There are very few things in life that are truly guilt-free pleasures. Throughout the history of the human race, we’ve been on the constant look-out for pleasure. And unfortunately, most of the things we find that give it to us turn out to be bad in some way. Masturbation, though, is not one of those things. It is the jewel in the pleasure crown: something which is both intensely enjoyable and actually good for you. So it’s disappointing to hear that some twats have invented ‘No Nut November’ – a masturbation version of Stoptober (for smoking) or Dry January (for booze). A month during which people are encouraged to avoid masturbation for the good of their physical and mental health.
Also referred to as ‘New Life’ November by some people in the NoFap community (an almost evangelical anti-wanking cult), No Nut November is apparently an opportunity to take some time out of masturbation and focus on other things in your life.
Let’s start up front by saying that your own wanking is your own business: I’m not going to burst into your bedroom and demand you start frigging away. It’s no more my business whether you wank than it’s my business how you brush your teeth or which bits you wash first in the shower. You do you, gang. You do you.
However, it absolutely is my business when movements like NoFap and their band of anti-wanking accolytes try to present masturbation like it’s a vice on a par with, say, smoking or alcohol.
Vices and harm
I feel very strongly about this, possibly because I am so keen on the kind of pleasure you can get from things which are genuinely bad for you. Every time I pick up a packet of fags, I am forcefully reminded that they’ll probably kill me one day. When I go for a night on the piss, I wake up the next morning with a dry mouth and thumping headache that flashes the clear message ‘your liver fucking HATES you.’ Drugs of other kinds can give intense pleasure in the moment, and intense guilt and anxiety later down the line when you start to wonder ‘am I doing this a bit TOO much?’ or you end up face-down on a pavement somewhere and wonder where all your mates have gone. What’s more, drugs like this are illegal (in the UK for now, at least). Side effects of anything from smoking a spliff to getting off your tits on MDMA and rolling around with a group of close friends include (but aren’t limited to) arrest and prosecution.
So if you’re a human being trying to eke pleasure out of this world, is there anywhere you can turn that won’t royally fuck you up? There’s sex, I guess, but even sex itself has some risks attached – more risks than wanking, at any rate. There’s the risk of contracting or spreading STIs, the risk of shagging someone who turns out to be emotionally or physically harmful, as well as the risk of things like pregnancy and falling in love.
Wanking, though? Wanking is free! And you can’t catch STIs from yourself! Nor will you get arrested (as long as you’re doing it in private), end up with a hangover, fuck your liver up or get so off your face you end up doing something stupid. As far as pleasure goes, wanking is one hell of a drug.
Except it’s not a drug, is it? It’s a natural human behaviour. One which the vast majority of us do on a reasonably regular basis. It is not addictive like heroin, or carcinogenic like smoking. It doesn’t make you go blind or give you night terrors or make you paranoid.
It does give you a temporary pleasurable boost and improve your health, though. It can work as pain relief for period cramps or keep your prostate healthy. There are plenty of reasons to masturbate, and only a few reasons not to: if you don’t fancy it, for example, or if you’re personally worried that you’re doing it so much it’s stopping you from doing other things you need to do. But it is not inherently harmful or damaging. It doesn’t need a magic ‘month’ like Stoptober, where we encourage people to stop doing it in order to help them understand just how much better their life could be if they had never started in the first place.
What is the point of ‘New Life’/No Nut November?
So the point, broadly, is that masturbation makes people feel bad and they want to feel good again. Some people feel like they are addicted to porn and masturbation, others think they will become more focused if they avoid doing it or give themselves time to do other things that are more important to them. All of these are personal reasons, and if you have a reason like this for not masturbating, then do what you want: as I say, I’m not going to tell you that you have to any more than I’d tell someone else that they shouldn’t.
