The Digital Closet, page 7
NoFap
The NoFap community originated on Reddit and has largely been organized through the r/NoFap subreddit started by Alexander Rhodes in 2011. The r/NoFap subreddit currently has 449,000 subscribers.58 The community is centrally organized around abstaining from pornography, masturbation, and/or orgasm (PMO) for set periods of time and takes its name from an onomatopoeic synonym for masturbation—fap—that originated in a Japanese comic strip in 1999.59 If you follow the forum, you will see between the banal and the misogynist posts a stream of (largely male) participants reporting the effects of abstaining from PMO as being akin to the awakening of “superpowers.” Posts regularly report effects like increases in concentration, energy, physical activity, confidence, and success with women. While there is certainly nothing unhealthy about abstaining from PMO for periods of time, the discourse on the NoFap forums is problematic in a number of senses: (1) it tends to oversimplify scientific evidence, (2) it tends to overhype the effects and correlate them too strongly to increased testosterone levels, (3) it reifies a fundamentally moral argument against PMO, and (4) by combining an emphasis on testosterone with an emphasis on this moral tradition of self-control, NoFap reifies heteronormativity.
Clinical psychologist and author of The Myth of Sex Addiction David Ley has written of the NoFap movement, “I’m not in opposition to them, but I do think their ideas are simplistic, naïve and promote a sad, reductionistic and distorted view of male sexuality and masculinity.”60 This is a common sentiment in the discourse of experts on psychology and human behavior when addressing the NoFap movement. The proponents of NoFap often ground their claims on bad interpretations of science or pseudoscience. Since 1972, the American Medical Association has considered masturbation to be normal human behavior.61 Since then, research has shown that masturbation is correlated to a number of health benefits, such as a release of sexual tension, reduced stress, better sleep, improved self-esteem and body image, relief of menstrual cramps and muscle tension, strengthening of muscle tone in the pelvic and anal areas, and it can help treat sexual problems.62 While for some people masturbation can compensate for a lack of partnered sex or sexual satisfaction, and thus potentially inhibit the formation of relationships, it is also frequently a component of an active and pleasurable sex life.63 The science is in on masturbation, and it indicates that there are no significant health risks.
There is certainly a rise in diagnoses of psychogenic erectile dysfunction (ED) among men under forty—which many researchers examine as instances of potential pornography-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED) in which the arousal mechanisms of the (male) body are short-circuited by the novelty and extremity of pornography. That said, there are many factors beyond the novelty thesis that may contribute to this rise. One important factor to be considered is the inadvertent sexual conditioning through pornography leading to unrealistic sexual expectations.64 Another factor is simply better diagnostic tools and an increased willingness of men to speak to their doctors about ED. However, the first peer-reviewed academic study on PIED found that viewing pornography correlates to greater sexual responsiveness rather than ED but also that there likely is no such thing as a biological addiction to pornography.65 In other words, the science is still out on PIED. We need much more research on the social conditioning factor, which would benefit from critical analyses of pornography content as well. What does seem clear is that whatever impact pornography is having on sexual health, it is not biological. Another study has shown that there is no change in the neuroendocrine response to orgasm after abstaining from PMO—thus indicating that many of the felt changes reported by members of the NoFap movement are psychological rather than biological in nature. However, this study did show that male abstinence can lead to elevated testosterone levels, and this is the data that members of the NoFap movement most frequently cling to.66
While the NoFap community is purportedly gender-neutral, much of its discourse is caught up in the reification of hegemonic masculinity, and this is the most likely explanation for the fixation on testosterone levels. Social psychologists Kris Taylor and Sue Jackson have studied the NoFap community and argue that its members “employ idealized discourses of innate masculinity and the need for ‘real sex’ to justify their resistance to pornography use and masturbation.”67 In this discourse, men are positioned as biologically inclined to seek pleasure from women, which in turn reifies traditional gender roles and sexual expectations.
A frequent reference in this community is the work of Gary Wilson, an anti-porn activist and author of Your Brain on Porn.68 Wilson argues that males are biologically wired to seek novelty during sexual selection—each female offers a novel genetic opportunity, and men are genetically programmed to seek them out, have sex with them, and impregnate them. For Wilson, online pornography simulates this experience of bringing an infinite stream of new females into view, thus desensitizing males to the novelty of females and subsequently to the desire to realize the genetic opportunity of copulating with them. Male brains become effectively rewired and addicted similarly to drug and alcohol abusers. He reduces this to the repetitive function of the click—clicking on content in an ever-refreshing feed of pornography—and describes this as a click-based addiction in the TED Talk that helped to popularize his ideas.69 His TED Talk comes with a legal disclaimer from TED: “This talk contains several assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology. While some viewers might find advice provided in this talk to be helpful, please do not look to this talk for medical advice.”70 Funnily, it is TED’s own addiction to click-based revenues that have led them to maintain a talk that requires such a disclaimer.
