NoFap is a website and community forum that serves as a support group for those who wish to avoid pornography and masturbation. Its name comes from the Internet slang term fap, referring to male masturbation.
Video NoFap
Founding
NoFap was founded in June 2011 by Alexander Rhodes after a thread on Reddit about a 2003 Chinese study that found that men who refrain from masturbation for seven days experience a 45.7% spike in testosterone levels on the seventh day hit the front page of a popular forum on Reddit. 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.
After this, Rhodes created NoFap as a "subreddit" forum community on Reddit. 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. The endeavour is sometimes referred to as fapstinence.
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. 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.
Maps NoFap
Membership
Demographics
The membership of NoFap ranges from atheists, like founder Rhodes, to fundamentalist Christians. Women are also a part of NoFap. The users of the website call themselves "Fapstronauts." Some correspondents have nicknamed NoFap's community members as NoFappers. Some self-described porn addicts seek out NoFap for help, while others join the website for the challenge or to improve their lives and/or their interpersonal relationships.
Beliefs
After abstaining from porn and masturbation for a period of time, some of NoFap's users claim to experience "dramatic increases in social confidence, energy, concentration, mental acuity, motivation, self-esteem, emotional stability, happiness, sexual prowess, and attractiveness to the opposite sex". Some NoFap users say their brains were warped by porn, at the expense of real relationships.
The medical consensus is that there is no harm from normal masturbation practices. According to the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, "It is considered abnormal only when it inhibits partner-oriented behavior, is done in public, or is sufficiently compulsive to cause distress." In the US, masturbation was a diagnosable psychological condition until DSM II (1968). The American Medical Association consensually declared masturbation as normal in 1972. Masturbation does not deplete one's body of energy or produce premature ejaculation.
Nofap hosts a wide variety of different opinions on sexual health, and supports users with various goals as long they are trying to improve their sexual health.
Reception
Some journalists have criticized NoFap, several after having participated in its programs. According to Elizabeth Brown, neuroscientists have questioned some of the claims made by people on NoFap. 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".
Behavioral scientists have used statistics gathered from NoFap to study addiction. Robert Weiss of The Huffington Post sees NoFap as part of a tech backlash. The endeavor has also been criticized as generating embarrassing side effects such as prolonged or unwanted erections in men or an excessive libido.
However, the German behavioral economist Alec Sproten from the University of Heidelberg conducted a survey which indicated that abstaining from pornography led to subjects feeling more altruistic, conscientious and willing to take more risky actions than they did before. His results have yet to undergo the peer-review process, so they have not been scientifically approved.
The Reddit-based PornFree group is similar to NoFap, focusing on giving up porn rather than masturbation and mainly on overcoming addiction.
See also
- Effects of pornography
- Opposition to pornography
- Pornography addiction
- Sexual abstinence
- Sex Addicts Anonymous
- Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
- Sexaholics Anonymous
- Postorgasmic illness syndrome
Notes
References
External links
- Official website
- The #1 Threat to the NoFap's Challenges and Porn Addicts by Alexander Rhodes
- Reddit-hosted NoFap Wiki Page
- NoFap on Twitter
- The NoFap Experiment: An In-Depth Look at Porn Addiction by ProjectKnow.com
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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