No Sex Allowed

"The sexual instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now."

— O'Brien, Nineteen Eighty-Four

One of the most obvious ways for writers to create a Dystopian setting is to remove those things which are most pleasurable to us in Real Life. In the design plans for dystopias, sex is often the first thing to go.

This is a predominantly literary trope. The authors using the deconstructed utopia could be trying to show that achieving what at the first glance seems to be a perfect society necessarily leads to loss of humanity of its members.

In settings 20 Minutes into the Future, sex can be outlawed entirely, while chemical castration drugs already exist to abolish sexual desire; humans would reproduce by growing embryos in People Jars (see Uterine Replicator). Some Transhumanist dystopias can also use genetic engineering to modify humanity as incapable of sexual desire.

The hero, who decides that My Species Doth Protest Too Much, is most likely to discover both What Is This Thing You Call "Love"? and Sex Signals Death. This is the unstated reason why writers have these societies use drugs to suppress sexual urges in the populace, rather than surgery: drugs, unlike sterilization, can wear off.

Not to be confused with the horrible song of the same name from the audition round of American Idol Season 7.

A type of Dystopian Edict. If it's applicable to other forms of intimacy, it's Love Is a Crime. When this affects only a few individuals, it's Can't Have Sex, Ever. When this is merely an aspect of the show's writing, it's No Hugging, No Kissing. The opposite is Free-Love Future.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Appleseed the movie, the Elders state that they have suppressed the reproductive functions of the Bioroids, to which Hitomi clarifies: "In other words, no sex". The reproductive and regenerative functions of the Bioroids are restored in the course of the movie, but it's unclear whether they still have fully developed sexuality — new Bioroids are still made in a factory in the sequel.
  • However it should be noted that in the manga, Hitomi has a possibly human boyfriend. It's unclear whether Yoshi is a human or bioroid. In the manga, the grand majority of the city's population consists of clones, cyborgs and other exotic types, but there is no reference to a class system or population control as explained in the movie.
• A mutiny ensues in Martian Successor Nadesico over a clause in Nergal's contract which stipulates that the members of the crew aren't allowed to do anything more sexual than hold hands, as Mr. Prospector points out "The Nadesico doesn't have a daycare center."
• In Pom Poko an elder tanuki attempts to apply this trope to the tanuki population to limit the population (due to an impending food storage). It works only for a while.
• Macross: "Uncultured" male Zentradi and female Meltrandi are portrayed as segregated in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, with a mild antipathy generated between them, to prevent any procreation not under control of the Protoculture originally and Zentradi fleet commanders currently. The movie adaptation Macross: Do You Remember Love? goes further, portraying the two as being at war, and so uninterested in any case in... intimate matters.
• One of the time periods visited by the protagonist of Apollo's Song is a dystopian future where sex has been abolished and the world is ruled over by a cruel Artificial Human race who reproduce through cloning.
• In Death Note, Shinigami aren't supposed to try to have sex with humans (and they are not biologically capable of it anyway). They don't have sex with each other, either; although there are both male and female Shinigami, it appears to be a case of Purely Aesthetic Gender.

Comics

• As with its source material, Alpha Complex in Paranoia have humans cloned and grown in vats, while hormone suppressants keep the sex drive dormant in the populace. The Earth Mothers are trying to re-discover sexual reproduction and re-introduce it to the populace.
• When John Byrne rebooted the Superman continuity with the The Man of Steel mini-series following the Crisis on Infinite Earths, he made Krypton an emotionally sterile society where sex was regarded as an animal act and all children were conceived in 'birthing matrixes'.

