“Get a new grip on life” is the slogan of NoFap, an online community dedicated to abstinence from porn, masturbation, and orgasming (known as PMO). Since it’s initial spark in 2011, lead by a handful of pseudoscientific YouTube videos and TED talks, the community now boasts a subreddit of nearly 140,000 members, websites, wikis, phone applications, its very own NoFap vocabulary, and more. The working belief among its members is that the rise of free and readily accessible internet pornography has lead them to experience sexual dysfunction or difficulties sustaining meaningful relationships.
While the NoFap movement certainly seems a positive space for many of its members to connect and regain control over their sex lives, its resources and writings beg at least two questions: i) can this movement work in solidarity with sex positive and feminist movements, and ii) where are our context-specific research methods and why are they not in use here.
If you read through the NoFap resources, you will scarcely encounter discussions about sexual shaming, although this seems like an important point to discuss amongst a group of individuals who, by their own accounts, are addicted to pornography. One of the reasons people join NoFap is that they are disgusted by the type of (kinky) porn they pursue — yet none of the NoFap resources introduce users to kink communities where they might find real life satisfaction and acceptance for their fetishes. Decidedly keeping these resources out of the community ensures that only a certain demographic is welcomed in the movement (i.e., those without any kinks and fetishes). Similarly, much of the discussion on the NoFap subreddit involves motivating users to ‘put themselves out there’. While this might work fine for a heterosexual male, this type of exclusive advice-giving shows a clear disregard for queer people, trans folk, or women who often risk much more than a rejection if they decide to ‘put themselves out there,’ particularly during their youth. With such limited discussion taking place, one must question whether or not this movement can be taken as forward-thinking as opposed to a perpetuation of the status quo.
We should also address the objectification and commodification of (human and nonhuman animal) bodies. Certainly there are a number of users, primarily older users, who have emphasized the importance of de-objectifying their partners. These users have spoken out about how quitting porn has helped them to do that, which is excellent to read about. That said, there are an overwhelming majority of younger users posting, and many clearly do not understand the importance of such a transition; instead they seem to relish in a newfound objectification of women in the real world. With only a minimal amount of guidance from more mature users, it is unsurprising that these posts often go uninterrupted, especially given the upbeat and motivation-centered tone of group.
Before delving into the scientific aspects of the NoFap movement, it is important to acknowledge that a large portion of the information floating around NoFap in videos, comments, and articles is pseudoscience (specifically, “neuro-bunk”). For example, one of the first videos in the Your Brain On Porn (or YBOP, a sister site to NoFap that was highly influential especially at the start of the movement) starts off with a picture of a brain and a large red arrow pointing to regions of that brain that are supposedly “where orgasms happen”. Rest assured, orgasms do not happen in any one place of the brain or body and the video creator left no references. Throughout the community there is a definite tendency to speak using “neuro-bunk” terms — often times users explain their own experiences using this newly acquired terminology. In fact, abstinence from PMO has been dubbed “rebooting” and is defined on the NoFap website as “the process of restoring your brain to factory defaults.”
It is suffice to say that there is no good reason to perform non-consensual animal research for the sake of curiosity (i.e., when we have no reason to believe that lives might be saved). A sizeable proportion of the NoFap resources build off of exactly this sort of research, which is also a shame since the methods are not well-suited to the questions they need answers to. Many of these studies come from the field of neuroscience, which is simply not developed enough as a field to reveal much about human sexuality that we don’t or couldn’t already know. Similarly, it is unreasonable to make inferences about human sexuality (or even physiology) based off the bodies and behaviors of rats. When performing brain scans on humans we still do not have the resolution to decipher what is occurring in one voxel of data from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. We also have no causal mechanisms that describe complex human behaviors based off brain activity alone. The only real conclusions we can come to are weak correlations between human behavior and a wide array of brain studies, many of which use different analysis methods.
If neuroscience can not help these dedicated NoFappers, what area of research can? Perhaps social, psychological, qualitative, and community based research methods would be useful here. Unfortunately, these methods do not receive the same degree of attention and praise that biomedical sciences do, and are often disregarded by those who wish to feel validated by “hard scientific evidence”. Even so, it seems particularly clear that the social and psychological sciences are really the fields that are well set up to deal with higher-level research including studies on human sexuality, sexual dysfunction, and the like. This is not to say that there are no neurological components to what people are experiencing — there is a neurological component to nearly every human experience — only that it’s not pragmatic (or often times ethical) to look for these components when there are actionable discoveries to be made.
The challenge remains that most psychological and social research methods still have not been adapted for use with online communities, but this is changing as the need for analysis of online communities grows and the social sciences begin to work more closely with computational sciences. Perhaps communities like NoFap could advocate for this type of a shift since they seem keen to track their own data and already have a cohesive community built.
For a grassroots community like NoFap, navigating the narrow road between inclusion, sex positivity and porn compulsion must be a challenge and sorting out the important scientific information from the irrelevant can be daunting. One can only hope that as the community grows, it will cultivate an environment more open to diverse demographics with practical research to support its users in reaching their goals.
- by ETHAN MACDONALD
