NoFap

NoFap
Type of site
 Private
Slogan(s) Get a new grip on life.
Website www.nofap.com
www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/
Registration Optional
Launched June 20, 2011 (2011-06-20) (subreddit)[1]
Current status Active

NoFap (fap: an internet slang term for male masturbation) is a website and community forum that serves as a support group for those who wish to avoid pornography and masturbation.[2][3]

Founding

NoFap was founded in June 2011 by Alexander Rhodes after a thread on Reddit about a 2003 Chinese study[note 1] that found that men who don't masturbate for seven days experience a 45.7% increase in testosterone levels hit the front page of a popular forum on Reddit.[1][4] Alexander Rhodes appears in the documentary written and directed by Nicholas Tana called Sticky: A (Self) Love Story, in which he discusses his findings and his opinions about masturbation.[5]

After this, Rhodes created NoFap as a "subreddit" forum community on Reddit.[1] At first, NoFap ran weekly and monthly challenges for a small group of people on the forum, and then the NoFap administrators created a day counter system. Now forum members set their own challenges based upon their own personal goals.[1] The endeavour is sometimes referred to as fapstinence.[6][7][8]

NoFap.com

Users on NoFap's subreddit more than tripled in number in two years, leading Rhodes to build an off-Reddit forum at NoFap.com and begin other plans to better serve the website's fast-growing factions in Brazil, Germany, and China.[9] NoFap.com is a forum-style website where individuals who have committed to abstain from pornography and masturbation for a period of time can talk about their experiences and engage in challenges to help them recover. NoFap.com is the sister website of the Reddit-hosted NoFap community.[10]

Membership

Demographics

The membership of NoFap ranges from atheists, like founder Rhodes, to fundamentalist Christians.[1][11][12] Women are also a part of NoFap.[11] The users of the website call themselves "Fapstronauts."[13][14][4] Some correspondents have nicknamed NoFap's community members as NoFappers.[15][16][17] Some self-described porn addicts seek out NoFap for help,[4] while others join the website for the challenge or to improve their lives and/or their interpersonal relationships.[4]

Beliefs

After abstaining from porn and masturbation for a period of time, some of NoFap's users claim, among others, "dramatic increases in social confidence, energy, concentration, mental acuity, motivation, self-esteem, emotional stability, happiness, sexual prowess, and attractiveness to the opposite sex".[1][18] Some NoFap users say their brains were warped by porn, at the expense of real relationships.[19]

The medical consensus is that there is no harm from normal masturbation practices.[20][21] But, regarding pornography, see Effects of pornography.

Reception and criticism

Some journalists have criticized NoFap, several after participating in its programs.[22][23][24] According to Elizabeth Brown, neuroscientists have questioned some of the claims made by people on NoFap.[25] One psychologist, David J. Ley, wrote: "I'm not in opposition to them, but I do think their ideas are simplistic, naive and promote a sad, reductionistic and distorted view of male sexuality and masculinity".[26]

Behavioral scientists have used statistics gathered from NoFap to study addiction.[27] Robert Weiss of The Huffington Post sees NoFap as part of a tech backlash.[28] The endeavor has also been criticized as generating embarrassing side effects such as prolonged or unwanted erections in men or an excessive libido.[29]