Fanfiction

• Being Female: During the time the protagonists are banished from the wizarding world, Umbridge proceeds to ban sex because she’s a "slut", and as a result, wizards have to revert to using the Delivery Stork for babies.
• In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, the Psyche Master enforces asexuality on all Psyches, since he is in charge of their reproduction, so sex is not allowed in their culture. Instead, Psyches that are bonded in same-sex pairs engage in the telepathic technique of "sharing dreams" with each other.
• Deconstructed horrifically by the Emirate of Mecca in Sonic X: Dark Chaos. The Emirate is a space Muslim theocracy that has extremely strict religious rules on sex. This naturally causes the Muslims to have very low birthrates, so rather than having sex they turned their women into literal baby factories, which are surgically impregnated and forced to give birth every few seconds.

Film

• The Island (2005) has a "proximity rule" designed to keep males and females apart. Presumably, because they didn't want clones reproducing real people.
• Demolition Man: At first, it appears that sex is common and taken lightly, judging by how casually Lenina Huxley offers herself. It turns out that "sex" only means by computer mind link, as real sex has been outlawed because of the "dangers of fluid exchange" (e.g. HIV and unplanned pregnancy; in fact, Huxley names two different STD outbreaks involving completely new diseases after HIV was presumably done away with). John Spartan seems to find it too intense, or just unsettling for someone who has never done it. Kissing or even touching is frowned upon, though, if not downright illegal. Their computer sex may be the only intimacy allowed.
• A Polish science fiction film called (in English) The Sex Mission features a future society consisting entirely of parthenogenically reproducing women for whom men ("phallocrats") are only a bad memory (at least according to the ultra-feminist propaganda of the Sisters in charge). Two male time-travelers remind some of the women that not everyone with external genitalia was a monster.
• The B-movie Sumuru (South Africa/UK 2003, based on a novel by some hack called Sax Rohmer) has a similar plot. Starring Michael Shanks of Stargate SG-1 fame as the male protagonist from the past. He ends up in the future and on a former Earth colony in space where women rule, living in a utopian city, and the remaining men work in the mines. The sexes only interact when the women select a male inseminator to father fresh babies like the mythical Greek amazons are said to have done. Not exactly No Sex Allowed so much as "no hetero fraternization allowed between the genders".
• The society of Libria from Equilibrium has outlawed all human emotion in an effort to stop another disastrous war from coming to pass. Including love. Although sex for reproduction purposes still works normally.
• THX 1138 takes place in an After the End setting where sex and natural pregnancies are outlawed, to keep the population stable. Reproduction occurs by production of babies in Uterine Replicator; children are raised by the State and robot teachers without knowing their parents. There is only a vague recognition that humans come in male and female. Everyone is mandated by law to take their daily drug rations to repress sexual drive. A few scattered people (mostly women who demand to experience motherhood) rebel against the system from time to time, but anyone not fitting in is considered deviant and a danger to the smooth operation of the city and is either brainwashed or executed.
• In Barbarella, Barbarella is rescued by a native of the planet she's on. When he asks that she make love with him in payment for the clothes and transportation he's providing, she describes some kind of ritual involving computers and pills. "Make love? But no one's done that for centuries!" The pill-based intercourse still provides an orgasmic response, though Barbarella finds she likes the old-fashioned version better.
• Sexual behavior by apes is evidently regulated in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, as the intelligent chimpanzee Caesar has his first sexual encounter when a request for "superior males" is issued and he's brought to a breeding facility. Presumably, "inferior males" of the three ape species aren't permitted to mate.
• The Jedi Knights of Star Wars aren't allowed to have attachments of any kind, like a kind of warrior monk or historical knight templar. Children strong in the force are found and chosen to join. Note that sex is just fine; it's procreation and love that are the problem. Not that we have examples of passionless sex in films; expanded universe material instead shows that Jedi like Obi-Wan had crushes, but refrained from having sex because they didn't want to let this error go too far. In Legends, Luke's new Jedi Order averts this, and Jedi can now make love and have families in the order.
  • Some of the Sith who do not follow as many evil paths draw attention to the implications of life without love, and how that isn't much of a life at all.

