needs—does not bring me closer to other people. It brings me farther away from myself. I have to dissociate or estrange from myself in order to give myself away in that way. It’s self-objectification. And for me, actual love and connection and partnership and intimacy with other people depends upon re-engagement with ourselves, so that I can make voluntary choices and say, “I am choosing to make this act of love.” It’s not coming out of obligation, or coercion, or conditioning. I just needed to destroy those ideas. 

RATAJKOWSKI: I really wanted to talk about the performance of seduction, because you were a dominatrix and then you’re a waitress, which are two professions that make you somewhat of an expert in intuiting needs and playing a role in order to appease another person. Obviously, I understand that you moved away from that when you found your now wife, and you’ve said there’s something so different now. There’s no performance; it’s just magnetism. But I’m curious, do you think there’s anything positive about that flirtation?

FEBOS: I totally do. As in so many things, and certainly always for me, it’s a matter of degree and application. In the context of my relationship, do I seduce my wife sometimes? Yes, absolutely. Do I like to put the whammy on her when we’re at a group dinner across the table just to watch her squirm? I love it. But I think when I was younger, and before I had this experience of celibacy and really scrutinized it, I was using that in place of self-esteem, in place of real connection with other people. I was creating chemistry where there wasn’t really chemistry. I was manipulating people that were inappropriate partners for me, or people that I wasn’t really that interested in just because I wanted them to like me.

RATAJKOWSKI: Validation, right?

FEBOS: Yeah. It was not cute to look at that and be like, “Oh, wow, I really have not thought of myself as a manipulative person. I thought I was just a romantic.” So I think it’s like, “Can I use that skill ethically?” Because life is full of performance, and that’s the beauty of it. Fashion is performance. Teaching is performance. What’s your experience with that?

RATAJKOWSKI: I don’t know. I moved to Brooklyn in the fall and there’s no paparazzi and it’s a much more quiet life, which I really like. I got a really bad haircut a month ago, and I didn’t even really care. I’ve spent most of my life really being self-aware and performing, and this is my season of not doing that. But what I loved in the book is how you take that performance and you put it towards something so positive, like conveying ideas to your students. 

FEBOS: I do think performance has no moral value to it. It’s an art form. In many cases, it’s a skill, it’s a gift. It is an incredibly powerful form of communication. I think some of us just have it and it can be expressed in certain ways, and we can use it for evil or we can use it for good. And there’s a lot that’s mixed up in between. 

RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah. I was thinking about that because when you’re performing, it’s obviously a manipulation, but it can feel really internal. And in the context of attention, there’s such a history of sexism around that, but then it’s also really powerful and maybe one of the tools that women have mastered so well. Is craving attention innately bad? 

FEBOS: That is such a good question. As you were saying it, I was like, “Oh god, she’s lifting the log and all of the little patriarchal bugs are scurrying around.” Men who seek attention are seen as powerful or successful or magnetic. And women who draw attention are seen as embarrassing or–

RATAJKOWSKI: Desperate.

FEBOS: Yeah, desperate, pitiful. There is this glorious quote that I’ve carried around with me my whole life, but it’s basically saying that any woman who tries to liberate herself should expect to be treated like a dirty joke. Shame is what we try to do to women who accrue power in any way. Art is the quest for attention, sometimes with desperation in it. It’s not a female thing. It’s not a moral thing at all. That is a deeply human experience. The ability to draw attention is so powerful. When we think about activists, politicians, or people who are inducing empathy in others through storytelling, those are all forms of manipulation and forms of attention-seeking. They’re not coded female, so we’re not trying to denigrate or discourage them. But desperation is not a gendered experience. Humans are desperate mammals. 

RATAJKOWSKI: One of the most interesting parts of the book is reading about how celibacy, for women throughout history, has been this pathway for freedom of thought. And there’s a really beautiful sentence in your book about when you no longer have to acquiesce to men, you can dedicate your life to thought. I actually just went through a period of celibacy and I had drinks with my friend. I was like, “I’ve noticed that I’ve really been able to write better.” And he said something so beautiful like, “Ultimately, making art or wanting sex and connection are both about seeking connection from other people, and so it makes sense that that energy would be interchangeable.”

FEBOS: That’s a smart friend. It is really true. It was definitely true for me. It’s always been true that that form of communication just never feels like a bad place to put my energy. It always multiplies. When I put my energy and my love into this form of communication, that is me trying to communicate with the world, but I’m not thinking of the world when I’m writing—I’m basically picturing you. I’m just thinking of someone who is coming to my experience in good faith, who shares it, who is interested and needs to hear it, because it’s a shared experience.

RATAJKOWSKI: This is another question that’s pretty big and broad, but has been on my mind a lot. In 2025, looking back on all these women who’ve been celibate or found ways to navigate sex in a way that allowed them to also be full people, what do you think we as women get from sex? 

FEBOS: I think one of the mistakes that we make as a culture, and one of the mistaken ways that sex has been presented to us, is that it’s a single category of experience, that there should be one thing that we all get from sex. We should all get oxytocin and intimacy from sex, or we should all get orgasms from sex, or we should all get self-esteem from sex. There’s the whole cache of things that we’re told we should get from sex and a lot of them are contradictory. Something that I have learned is that it can be used to express so many things, even inside of one relationship. Like, sex inside of one relationship can be a form of catharsis. You can be working something out. You can be seeking closeness. It can be play. It can be somewhat autoerotic, like orgasm-seeking. It can be mutual masturbation. It can be a way of grieving together. The same way that hugging or talking or walking or meditating can be so many different things. I also talk about that a lot with my writing students. I feel like they’re afraid of writing sex scenes because it has to be a “good” sex scene. And I’m like, “What does that even mean outside of the context of your character’s lives?” It just is what it is, just like every other scene.

RATAJKOWSKI: That’s why I love Sally Rooney and the way she writes sex.

FEBOS: She’s so good.

RATAJKOWSKI: I love her politics, and there’s a lot of things I love about her writing, but I think the way she writes sex is so amazing because there’s a million different ways that she approaches what the characters are getting out of sex or what intimacy is. It’s often awkward and painful, but it’s really expansive. You don’t know what you’re going to get. There’s the spirituality in sex, the openness to experience and connection.

FEBOS: Exactly. It can include self-awareness, but it’s also self-forgetting. It’s like just showing up as a part of the universe with other parts of the universe interacting with them and not trying to control it, and not trying to extract something from the experience. Just being a part of.

RATAJKOWSKI: Yeah, this sort of quiet presentness, which does feel sort of the opposite of performance. I want to end on that note, but I don’t know.

FEBOS: That’s a good spot. Oh my god…

RATAJKOWSKI: That was so fun. 

FEBOS: You are the best reader.

RATAJKOWSKI: I just feel lucky to be witness to it all.