The problem here is that Wilson, like so many others, is taking a vague moral position, justifying it by appealing to normative gender roles, and then biologizing those gender roles. This is a paradox that Taylor and Jackson highlighted in their study of NoFap forums: NoFap requires men to “perform ostensibly innate characteristics.”71 In short, the problem with this discourse is that neither the morals nor the gender roles are universalizable. As Thomas Laqueur has demonstrated at great length, this conjuncture of universalized anti-masturbation sentiment is an essentially modern phenomenon in the Western world.72 Laqueur found that masturbation was not seen as a serious problem for much of recorded history until the 1712 publication of Onania: Or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences (in Both Sexes) Considered.73 Onania claimed that masturbation led to deleterious effects, like stunted growth, epilepsy, and the contraction of sexually transmitted infections.
The publication of Onania and its surrounding discourse is also deeply tied to the emergence of modern binary gender roles. Stephen Greenblatt neatly summarizes Laqueur’s discoveries about this connection:
His book showed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people gradually shifted from a one-sex model—in which the woman’s body was viewed as a providentially inferior version of a man’s—to a two-sex model, in which the organs of generation were understood to be quite distinct. That is, they gave up the ancient idea that the vagina was in effect an unborn penis and grasped that what they had thought were the woman’s undescended testicles were in fact something quite different, something they called ovaries.74
Thus, the emergence of procreative heteronormativity is not a millennia-old phenomenon but a thoroughly modern one in which the genders were articulated as different in kind, each with their own normative social and sexual roles. Onania thus successfully combined a historic religious and moral opposition to masturbation with misguided medical practice and scientificity, a heteronormative formula that would endure for generations.75
Onania had multiple American editions that were influential in the United States and imitated by many local authors.76 Its line of argumentation was echoed by American founding father Benjamin Rush, who suggested “a vegetable diet, temperance, bodily labor, cold baths, avoidance of obscenity, music, a close study of mathematics, military glory, and, if all else failed, castor oil” to ward off masturbation.77 The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were filled with American physicians in the so-called “social hygiene movement” continuously inventing new ways to diagnose and temper the conditions that tempted people to masturbate, ranging from diets to devices.78 These diets most notably included Sylvester Graham’s famous crackers and J. H. Kellogg’s cereal. Kellogg advocated not only serving his cold and bland cereal but also bandaging genitals and tying children’s hands to their bedposts at night.79 Other techniques included the use of straitjackets; wrapping children in cold, wet sheets at night; applying leeches to genitals; burning genital tissue with an iron; castration; and clitoridectomy. Technologies included genital cages, metal mittens, rings of metal spikes to cover the penis and stab it if it became erect, and metal vulva guards.80 As Amy Wilkins, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado–Boulder has noted in her interview for New York Magazine, this discourse tethers masculine identity to an ethic of self-control that actually reinforces heteronormativity—certain (heterosexual) desires are articulated as natural impulses in need of control through rigidly policed gender norms.81 #NoFap needs to be understood in light of this. The men who predominate in its online discourse are participating in a form of masculinity tethered to self-control and traditional heteronormative biases.
In his 1904 book Adolescence, which is frequently cited as the origin of adolescent psychology as a field of scientific research, G. Stanley Hall examines the research supporting the argument that “self-abuse [i.e., masturbation] itself can be the cause of a distinct type of insanity”—namely, sex perversion.82 Despite his other contributions to the field, Hall brought many of his heteronormative biases to bear on adolescent psychology and established them at the foundation of the field.83 The strength of this discourse is nowhere felt more strongly than in the Boy Scout Handbook, whose 1910 edition argued that “for an instructor to let his boys walk on this exceedingly thin ice without giving them a warning word owing to some prudish sentimentality, would be little short of a crime.”84 While psychologists like Magnus Hirschfeld and Wilhelm Stekel would publish arguments that masturbation had no scientifically demonstrable negative effects on health in 1917, it wasn’t until the late 1940s and 1950s that researchers like Virginia Johnson, William Masters, and Alfred Kinsey began in earnest to normalize masturbation, and scientific consensus wasn’t reached until the 1970s. However, as Laqueur demonstrates, even after scientific consensus was reached, anti-masturbation sentiments flourished and continue to permeate our society through jokes and shame felt about masturbation, as well as in religious discourse. Tellingly, when asked about a leading proponent of the NoFap movement, Laqueur responded via email, “This guy is straight out of nineteenth century America. It warms a historian’s heart.”85
In his astute overview of the NoFap movement, Jesse Singal argues that NoFap offers “a version of anti-masturbation worries that has been tailored for an age in which productivity is the sort of buzzword that piety and purity were back when this panic first emerged.”86 This twenty-first-century anti-masturbation sentiment is fundamentally structured by an ambivalence about technology—and online pornography in particular. On the one hand, Robert Weiss has argued that “the [NoFap] movement is less about not masturbating than it is about not engaging with ‘sexnology’ to the exclusion of in-the-flesh intimate encounters. In other words, these young men are rebelling against tech-sex; they are stepping away from their laptops and into the real world.”87 From this perspective, and following Singal, we can understand the NoFap movement as having a deep anxiety about nonproductive sex, where productive sex might be read through either of the two historic heteronormative lenses of procreative sex or heterosexual intercourse to alleviate the biological impetus toward pleasure and sexual release. On the other hand, Sarah Sharma has critiqued the manosphere’s emphasis on using technology for a sexodus in which feminist critiques and demands can be ignored because sex robots, toys, and pornography now prevent women from withholding sexual gratification from frustrated men—which to many in the manosphere is the only reason feminist demands might otherwise be negotiable.88
From this perspective, we can understand the NoFap movement as highly invested in sexual conservatism and particularly the maintenance of traditional gender roles, as well as technocapitalism. Here productivity might imply the felt urgency to continually press onward with the development of technology in a hypermasculine competitive marketplace without ever pausing to reflect, exercise hindsight, or invest time and energy into addressing feminist concerns. Why waste time learning how to make yourself and the world more inviting to women when you can build a robot sex slave? #NoFappers are not anti-orgasm, but they generally are decidedly anti-feminist.