Literature

• Elites of Ai no Kusabi are forbidden to engage in any sexual activities whatsoever other than voyeurism.
• In The Goodness Gene, children are created artificially in Petri dishes; babies with 'undesirable' traits are quite literally shredded to bits while in the embryo state; also, there is what some call "simulation sex", created because dictator Hayli is a germophobe who abhors touching others and wants to condition the desire to do so out of the entire population.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: For Party members, the only acceptable devotion is to Big Brother. Casual and romantic sex are outlawed, with the only time sex is 'accepted' is when it is necessary for procreation, and you're not supposed to enjoy it. One of The Party's prominent youth movements is the Junior Anti-Sex League, who want all reproduction done by artificial insemination. (Of course, the very sexual Julia uses membership in the JASL as a cover.) This adds to the general interpretation where Party members, who are constantly under surveillance and forbidden to express subversive desires, are in a much worse Fate Worse than Death, compared to the Proles who are allowed freedoms such as porn access and prostitution because the Party sees them as animalistic and Apathetic Citizens. The female orgasm is especially subversive. The banning and hatred of sexuality could be useful to the Party for the purpose of inducing sexual frustration, which results in war hysteria and obsessive loyalty.
• In The Giver, people are given pills to stop sex drives, or "stirrings," from the start of puberty. (Platonic) marriages and families still exist, but the children are assigned to parents by the government, which has Birthmothers as a special profession. They undergo artificial insemination, as described in Son.

