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No-Nut November: A Classic MRA Ritual

 

Many men mark their calendars each year for "No-Nut November" ("NNN" or also "No-Fap November"), a month-long event with a self-evident purpose — no "masturbation" for a whole month. This ritual is recordable on Reddit since around 2011 and it's been gaining traction steadily since then, as well as becoming more intricate (Mavanis 2018). It sprang up from a pseudoscientific TED Talk, "The great porn experiment", concerning the psychological effects of porn consumption, which implied not only the negative effects of porn, but the negative effects of masturbating too frequently (Mavanis 2018). The negative effects apparently stemmed from losing testosterone through masturbation, a condition that was mythologized in the Reddit NoFap community into a vitalistic interpretation of masculinity that depended on high levels of testosterone. To perhaps nobody's surprise, this condition became the fault of women, and NNN took on a, perhaps inevitable, misogynistic frame with women paradoxically being the threat to men's very identity. Due to its inherent concern about men's virality however, NNN's structure as a ritual is not so much about masturbation per se, but rather about orgasm. 

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For NNN, the orgasm functions as a 'frame', a terminal point that "indicates when the ritual begins and ends" (Sims and Stephens), and in this case combines with the beginning and the end of the month of November to set the bounds of the ritual. The ritual, upon success, earns men prestige not only in terms of their virality, it means that they are in control of their bodies and their lives, marking them as 'better' men (Mavanis 2018). In order to be successful, men are encouraged to be active in their online communities (e.g. Reddit, Discord, etc.) and participate with other men in activities that both affirm their masculinity and distract from the urge to get off. These include helping other men, playing video games, working out, watching movies, etc., as well as checking in with the community to communicate their struggles. This might make it seem like men don't masturbate during NNN, but they often do, participating in the practice of "edging", one of the several exceptions to the rules. Another curious exception is that if it's you're birthday, you're allowed to have "birthday sex", but you cannot have the equivalent in terms of masturbation (Mavanis 2018). 

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