How did No Nut November start?
Some sex researchers get calls every February, just before Valentine’s Day, for the latest on getting or keeping romantic relationships. My busy time is November, when everyone wants to know the latest science on masturbation abstinence called “NoFap” and the associated “No Nut November” (aka “No Fap November”). The practice involves abstaining from masturbation, or sometimes ejaculation entirely, throughout the month of November. We now have better documentation of how this started, along with many new studies related to its practice.
Semen Retention and NoFap are the most widely posted male sexual health topics on Instagram and TikTok, but also have the least accurate health information. Semen retention has its roots in ascetic religious practice, but the more recent practices appear largely unrelated to those ascetic principles. As best we can find, No Fap first appeared on a BodyBuilding.com forum on July 9, 2004.
Specifically, a BodyBuilding.com user lamented that his girlfriend was away, and that she had demanded that he not ejaculate at all while she was gone. It would be 49 days until she would get back. He started a counter for his “NoFap” journey and rated his daily “difficulty” abstaining from ejaculation.
Commenters in the thread were vicious. A number referred to the girlfriend as a “bitch”. They recommended that he cheat on her while she was gone, or sexually assault her when she returned to teach her a lesson for being so unreasonable.
Somehow, this caught on in the BodyBuilding.com forums and became a monthly challenge to abstain from masturbation. They mistakenly believed that ejaculation abstinence would increase their testosterone (abstinence actually decreases testosterone). The first instance of “No Fap November” I was able to find was November 1, 2009 on the BodyBuilding.com forum.
This grew to be wildly popular on BodyBuilding.com forums, with a thousands-reply post on June 2011. About three weeks later, the subreddit “NoFap” (denoted “r/NoFap”) was created on Reddit by two cofounders/moderators who also had been active in Body Building forums. They stated the NoFap idea came from BodyBuilding.com and even linked to the popular post. The NoFap subreddit defined the practice as the rules for NoFap are “Absolutely NO fapping. No self pleasure AT ALL.” Fapping is slang for male masturbation.
One of the r/NoFap co-founders left to create a new PickUp Artist subreddit called r/TruePickup, which focused on men extracting sex from women. The other r/NoFap cofounder started dozens of NoFap subreddits, which have had various outcomes. The other subreddits included an apparent fan page for himself (r/AlexanderRhodes) and r/NoFapArmy. The later hosted challenges (r/NoFapWar) where members would be given military ranks, grouped into warring armies, and listed as “dead” when they masturbated or failed in some other way. Women could be directed to “r/NoShlick”, an apparent reference to female masturbation. I scraped the last 1,000 posts on r/NoFap and found none identified as female.
From these auspicious beginnings, seemingly thousands of spin-offs using the name “NoFap” have appeared online. Many appeared to be men offering “coaching” services promising to cure a variety of medical illnesses, which there is no evidence they do. Given that “No Fap November” actually started on a BodyBuilding forum, the groups appear to arise from a variety of different sources. NoFap has since been classified as a part of the manosphere, seeking to disseminate anti-feminist viewpoints.
Abstaining from masturbation or ejaculation in November is probably not harmful if you have no expectations and engage for fun. However, if you think “No Nut November” will reap health benefits for you, it will not. Masturbation abstinence practices are consistently associated with negative health outcomes, promote false conspiracy beliefs about the pornography industry (for supposedly tricking them to ejaculate), promote antisemitic beliefs, and spread misogynist values. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism described NoFap as a part of extremist misogyny online. The Violent Extremism Risk Assessment also included “NoFap” as a term associated with online violence and misogyny. The likely outcomes of abstaining from ejaculation for November are to decrease testosterone, increase the frequency of noctural emissions (i.e., “wet dreams”), and possibly cause a new anxiety disorder called Dhāt Syndrome.
Given how it started, perhaps where it has “ended” will make more sense!
REFERENCES
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Dubin, J. M., Aguiar, J. A., Lin, J. S., Greenberg, D. R., Keeter, M. K., Fantus, R. J., … & Halpern, J. A. (2022). The broad reach and inaccuracy of men’s health information on social media: analysis of TikTok and Instagram. International Journal of Impotence Research, 1–5.
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Rhodes, A. and Ohropax (2011) r/NoFap, Reddit. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20110629005129/http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/ (Accessed: 29 June 2011).
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