• Zamyatin's We. All members of the society in We were issued tickets to be redeemed for sex with members of the opposite gender; the ticket allotment was based on hormone levels in each person's bloodstream. The fifteen minutes allotted for the use of each coupon was the only time in the day when the people involved were allowed to drop curtains on all four walls of their bedrooms and have some privacy, as the buildings in We were made of glass. One of the signs that society is breaking down fast in the latter part of the book is when the narrator describes entire buildings with virtually every single room's curtains down...
• Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut: Body-numbing pills, originally designed to keep monkeys from behaving in an unseemly fashion in front of visiting schoolchildren and grandmothers, have become compulsory to stop people from having sex.
• An inversion: Brave New World makes most of its members sterile and healthy, thus unrestricted, noncommittal sex is accepted and even encouraged with "orgy-porgies". In the end, however, it sends a similar message as No Sex Allowed does, due to the fact that being monogamous or emotionally attached is considered undesirable: the "utopia" has sacrificed human intimacy and emotion such as "True Love" for mechanical order and guaranteed but shallow biological pleasures. The alternate interpretation, encouraged by the author's note, is that this world is a dystopia, and allowing free sex is a way to distract people from complaining against the power.
• Joe Haldeman's The Forever War has a traveler stumble upon a future Earth where, due to massive overpopulation, heterosexual contact and sex is entirely outlawed and considered lewd. Homosexual relationships are considered clean and normal, and the occasional reproduction occurs by artificial insemination. The heterosexual male time-traveler runs into problems with his preconceived notions of decency.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In Ethan of Athos, the planet of Athos is populated entirely by men who reproduce by using eggs from frozen ovary tissue cultures and grow the babies in artificial wombs. The planet was originally settled centuries ago by an ultra-religious sect of zealot monks. The sect's founder believed that women were unclean, so he sought to found a sanctuary where no women were ever allowed to set foot, and this then blossomed into full-blown paranoia and superstitious fear about women. In the present, off-world literature written by women is censored, only men considered morally stable are allowed to read scientific articles written by women for fear they might be infected with this madness, and few Athosians leave their planet. While the founders apparently intended "no women" to lead to "no sex", that is... not really how it's worked out.
  • Played with on the world known as Beta Colony. Sex in just about any form aside from rape is permitted and indeed encouraged — they have even worked out a whole set of codes concerning availability and preferences, displayed to the world by wearing distinct styles of earrings, to get the guessing games out of the way. It is reproduction that is regulated in a downright draconian manner, via the implanting of mandatory contraceptive implants at puberty. Anyone wishing to reproduce requires Government approval to get the implants temporarily disabled; obtaining a permit for a first child can be roughly equated to getting a driver's license (a fairly rigorous process, but easily successful by anyone who puts in a bit of effort), a second child permit is harder than for the first, and third children are extremely rare. The no-reproduction-without-governmental-consent rules come not from any moral or religious principles, but from pure pragmatism: Beta Colony just doesn't have enough room to allow complete freedom of reproductive choice.
• A Boy and His Tank by Leo Frankowski involves an ethnic group which is forced to live on a planet that is very, very low on organic molecules. For this reason, the sexes are segregated.
• Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep by Thomas F. Monteleone. Children are produced by giant amoeba-like creatures who live in vats. Men and women have sex by hooking their brains up to a machine that amplifies and echoes their arousal back to each other; touching is forbidden.
• The theocratic government of The Handmaid's Tale doesn't ban sex but does put very strict rules and regulations in place around it. Women must wear clothing that covers them completely and de-emphasises the hips and breasts. Fertile women have sex exactly once a month with the head of their household for the purpose of conceiving children. Unmarried men are permitted no contact with women. Homosexuality is illegal. People who break these rules are publicly executed. The excuse given for all this was ultraconservative backlash against a ridiculously uber-liberal society, which included "Feels On Wheels" prostitute delivery (and possibly other end-of-Cerebus the Aardvark-levels of depravity); given that this is what the government in place tells the populace, it should be taken with a pillar of salt.
• The extravagantly dystopian totalitarian regime of the People's Republic of Daros in the Spaceforce (2012) novels forbids personal relationships.
