Masturbation abstinence practices have returned to the USA in the form of semen retention communities. Followers on one of these male, anti-masturbation forums, “NoFap,” on Reddit (denoted “r/NoFap”), have engaged in homicidal behaviors that appear to be linked to these sexual beliefs and practices. This study uses a systematic search on r/NoFap and two control forums (r/pornfree, and r/stopdrinking) to define a corpus of violent content. The study's goals were to describe the nature of threats on r/NoFap and suggest whether the violence might be attributable to sexual deprivation or false beliefs that non-sexual targets caused their violent urges. Of the 421 violent posts identified from September 2011 to September 2022, r/NoFap contained the majority (94.3%). Violent threats on r/NoFap mostly targeted pornographers, women, scientists, specific persons, or any person (i.e. homicidal “rage”). Violent threats against r/NoFap’s own followers were growing most quickly. Violent posts were well-supported with upvotes by other followers in r/NoFap. These data are important because NoFap may represent a growing threat for real-world violence.
The nofap "movement" tell depressed, alienated guys that cutting out porn and masturbation is the key to turning their life around. This is how you can gain back your confidence and self-respect, become the person you want to be and stop being so alienated to everything around you.
Since the real world doesn't actually work like that, I'm not surprised it can lead to insane amounts of anger and frustration in some followers.
Not just turning their life around, they believe it will basically make them superhuman. They think that if they deny their body's natural urges it will someone give them magical powers needed to become a bigshot billionaire or something.
And like any good internet cult, they constantly tear each other down and are told that it is their fault, not "the program's" if they fail to achieve their absurd and unrealistic goals.
Lol. Reminds me of incel forums (I mean, same shit) that encourage their own users to kill themselves or become demoralized. Seems like a great ideology and community compare to the woke left
the paper references a study from earlier this year
Finally, NoFap followers also report becoming suicidal due to the “relapse” component of NoFap treatments (Prause and Binnie Citation2023). Two persons are reported to have died by suicide from NoFap, including one NoFap moderator and a NoFap collaborator (Rhodes Citation2015a; Stebbins Citation2022).
volcel police jokes aside, please look after your mental health comrades, talk to your friends and family, seek out professional mental health care if you can, and for the love of god please masturbate
That "porn industry" spike during COVID, combined with a decrease in threats against a specific person, which is then followed by a massive increase in theatening other users of the nofap subreddit post 2020, is very telling. Quarantine broke them. Probably went back to watching porn during quarantine and got gulit tripped by fellow nofap crazies afterwards.
This is part of why history search of comments and posts on reddit had to die via shutting down the api.
Reddit could not allow too much research like this to expose the underbelly of the site.
Once the site IPOs it introduces a financial incentive for shorts to find things on the site that can be turned into drama that damages its value, so research like this would find potential finance motivated backers and massively increase in quantity.
Thoughts on the wisdom of betting against reddit once it goes public? It sounds like free money, especially now that the VC money faucet is turned off.
Personally think it's going to be a rollercoaster of ups and downs. Depending on the starting price r/WSB hype might pump it to begin with. There's no real telling what happens if that fuckhead Elon involves himself too.
In the longterm I predict there's way too much cancer on the site for it to survive with the financial incentive people will have to use that cancer to tank the value. But again it depends on how much they clean up before IPO and whether that clean up avoids a drama collapse in and of itself.
I'm convinced that the company is being propped up by CIA money, which means they could keep the lights on for decades. They've done it before, dumped money in businesses to keep them afloat because they were part of an intelligence operation, like that company that sold encryption machines to foreign governments that all had secret backdoors built into them. Reddit has never made money and it probably never will. Idk as much as I'd like to bet against that hell site I think the thumb is on the scales
The people planning the IPO are going to try really hard to time/hype/price it so that the stock goes up for a while. They might not succeed, but they'll keep stalling until they think they can. So give it a few weeks or months before you start betting against it.
Iirc reddit automatically gives you access to pushshift if you're the mod of even a small subreddit, or manually if you send an email explaining you're a researcher. It's not completely dead
The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.
نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.
Religious people have been doing shit like this for centuries, this is just the same thing in a shiny new package, just like the whole "Fight The New Drug" campaign.
So I have some real insight here. Around 2017 I decided to try Nofap. I joined their forums at nofap.com. I downloaded their countdown app. Honestly, I thought that porn had taken over my life. I abstained from six months. I kept up with the people on the forum. So I really immersed myself in it and their culture. My findings:
The claims of the effects of Nofap may have a grain of truth. Im not sure if it is because of my libido being focused out like they claimed, or if was other factors (I stated regular excersize and I went back to college around that time) but I was more interested in sexual matters and more sexually successful.
The people on the forums are completely and utterly insane. Evangelical men being forced to abstain by wives who considered porn cheating. Incels who thought that this was the secret code. Semen retentionists. It felt like I was the only one who wanted to be free of porn just because I wanted to.
Lastly, I wanted to point out that they are misreading, as they always seem to. the problem is not porn, but Capitalism.
I've had a similar experience. I've been trying to quit porn off and on for a while now. At one time I considered myself as practicing NoFap. I consumed all the introductory content you first come across, abstained from masterbating for varying stretches of time, and visited the subreddit fairly regularly.
