Scott Burnett: Masculinities, Masturbation and No Fap

As we covered in a recent podcast Her Sexual Self, drawing and redrawing our sexual or asexual subjectivities is something that we are all in the process of doing - whether we know it or not. How do we come to know and understand and become our sexual selves? How do we do this when discourses, or should stories, of how we should do our gender and sexuality are so powerful and all around us. What happens in communities, or at an interpersonal level when these stories can be told and retold to others Scott Burnett has written an excellent paper on how men who abstain from masturbating make sense of their sexual subjectivities and how this is produced and reproduced in online communities. Some of this is quite everyday and benign, but some of it is quite troubling. So here’s a warning that some of what we might talk about might refer to racist tropes and sexist and potentially violent views of women. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1097184X211018256# Here are the notes I made before the show No Fap - brief overview Small minority but the basic ideas exist in culture more broadly and have for hundreds of years How masculinity works. Brief overview of hegemonic masculinities and how control narratives are a source of doing masculinity even when men are supposed to be interested in and having a sex drive. Manosphere online - a deliberate space set up as different to the IRL ‘toxic’ masculinity, but still doing the same thing. Fapstronauts Influenced by discourse about porn addiction Concerns over their sexual performance IRL, strong big erect penises eg Social harms of porn but not for women (slut shaming) Sexual energy can be exchanged for other energies Self masters Trying to be the ideal neoliberal subject Performance Lift, eat well, supplements, crypto, etc Jordan Peterson Meninists In opposition to feminism. Restating patriarchy Testosterone boosting masculinity Cucking discourses Trad discourses Porn drains energy from men, makes them soy (thus porn is a feminist plot) Sex is procreative, heterosexuality, have trad wife Alt Right Anti semitism - who porn is made by and what Here’s some more reading for you if you are interested Friend of the show Eleanor Janega wrote this on the history of some of these ideas https://going-medieval.com/2018/11/26/on-no-nut-november/ Here’s an excellent blog from other friend of the show Girl On The Net https://www.girlonthenet.com/blog/not-masturbating-too-much/ And here’s my advice article for young men about how to do No Nut November (I am not asking them to abstain from abstaining, but instead to give them gentle advice that might lead them away from the harmful groups we talk about in the episode) https://www.bishuk.com/sex/tips-for-no-nut-november/ Justin