But what bothers me is summed up partly by this message from someone on the ‘New Life’/No Fap November thread:
“I’m tired of getting thoughts throughout the day of sexual activity and I’m tired of the feeling of guilt and loathing that inevitably follows a session.“
Where does this guilt and loathing come from? Does it come from masturbation itself, or does it come from society’s attitude towards masturbation? These feelings of guilt and loathing aren’t going to be reduced or eliminated by not masturbating: they will, in fact, be enhanced. The more people that are out there spreading propaganda that masturbation is somehow deeply harmful, the more intense these feelings will be. And the more people (mostly but not always men) will feel pushed towards movements like NoFap seeking a ‘cure’ for this invented problem.
I’m not saying that there is no one out there who has a problem with porn or excessive masturbation – anything is problematic if you do it so much that it interferes with the rest of your life. But the dangers of porn are usually wildly exaggerated or based on stats that are – to put it mildly – incredibly fucking dodgy. And organisations like NoFap actively make a profit off telling people that masturbation is inherently a bad thing. They have a vested interest. Their ‘academy‘, where they teach you how not to wank, costs $50 per month (or $360 per year if you pay for a full year in advance!). Not exactly a bargain when you could get a Catholic priest to tell you much of the same shit for free. They even – and I’m not making this up – sell T-shirts – so you can broadcast your NoFap status to the rest of the world.
And in the meantime, they have tried to jump on the ‘good cause’ bandwagon by encouraging people to abstain for No Nut November. A month during which, no doubt, they will sell a fuck of a lot more academy courses and T-shirts, get more links and attention and traffic, and get their ‘wanking is bad for you’ myth in front of a hell of a lot more people.
If someone were to tell me they’d made a personal choice to abstain from wanking for a while, because they wanted to see whether it made them feel good, or they wanted to spend more time studying or reading or doing DIY, I’d wish them all the best on their personal journey. But when an organisation which profits from spreading lies about masturbation tries to position it as a bad habit on a par with smoking and drinking? I’m not challenging personal choices, I’m doing damage limitation.
And I appreciate the irony here, because I take money from sex toy companies (click on the ads etc etc) to help me run my site. I also take money on patreon for making audio porn. I am effectively a pornographer, and I have a vested interest in masturbation. But here’s the thing: I am also telling the truth. Masturbation is generally accepted by the vast majority of medical practitioners to be not only safe but actively beneficial. If you’re someone who has been at least a little persuaded by the myths peddled by the ‘New Life’/No Nut November or the NoFap movement in general, and you’re worried that I have the same profit motive they do, feel free to never visit this site ever again. Print this blog out, then avoid me like the plague from now until the end of time. Don’t click on any ads, buy anything, or remember the names of any of the companies that want to sell you sex toys. But please also refrain from giving your money to an organisation that’s feeding you lies to make you feel bad in order to sell you a ‘course’ to learn a skill that almost inevitably dooms you to failure (because let’s face it, it’s almost impossible to not wank – if it were possible I’m pretty sure one of the millions of religious folks since the dawn of religion would have found a way to crack it by now).
Don’t give them your money, don’t give them your time.
Personally I’ve got something far healthier and more pleasurable to do right now instead. And it won’t leave me with even the traces of a hangover.
14 Comments
Wow, there’s a lot to think about here. So, this quote:
“I’m tired of getting thoughts throughout the day of sexual activity and I’m tired of the feeling of guilt and loathing that inevitably follows a session.“
That resonates with me (although like fuck do I even close to agree with it) for a couple of reasons.The first is something I used to feel when I was about 14 or 15 and watching erotic films on Channel 5 every weekend. I wasn’t actually masturbating, but I was getting immense erections and thought that it was, effectively, illegal for me to be watching that stuff. I used to watch it, get hard, then (after I’d calmed down) feel guilty about it, and then have monologues to myself like:
“It’s all [insert name of current crush]’s fault. It she was in a relationship with me, I wouldn’t have these feelings, and I wouldn’t need to watch this stuff.”
And then I realised that was a load of shit, so I stopped thinking that way.
