So I wondered where something like NoFap could have possibly come from and when I started looking into it’s claims (I know they’re bad) I found stuff like this:
It turns out there is a long history of believing sexuality is some sort of energy to be harnessed. I thought it was just Christianity that put locks on it but apparently there are plenty of other areas that claim you can use that “energy” for higher purpose. The second one makes a ton of claims that seem about as nonsensical as NoFap.
I just wonder why humans feel the need to war against such a natural aspect of their being.
I suppose, but if the question is why various priests, monks, yoginah, rishayah, etc are supposed to remain celibate, the canonical reason is not because fucking (or masturbation) is somehow bad in any way, it’s just that it’s a base instinct that is supposedly distracting and uses mental “energy” that could otherwise be devoted to meditation or prayer (cf the complication of ritual Tantric sex, for example)
Yeah…I saw that episode of Seinfeld too. George abstained from all sexual activity and became a genius while Elaine did the same thing and became a moron. Not to be confused with The Contest episode.
The pattern I see through history is that lack of sex makes people mean and nasty and drives them to try to remove all pleasure from all people’s lives. I keep hearing about this Incel thing out there, and I imagine that is following the same pattern. And I don’t believe those guys weren’t jerking off whenever they had a chance. We still see in modern times what happens when men try to be celibate for religious reasons.
Ah, finally a chance for me to say why I think the NoFap thing is dumb.
Ok, but first I guess I should address the main topic of the thread…
I think it’s a bit more basic than the OP.
Society has always had its nose (so to speak) in our sexual activities, labelling anything other than getting it on with the “right” gender in the “right” way as shameful. This is helped by us having certain disgust or shame instincts e.g. a revulsion towards certain sex acts. It’s just part of our psychology to confuse disgust with immortality.
In the modern world, while we intellectually know there’s no issue with masturbation, the social baggage remains, and for most of us the greatest embarrassment we could imagine would be being caught masturbating by anyone other than our partner (some would be embarrassed even then).
Now why NoFap is dumb:
The modern world is full of instant gratification. Why single out masturbation as something requiring absolute prohibition, but accepting that for other activities a sensible balance can be found?
One of the assumptions they seem to go with is that masturbation and initiating real relationships are either-or. I think that if masturbation genuinely substituted adequately for actual sex, none of us would be here. I think in reality masturbation and genuinely getting laid go hand in hand (so to speak…again). One thing helps motivate the other.
Kind of hard to take that site seriously based on the name.
Still sounds like a suppression of sexuality to me though. All the links I looked at talked about it being some spiritual energy that you have to channel so it isn’t “wasted”. Wasted? Who gets to define such things.
It is completely understandable to me that when hedonism becomes mainstream, people will rebel against it by practicing forms of self-deprivation, and promote it as beneficial. As long as they don’t push their beliefs on others too aggressively, it’s fine with me and should be accepted as a normal part of human culture.
When I was younger (so, in the 1970s or thereabouts), there was certainly a trope that athletes (particularly boxers in training, as well as other athletes, at least on the night before “the big game”) should be abstaining from sex, as it would sap them of the energy they would need to be at their athletic peak. It doesn’t seem like that “conventional wisdom” is as widely held today (or, if it is, it’s something that I just don’t hear about anymore).
This article from Psychology Today indicates that the belief can be traced back to Greece, and athletes who were competing in the original Olympic Games.
However, it also quotes former MLB manager Casey Stengel, who said, “It’s not the sex that hurts athletic performance. It’s athletes staying up all night drinking and chasing women,” which I think is probably a big part of it.