Hands free

Eight years ago, I had an erotic epiphany. It was around midnight: I had sex on the brain and porn on my laptop. Suddenly, everything felt wrong and a wave of sadness washed over me. I felt like some sleazy man from a Michel Houellebecq novel. I no longer wanted to be that kind of man. So I made a solemn vow to abstain for at least 60 days.

Back then, I thought I was the only man in the world who had taken such a vow. (And in case you’re wondering, I lasted 45 days that first time and now remain free of porn.) Little did I know then that that year — 2011 — was when a forum called NoFap was set up on social media platform Reddit by Alexander Rhodes to support men like me. The name NoFap is meant to be an onomatopoeic representation of the sound of masturbation. Members who abstain are called ‘fapstronaughts’ and women members — they have a few — are known as ‘femstronaughts’.

Today NoFap has an online community of around 400,000 and describes itself as a ‘porn recovery site’. What, you may wonder, are they recovering from? Exhaustion? Sprained wrists? NoFap believes that the use of porn and masturbation together has detrimental effects on your mental, physical and emotional health. The site advocates ‘abstinence’ for a period of 60 days, which allows the body and mind a natural ‘rebooting’.

Over the past decade, an anti–masturbation movement has emerged in America. Groups such as NoFap, Proud Boys (young right-wing nationalists whose hashtag is #NoWank), Christian chastity advocates and writers such as the productivity gurus Tim Ferris and Jordan Peterson are seen as part of it. There are groups such as the Sacred Sexuality Project which warns that ‘pornography addiction could quite literally be considered an epidemic in modern culture today’ and should be seen ‘in a similar light to the abuse of cocaine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries’.

Of course, the British like to think this is some sort of peculiarly American thing, rooted in its puritanical past.