• In James Tiptree, Jr's Houston, Houston Do You Read? astronauts find themselves in a male-less world where all reproduction is done via cloning—plenty of sex, though. Unlike Queen of Outer Space or Fire Maidens of Outer Space or The Time Travellers, the women seem quite happy with how things have worked out, though they don't mind taking some semen samples for back-up. Note that Tiptree was lauded for "his" keen insight into what women really felt.
• The Doctor Who Expanded Universe tried to make the Doctor's asexuality canon in Lungbarrow, where it's revealed that an ancient Gallifreyan witch named Pythia cursed the Time Lords to sterility, and children are assembled in genetic "looms." Russell T Davies has spent the past few years of the new series finding subtle ways to dance all over this trope with hobnailed boots. Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime?
• In Chalker's Well World novels, many of the Comworlds have taken this approach, artificially suppressing the onset of puberty in the majority of their populace.
• Apparently the case with the "silver elf" aliens from Angry Lead Skies, whose reproductive systems are underdeveloped in females and shriveled in males.
• In the Matched trilogy, the lower classes (Aberrations and Anomalies) of the Society (land of Bureaucratically Arranged Marriages) are not allowed to marry or have children, and since the Government Drug Enforcement regimen apparently does not include birth control, there's only one conclusion to draw.
• In John C. Wright's The Hermetic Millennia, the Chimarae and Blue Men allowed reproductive only sex, under strict control; the Hormagaunts had the reproduction done artificially. There were also the Nymphs, who by dint of drugs and bioenhancement were all Extreme Omnisexuals, with the effect of making no relationships special; however, despite this, the other cultures note similarities between Nymph-talk and talk of brotherhood.
• In the Darksword Cycle, the Magocracy of the magical world of Thimhallan has forbidden sex of any kind. Procreation is done through magic, where a specialized druid places the seed of a man within the womb of a woman. The reason for this is that the people of Thimhallan see the act of sex as barbaric and animalistic.
• In The Lovers, one of the tenets of the Sigmenist faith practiced in the Haijac Union is that sex, referred to as the "Daily Duty", is for reproduction only and not to be enjoyed... But still made out of love between husband and wife. One of the reasons Yarrow is enticed away from his faith by Jeannette is that she's not only quite willing to have sex out real love, she's much better at it than his wife (that he was divorced from when he signed in as an astronaut) ever was.
• That Hideous Strength: A variation: the N.I.C.E. wanted to use artificial means of reproduction, and indeed, artificial means of anything that nature would normally provide. They had a civilization on the moon as a role model that used demon-possessed sex-golems for sexual pleasure instead of actually sleeping with each other, though it's implied that their own perversions rather than their government were what were actually forbidding sex.
• The Belgariad: Relg had...issues with sex in general, and stated that one of his goals was to build a society like this. The fact that this would have them die out was pointed out to him in-universe, and he said he was looking for a workaround. Fortunately, he has enough Character Development over the course of the novels to grow out of the desire to build this kind of society.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: The Next Generation: One episode features a planet of clones and a very forced reproductive rights analogy. It seems to be used both to distance people from their "animal natures" and as a way to minimize bonding and loyalty to other people.
  • Then there are the Star Trek aliens that have a No Sex Allowed policy with regards to other species, like the Deltans (whose sex is so good it drives non-Deltans insane) and the J'naii (an androgynous race which holds "gender neutrality" sacrosanct, and sex with explicit males or females endangers that).
  • The episode "Up the Long Ladder" had a situation where a crashed colony ship had only five survivors and not a large enough gene pool to produce a healthy society, so they relied on cloning and banned sex to prevent inbreeding. 300 years later, their cloned descendants now find the idea of sex somewhat repulsive. If they're all clones that's a valid response since there's still only five different base codes.
• Elements of Welcome to the Monkey House (see above) briefly appear in the Vonnegut pastiche/tribute Between Time And Timbuktu, which was broadcast on PBS in the early 1970s.
• During the brief proliferation in the late '90s/early '00s of one-hour sci-fi story series in the style of Twilight Zone and so on, there was an episode of such a show where, again, while the future allowed sex, and there were men around, all the men were sterile. This inability to conceive somehow robbed women of any and all pleasure from sex, and relegated men to being treated like not-very-useful sex toys and not mentioned otherwise, with women dismissing them contemptuously and sitting around to gossip over old sex stories of kinky naughtiness they didn't really understand. Then a fertile male shows up and suddenly all the women want him because of his ability to fill them with babies makes the sex ridiculously good. One hardly knows where to start on the massive amount of sexism this heaps on BOTH sides.
• Die Hart: Ron Wilcox strictly forbids sex between his pupils at his action hero training camp.