I would say overusing porn can for sure have downsides, and abstaining from masterbating for a short time could help with getting out of the habit of using porn. The community just gets so much more weird and cringe from there, not to mention the violence that is fostered there which I wasn't aware of. Maybe the forum was more hardline.
That video looks interesting too, thanks for sharing!
or if was other factors (I stated regular excersize and I went back to college around that time) but I was more interested in sexual matters and more sexually successful.
It was this.
How is this in doubt? No one knows if you're jacking it or not; people do notice if you're exercising. Being around single people in a social setting (college) gives you more opportunities to meet people, which is a real thing, unlike semen magic.
So wonderful we can casually have what other nations consider national tragedies because some guy convinced himself that not touching himself would make him a genius or whatever.
Man men are NOT okay, and here I thought cutting out porn and getting fapping down to only a few times a week was a noble goal. Turns out it turns you homicidal.
That's generally a good idea, but the r/nofap people take it further, they say you shouldn't masturbate at all. Then that gets paired with some misogyny and the promise that women will just throw themselves at you for doing this, and you end up with some very frustrated boys that should've knocked one out periodically to relieve their stress.
Porn has more damaging effects and a terrible industry, yet these people conflate jacking off with porn lol. Like bro just use your imagination if you don’t want it to influence your brain
I've always wondered if the resultant propensity towards violence is a big part of why puritanical movements tend to be puritanical. Make people build up that tension naturally by not expressing their sexual urges (or any sort of enjoyment of excess in general), and you've got a weapon that you can fine tune towards any target you can get it to believe is a threat.
Make people build up that tension naturally by not expressing their sexual urges (or any sort of enjoyment of excess in general), and you’ve got a weapon that you can fine tune towards any target you can get it to believe is a threat.
I think I recall IngSoc in 1984 heavily policing sex for exactly that purpose.
My guess is that those communities tend to attract the types of people who are more likely to commit a mass shooting, not so much that participating in abstinence from masturbation turns people into mass shooters. I'm sure it's a very unhealthy group to socialize with though.
I think there's a level at which masturbating and looking at porn becomes unhealthy, but there has to be a better way to address that.
I think there's a level at which masturbating and looking at porn becomes unhealthy, but there has to be a better way to address that.
Unfortunately, discourse on where that actually begins has been so thoroughly and completely poisoned by religious groups that are only using it as a recruiting opportunity, as well as nominally secular groups like this which are also effectively used as a recruiting ground for reactionaries, apparently to a degree more similar to incels than I previously thought. Arguably, the better move is to not give these groups an inch, because arguably most places in the world tend to have pretty reactionary views on sexuality and people are generally going to have a low estimate of when this becomes a problem, which then makes them prime targets for these groups. There are also studies finding that self-reporting for porn addiction is a much more reliable indicator of religiosity than it is an indicator for porn consumption, which should pretty plainly show that the actual effect of this rhetoric is that people who aren't really doing anything unhealthy end up manipulated into a cycle of self-hatred and shame far more often than it actually helps someone who actually has a problem.
That's when therapy should come in to play. If someone really thinks their masturbation is negatively impacting their lives then trying to fix it by joining reddit incels groups is obviously a bad idea. But trying out a couple sessions with a psych to see if they think it's a problem and if so then they use real, evidence based, ways to help. Now convincing them to try therapy in the first place is obviously a huge problem itself
yeah cutting out porno and using your imagination once in a while to rub one out, probably good for you; also probably good to fap less if you feel like you're doing it too much; what's not helpful is being weird about it, and then expecting it to make you superman
Don't turn everything into a Fandom in general. There doesn't need to be a Not Masturbating Community. Of course that's gonna get weird in some way. Making a message board for everything brings too many people who do one weird thing together and it has been a disaster time and time again. Except when it's us.
Well how do you explain them showing up to your comment unwanted? Clearly the volcel police have gone off the rails and is a power hugry bot abusing it's authority. AVPAB.
The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.
نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.
I get that they're trying to keep the scope limited to documenting the amount of violent posts on r/NoFap and trying to come to some conclusion about whether or not this is due to sexual frustration, but they do drift into some speculation outside of the stated scope, "A second potential explanation for violent posts in NoFap is that the Reddit platform promotes violent posts by providing a high level of user anonymity with lax content moderation (Brown et al. Citation2018)". So why don't they speculate on the obvious - the control forums they chose have earnest self-help motivations but r/NoFap is rooted in a reactionary conspiracy theory?
Not too surprising with how many incels are attracted to that sub. Cutting out porn and masturbating maybe a few times a week is a great idea if you're suffering from porn or masturbation addiction. Don't know how they went from that to believing that non-masturbation would make you a superhuman.
As far as i can tell, porn addiction is a shame spiral where they use porn to cope with the shame of using porn, and the shame usually comes from a religious upbringing. Misogyny and conservatism also correlate with that kind of religious upbringing. So you have a bunch of sexually frustrated right wing misogynists who feel disempowered and ashamed and blame the world for it, all congregating in one place. What could go wrong?