And I moved on to another thing that made me feel guilty. I started to have relatively dark thoughts about things that I felt neither positively about or particularly sexy in any way whatsoever – usually non-sexual things. Following certain people on Twitter, or reading their blogs, tripped me up, but when I brought myself closer to orgasm, occasionally it would be a sudden and unexpected intrusive fantasy that entered my head in the seconds beforehand. To even think that I’d be aroused by all this sort of stuff made me feel incredibly guilty, and to orgasm to it made it even worse.
I brought myself out of that eventually – reminding myself that the things I usually masturbated over were much cleaner, less dark, and more joyful, and relying upon those to get me off, refocusing myself somehow – because it wasn’t bringing me pleasure, and isn’t that kind of the point?
I don’t understand the guilt surrounding masturbation, but I do understand the guilt of things associated with masturbation – when I was at school, I always (probably unconsciously) associated it with the abusive bullies who both bragged about it and gave me hell every day – nobody else mentioned it, I didn’t know what it was to begin with and I’d never heard the term before, and I genuinely didn’t think I’d ever have sex, so I didn’t think about it. So maybe it’s a societal thing: it’s not the act of masturbation that brings about the guilt, it’s all the things surrounding it that can.
That or I think too much. It’s probably both.
“it’s not the act of masturbation that brings about the guilt, it’s all the things surrounding it” I think this really nails it to be honest. There are lots of different reasons for people to not want to masturbate or to not enjoy it (purely not enjoying it on a physical level would be one of them I think, or wanting to avoid it as a personal challenge etc). But my worry is that so often this guilt is effectively manufactured – by society that tells people not to do it, or by people who use it for control/aggression. That school bully example is horrible, and I’m so sorry you had to deal with that – I have vague recollections of bullies at my school using aggressively/overtly sexual stuff as a bullying tactic too (though it was probably much more pronounced for the boys than for me – a kind of ‘I’m macho because I wank’ thing).
FWIW I think your attitude towards it sounds really healthy, and it is probably at least in part a result of what a thoughtful person you are – not thinking too much but thinking about stuff thoroughly =)
“it’s not the act of masturbation that brings about the guilt, it’s all the things surrounding it that can.” I have to second GOTN on this.
When I was a teenager I used to feel “guilty” about masturbation, not because of the act itself but because I felt that the associated fantasies I had (back then fairly conventional MF porn type scenarios) were degrading towards women. The problem was that all the girls I knew never openly discussed sexuality or overtly displayed any signs of sexuality, probably because of macho bullies who would have harassed them even more than they already did.
Then I met Little Spoon (and later several of the amazing sex bloggers) and realised that women get just as horny as men. That sounds stupid writing it now but when I was a teenager I genuinely thought women weren’t as sexual as men and that thinking of them in a sexual way (even in the context of fantasies) meant that I was degrading them.
Great post as usual and once again SMDH.
I feel sorry for these guys in a way. They should really call it “Self-Loathing November” which I’m then sure is followed by “Amazing Nut December”.
But the more insidious thing is how a lot of this also funnels into misogyny, into “I wouldn’t have these thoughts if co-worker/girl on bus/barista/imaginary people on TV weren’t flaunting their body parts”.
I’d like to see Venn Diagram of No Nut guys and Incels.
I remember when one of these guys tried to persuade people in my online network to go 40 days without wanking. My reaction was something like this post: “Why would I want to give up something harmless that gives me pleasure, simply to prove that I can?” It struck me as a weird attitude then and it still does now. One wonders if these people are focusing on wanking as a scapegoat for other problems in their lives. I guess it’s possible to be such a compulsively addicted masturbator that it’s taking up large amounts of your time; but even then, surely it’s just the symptom of deeper personal problems, which ‘stop wanking’ isn’t going to fix.
Or alternatively, maybe some of these guys actually get off on the thought of self-denial? Paradoxical as it sounds, that’s hardly unknown as a fetish (and is more understandable to me than self-denial for its own sake); but the more honest thing would be to admit it to themselves.
I think it’s also an example of a kind of stupid puritan logical fallacy that rears it’s vile head in other spheres as well:
“Doing loads of X is bad for you, therefore not doing X at all is good !”