Music

• Mike Batt's concept album "Zero Zero", especially the hit "Love Makes You Crazy".
• Ninja Sex Party's "6969". The duo uses a time machine to go to the sexiest year ever, only to find that human touch has been outlawed, so they take it upon themselves to save the future from itself.

Tabletop Games

• Paranoia:
  • All humans in Alpha Complex are cloned and grown in vats. Sex is not only considered treason, but constant doses of hormone suppressants (Along with the mind-boggling amount of other drugs that fills most human's diets) remove the capability to reproduce, as well as any desire. Because of this, not only is their barely any significant difference between genders, but many aren't even aware of the human capability for reproduction.
  • However, when teams of Troubleshooters go on missions that take them out of Alpha Complex and away from their precious drugs, the hormones can come flooding back in an instant...
  • In earlier editions, one of the secret societies (the Earth Mothers) is explicitly opposed to this and is one of the few societies that more-or-less know what it's doing, making them rather powerful.
  • If you survive long enough to get to Ultraviolet clearance... well, one of the perks is learning more about the Old Reckoning, which includes all the trouble Old Reckoning people went through to get some action... Long story short, High Programmers tend to maintain personal harems.
• Spanners of Continuum are banned by the Decision of the Second Atlantean Council from having children with another spanner. Sex itself isn't banned, but there's a very real possibility of a spanner trying to 'get it on' and having a Midwife, Exalted, or even Inheritor knocking on the front door. Heterosexual sex with non-spanners is not as heavily discouraged but can gain a lot of frag or nasty events in the Yet.
• The werewolves of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Werewolf: The Forsaken are prohibited from having procreative sex with each other, on threat of deformed, sterile offspring or deformed, evil, ghost child of Doom, respectively. Heterosexual sex tends to result in punishment even before any weird children are involved. In Forsaken's first edition, any sex between werewolves dings the Karma Meter.
  • On the other hand, sex with humans (and, in Apocalypse, wolves) is just fine. In Apocalypse, breeding with Kinfolk (humans or wolves with werewolf ancestors) is encouraged, as it produces new healthy werewolves.
  • This trope was thrown off a cliff for Werewolf: The Forsaken's second edition, however. Now they can breed with each other just fine.
• Abyssal Exalted exist solely to bring death to all that lives, and thus cannot do anything that would protect or create life without incurring the wrath of the Neverborn. Naturally, this includes procreative sex.
  • Except with their Lunar Mate because some things are stronger than the wrath of the Neverborn.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • While not outright banned, the highly-psychic Eldar take very great care when making kids, as lust and pleasure strengthen Slaanesh, the Chaos god of excess and embodiment of desire (who was birthed from millennia of Eldar decadence). The Dark Eldar, on the other hand, pursue hedonism in all its forms, as the Webway they live in is mostly protected from Chaos... but they know not to push it too far. Humans, on the other hand, aren't as psychic as the Eldar and need to go a lot deeper into depravity to get hir attention, so regular intimacy is mostly safe.
    • It is worth noting that the Imperium of Man is quite sex-positive. After all, The Imperium always needs more bodies holding lasguns or working in factorums for the glory of The God Emperor of Mankind.
  • As pointed out in Ciaphas Cain, not all Sororitas orders have vows of celibacy or chastity, it's just that very few have the time to engage in it. Fans, on the other hand...

Video Games

• The Combine in Half-Life 2 are mentioned to have set up a "suppression field" to prevent human procreation, though Episode One reveals it doesn't suppress the drive, only the formation of embryos. After the Citadel is destabilized by Gordon destroying the dark fusion reactor, the suppression field is disabled, prompting Kleiner to announce during his evacuation bulletin that those who are clear of City 17 and the Citadel should give thought to "the revival of the species".
  Alyx: Is Dr. Kleiner really telling everyone to... get busy?
  • In fact, one of the benefits in joining the Combine forces is to be able to breed (or at least experience something close to sex), which makes sense since the Combine want to integrate the human race into its army. Overwatch's official term for this reward is "Non-mechanical reproductive simulation".
• Sword and Fairy 7: Deities are forbidden from falling in love, and having a child is considered to be even worse offence. It's slightly more justified than usual, as the child absorbs spiritual energy of both their parents, who will eventually die from it. However, local Knight Templar chose to enforces the law by imprisoning both parents and the child in such a place, where the child will die too. It directly led to one of his subordinates turning on him, which eventually resulted in his downfall.

Web Comics

• The Dimension of Lame from Sluggy Freelance lacks many things that Torg loves (such as beer, sugar, pornography, or any TV stations besides PBS and Disney). We never get a definitive answer about sex, but we are shown you're not allowed to say "the S-E-X word."

Web Original

• In the epilogue of Elliot Rodger's "manifesto" which he had written before his massacre and death in 2014, he envisioned a world that he could control where sex would not be allowed, where procreation would only be allowed by what he called "intelligent people" through artificial insemination... and all because he didn't have the fortune to get laid or have a girlfriend during his teenage years and early adult life.

Western Animation

• The Demolition Man example above was parodied (and of course, made much more painful) in an episode of Johnny Bravo.
• One episode has Ned Flanders briefly become the landlord for The Simpsons, and after evicting them for Homer's unusually obnoxious behavior and refusal to pay rent, he plans to rent the house to a married WASP-ish couple who state on their application that they don't even have sex for reproductive purposes. After meeting what he has always thought would be his ideal neighbors, Ned finds that he hates it and wants the Simpsons to move back in.
• In the "Lois Kills Stewie" episode of Family Guy, after Stewie becomes ruler of the world, one of his first edicts is to make sex illegal and punishable by death. Quagmire promptly goes insane as a result.

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