Proud Boys
The violent ends of a movement toward an anti-pornography and anti-masturbation ethic can be more clearly seen in the case of the Proud Boys. The group began in the fall of 2016 when VICE magazine cofounder and libertarian provocateur Gavin McInnes and a group of fans gathered in a bar to laugh at videos about the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, which seeks to offer white reparations to African people, and to sing the song “Proud of Your Boy” from the Broadway adaptation of the Disney animated film Aladdin.89 McInnes repeatedly articulates the Proud Boys as a fraternal social and drinking club open to any men, regardless of race or sexuality, willing to openly declare their commitment to what he calls “Western chauvinism.”90 While the term “Western chauvinism” is not clearly defined in the majority of Proud Boys materials, it is generally tied to a commitment to Western modernity and conservation of its values. These values center on a number of tenets:
• Minimal Government
• Maximum Freedom
• Anti-Political Correctness
• Anti-Drug War
• Closed Borders
• Anti-Racial Guilt
• Anti-Racism
• Pro-Free Speech (1st Amendment)
• Pro-Gun Rights (2nd Amendment)
• Glorifying the Entrepreneur
• Venerating the Housewife
• Reinstating a Spirit of Western Chauvinism91
All one has to do to join the Proud Boys is publicly declare one’s Western chauvinism. By forgoing anonymity and facing the consequences of taking this stance, one achieves the “First Degree” of Proud Boydom.92 This entry into Proud Boydom is often accompanied by the purchase of a black and gold Fred Perry polo shirt, which is the unofficial uniform of the Proud Boys.93
Simon Houpt, of Canada’s The Globe and Mail, described McInnes’s beliefs as “libertarian politics, Father Knows Best gender roles, closed borders, Islamophobia and something he calls ‘Western chauvinism.’”94 It was this combination of beliefs and the actions that they encouraged among Proud Boys that led the Southern Poverty Law Center to label the Proud Boys a hate group in 2018 and Canada to label them a terrorist group in 2021.95 Proud Boy forums and online social networks were rife with white nationalist memes that, while they clash with the official positioning of the group, are in line with the alliances it has built and its affiliated media outlets. McInnes has published on hate sites like VDare.com and American Renaissance and in far-right publications like Taki’s Magazine. He has made a series of racist, transphobic, and misogynistic statements in these media outlets and interviews for more mainstream publications.96 For example, in 2003, McInnes told the New York Times, “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. . . . I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”97 The ability to make these sorts of offensive statements itself is gendered and sexualized because it is associated with masculine potency, capacity to satisfy a sexual partner, and maintenance of “alpha” status. Conservatives who refuse to do so are referred to as cuckservatives, a term McInnes draws from Matt Forney’s article for Return of Kings that associates such conservatives with cuckolds, men whose wives seek sexual gratification outside of marriage, often with racially othered male partners.98 For McInnes, real conservatives would be better served by abandoning politically correct culture: “We keep clamoring for the youth vote, and the woman vote, and the minority vote when if we just accepted the dad vote we’d be fine.”99
McInnes’s commitments to heteronormativity are rendered even more transparent in light of his violent transphobia. In an article titled “Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural,” McInnes wrote, “Womanhood is not on a shelf next to wigs and makeup. Similarly, being a dude is quite involved. Ripping your vaginal canal out of your fly doesn’t mean you are going to start inventing shit and knowing how cement works. Being a man is awesome. So is being a woman. We should revere these creations, not revel in their bastardization.”100 He has similarly argued that transgender people are “mentally ill gays” and has referred to them as “gender n*****s” and “stupid lunatics.”101 Though he argues that his transphobia is located in a respect for traditional womanhood, McInnes is also an avowed anti-feminist and at times open sexist. On his YouTube show, McInnes has noted, “Maybe the reason I’m sexist is because women are dumb. No, I’m just kidding, ladies. But you do tend to not thrive in certain areas—like writing.”102 The Proud Boys use their pro-Western posture to position themselves as promoting “Western values” without ever acknowledging their perpetuation of the worst “Western” prejudices and intolerances around race, gender, and sexuality.