“I’m not going to burst into your bedroom and demand you start frigging away.”
Well, damn it.
Yep, the anti-wank nutjobs can take the whole idea and cram it up their arses. One never knows, they might just enjoy the feeling…
(Typing this whilst wearing my sluttiest little latex dress with a buttplug in me… I feel I should make up for the wanking that those poor souls missed out on last month…)
I’ve been wondering about where all the sex-negativity in the world comes from. Maybe it could all be traced back to a single puritanical cultural origin which spread to the whole world like a set of core religious beliefs, but I don’t think so.
I believe there’s a biological element to the ‘guilt and shame’ factor of sex in general and masturbation in particular. At least in men (and then men have more power to decide about social and moral codes).
The sharp contrast between the pre-fap drive, then the crescendo high and the prolactin-seeped post-come low has always baffled me. How can sex be so high up my priority list that I think of little else for hours on end and then be flushed down a memory black hole the instant after the last spasm of an orgasm ebbs?
I don’t think other pleasures work the same. For instance, when someone eats something delicious, satiation and then disgust are gradual processes. With sex (at least for a number of men), this is instantaneous, from highest peak to deepest trough.
And the impression of stepping into recovered clarity and lucidity is striking, especially when compared to the state of mind that prevailed only a few seconds ago. This impression that now I am lucid after sex had somehow taken over my agency, and is nothing I should be bothering myself with anymore, possibly sprinkled with a measure of blues and a pinch of disgust (after all, sex makes us do things that we were absolutely squicked about pre-puberty) can be very convincing.
That’s bad enough.
Then we created a perfectly vicious circle in which this primordial/biological post-sex doubt is etched into dogma and moral codes, adding social shame to hormonal backlash.
PS: if the guys want to avoid the post-orgasmic ‘shame’ factor, they can decide that November is edging month (that would combine sex-positivity with an almost superhuman level of dedication and self-restraint :)
Fuck that.
I’m in a db relationship and given I hardly drink these days and can no longer take the come downs from the illicits I used to imbibe on a regular basis; food and wanking is pretty much all I have left in the pleasures department.
I kind of get it if you’re spending more time than comfortable in pornworld with your hands down your pants but then that too smells like AA evangelicals who want the world to join them in not drinking and doing naughty stuff because it fucks them up. Also ‘Fapstonaut’ sounds like someone who has given themselves over to discovering wanking which is literally out of this world!
If you want to deny yourself for whatever reason then great, but leave others out of it.
The only time I have felt guilt or loathing after masturbation is when I hadn’t come to terms with being Bi and a crossdresser. I’d be thinking of a sexy girl, then the fantasy would change to me being the sexy girl being fucked – I’d cum and after the come down I’d feel bad. Simply because I couldn’t handle those feeling, not because of the masturbation.
Now I’ve accepted that I look fucking hot in a corset and stockings and that there is nothing wrong with having a cock and licking cock, I’m happy!
Yesssss <3 I am so happy for you! I think a lot of these 'anti wank' movements are born of shame, and they talk a lot on their forums about post-wank 'comedowns' which to my mind are usually based in shame. When we realise that consensual sexual stuff ain't shameful, those comedowns disappear =) Thank you for commenting!
Well, to some of us chronic masturbation has left us with anxiety, OCD and paranoia. Skinny bodies and lack of ambition. Constant negative thoughts, lack of energy and just bleak outlook of life. So, for some of us, masturbation does negatively impact our lives. And while trying no nut we feel all those symptoms fading away and feeling much better. So your opinion is cool, glad for you you can wank and live your life at the same time. I can’t and will comtinue no nut.
Cheers
If it works for you, go for it – as I say in the article, I am not going to tell anyone to wank if they don’t want to. However, my worries about NNN remain, and if you went to a doctor or counsellor with the symptoms you’ve described to me, those qualified professionals would be unlikely to recommend abstinence from masturbation as a beneficial solution. If abstinence makes you feel better, great, but I am concerned that unqualified charlatans are selling you this as a magic pill when you deserve better, evidence-based support.