However, the German researcher Alec Sproten from the University of Heidelberg found that abstaining from pornography and masturbation has positive effects on character traits. For instance, participants of the study feel more altruistic, conscientious and are willing to take more risky actions than they did before.[30]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ The thread ("TIL when men don't masturbate for 7 days their testosterone levels increase by 45.7%. • /r/todayilearned". reddit.) discussed Jiang M, Xin J, Zou Q, Shen JW (2003). "A research on the relationship between ejaculation and serum testosterone level in men". J. Zhejiang Univ. Sci. 4 (2): 236–240. PMID 12659241. doi:10.1631/jzus.2003.0236.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Jalsevac, John. "130,000+ Reddit users flock to forum founded by atheist to quit pornography, masturbation". Life Site. Retrieved 10 June 2015. Rhodes took the initiative and did so, 'in the 23rd hour of June 20, 2011'
  2. ↑ Cowell, Tom (17 September 2013). "No fapping, please, it's making us ill". The Telegraph. London, England: Telegraph Media Group. Retrieved 22 May 2015.
  3. ↑ McMahon, Tamsin (20 January 2014). "Will quitting porn improve your life?: A growing 'NoFap' movement of young men are saying no to porn and masturbation". Maclean's. Toronto, Canada: Rogers Media. Retrieved 22 May 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Love, Dylan. "Inside NoFap, The Reddit Community For People Who Want To Be 'Masters Of Their Domain'". Business Insider: Australia. Retrieved 10 June 2015.
  5. ↑ http://www.fandango.com/movie-trailer/sticky:aselflovestory-trailer/189754
  6. ↑ http://gawker.com/5994669/in-defense-of-masturbation
  7. ↑ http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/masturbation-giving-up-effects-life-changes-reddit-nofap-men-say-it-gave-them-superpowers-a7345466.html
  8. ↑ http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/05242017/grumpy-ghey-fap-flap
  9. ↑ Eck, Ian. "The Men Who Would Not Wank". SanFrancisco Magazine. Retrieved 27 June 2015.
  10. ↑ Israelsen-Hartley, Sara. "Adolescent addiction: When pornography strikes early". Deseret News. Retrieved 27 June 2015.
  11. 1 2 Blair, Leonardo. "Christians Find Help for Porn, Masturbation Addiction Through 'NoFap' Community Started on Reddit by 24-Y-O Web Developer". HuffPost. Retrieved 10 June 2015.
  12. ↑ McMurry, Evan. "9 hilarious ways the religious right tried to eradicate masturbation". salon.com. Retrieved 27 June 2015.
  13. ↑ Hall, Lex (26 December 2016). "Internet porn abounds but 'no fappers' rise to the occasion". The Australian.
  14. ↑ McMahon, Tamsin (20 January 2014). "Will quitting porn improve your life?". Maclean's.
  15. ↑ http://www.informationng.com/2017/03/listen-watching-prnography-can-ruin-sx-life-10-reasons.html
  16. ↑ http://www.neonnettle.com/features/423-nofap-why-a-growing-number-of-males-are-refusing-to-masturbate
  17. ↑ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/internet-porn-abounds-but-no-fappers-rise-to-the-occasion/news-story/67c474a806d07014042a08f5814aabe6
  18. ↑ Jackson, Ryan. "15 Benefits of Quitting Pornography". The Former Fat Kid. Retrieved 27 June 2015.
  19. ↑ Weisman, Carrie. "Has Porn Overwhelmed Our Brains? The "NoFap" Movement Thinks So". AlterNet. Retrieved 27 June 2015.
  20. ↑ Coon, Dennis; Mitterer, John O. (1 January 2015). "11. Gender and Sexuality". Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior (14 ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 363. ISBN 978-1-305-54500-7. Is there any way that masturbation can cause harm? Seventy years ago, a child might have been told that masturbation would cause insanity, acne, sterility, or other such nonsense. "Self-abuse," as it was then called, has enjoyed a long and unfortunate history of religious and medical disapproval (Caroll, 2013). The modern view is that masturbation is a normal sexual behavior (Hogarth & Ingham, 2009). Enlightened parents are well aware of this fact. Still, many children are punished or made to feel guilty for touching their genitals. This is unfortunate because masturbation itself is harmless. Typically, its only negative effects are feelings of fear, guilt, or anxiety that arise from learning to think of masturbation as "bad" or "wrong." In an age when people are urged to practice "safer sex," masturbation remains the safest sex of all.
  21. ↑ Sigel, Lisa Z. (Summer 2004). "Masturbation: The History of the Great Terror by Jean Stengers; Ann Van Neck; Kathryn Hoffmann". Journal of Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 37 (4): 1065–1066. ISSN 0022-4529. JSTOR 3790078. doi:10.1353/jsh.2004.0065. Stengers and Van Neck follow the illness to its fairly abrupt demise; they liken the shift to finally seeing the emperor without clothes as doctors began to doubt masturbation as a cause of illness at the turn of the twentieth century. Once doubt set in, scientists began to accumulate statistics about the practice, finding that a large minority and then a large majority of people masturbated. The implications were clear: if most people masturbated and did not experience insanity, debility, and early death, then masturbation could not be held accountable to the etiology that had been assigned it. Masturbation quickly lost its hold over the medical community, and parents followed in making masturbation an ordinary part of first childhood and then human sexuality.
  22. ↑ Singal, Jesse. "Why We're Scared of Masturbation". NY Mag. Retrieved 10 June 2015.
  23. ↑ Barker, John. "The failure of a 'noFap' reboot for porn addicts and why abstaining from PMO is not enough to recover". Sexual Reboot. Retrieved 3 July 2015.
  24. ↑ Brink, Rebecca. "True Story: I Tried No-Fap And It Sucked (For Me)". The Frisky. Retrieved 10 June 2015.
  25. ↑ Brown, Elizabeth. "Neuroscientists Challenge Myths About Men and Porn". Reason.com. Retrieved 10 June 2015.
  26. ↑ Ley, David. "The NoFap Phenomenon". Psychology Today. Retrieved 10 June 2015.
  27. ↑ Anderson, Kirsten. "GQ Magazine tells men: Quit watching porn before it ruins your sex life". Life Site. Retrieved 10 June 2015.
  28. ↑ Weiss, Robert. "Is 'No Fap' Movement Start of Tech Backlash?". Huff Post. Retrieved 27 June 2015.
  29. ↑ Harrison, Alexandra (2014). Nudge, Don't Thrust: The Application of Behavioral Law and Economics to America's Porn Addiction. p. 337.
  30. ↑ Wolking, Sebastian (2016): http://www.unicum.de/de/studentenleben/liebe-sex/nofap-die-porno-verweigerer
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