nofap waluigi
masturbation antis are living in philip k dick's hellworld
Last night I was trying to re-watch a scene from Richard Linklater’s adaptation of A Scanner Darkly. I couldn’t find it on YouTube, so I Googled the half-remembered dialogue and the first result was a site hosting movie subtitles. The file format transformed the mundane banter into ethereal free verse:
What’s a narc look like?
That’s like asking,
“What’s an impostor look like?”
I talked to this dealer
who’d been busted.
I asked him what the narc
who busted him looked like.
What did he say, he looked just like us?
More so.
So I guess the moral of that is…
…stay away from guys
looking the same as us.
Well, there are female narcs.
Oh, hey, I’d like to meet one of those.
No, I don’t mean a female. I mean
just the narc, knowingly, like, positive.
Sure. So you could positively know.
And you will. When he slaps the cuffs on, you’ll know
for sure, when that day comes.
How could a guy do that?
Pose as a narc?
- What?
- What?
Pose as a narc?
- No, you said it. So yeah.
- Pose as a narc.
Oh, sh… ***, I’m spaced.
Pose as a narc, wow.
Pose as a narc.
And I thought: “Oh shit, it’s r/NoFap.”
People outside of the gooning community are often surprised to learn that many porn addiction fetishists love the r/NoFap community like a little brother. And what’s not to love? Both gooners and NoFappers are engaged in deep inner work on their relationship with digital sexuality, chasing the emotional highs of abstinence and relapse, and they both talk about porn the way cops talk about fentanyl. Memes and mental models flow freely between them—every r/NoFap technique becomes fodder for gooning content, and every aesthetic trend in gooning becomes the target of anti-porn fearmongering. Did ‘No Nut November’ originate as a NoFap shibboleth or a fetish, and can anyone even tell the difference?
NoFappers are keenly aware of this proximity, and the shared idioms also make it an ideal playground for erotic roleplayers and corruption fetishists. The psychosexual background radiation in the subreddit buzzes with intense paranoia. NoFappers depend on their (para)social relationships with other members for emotional support, but due to the constraints of the pseudonymous medium, the high rate of attrition, and the constant fear of gooner subterfuge, few of these bonds are lasting or genuine. In this state of heightened anxiety, NoFappers find themselves in a Phildickian nightmare, seeing perverts and infiltrators everywhere, unable to discern whether their peers’ advice is sincere or designed to ensnare them in another relapse. Their encyclopedic knowledge of the fetish landscape, intended as a defense mechanism, ironically makes them more likely to flip polarity and binge out. If my direct messages on Twitter are any indication, they crave the orgasmic release of certainty so deeply that they actively seek out gooning accounts to ‘corrupt’ them and end their suffering. And so r/NoFap becomes the top of the sales funnel for gooning.
This outcome was easily predictable from the incentive structure of anti-masturbation communities, which are fundamentally cursed by evaporative cooling. r/NoFap is an intentional community—if a member follows the program and succeeds in regulating their libido, then they no longer need the subreddit and will probably leave. After a few iterations, the community mostly consists of people who stuck around because they are really bad at controlling their porn consumption. Alcoholics Anonymous and similar mutual aid groups mitigate these selection effects with close in-person relationships and by establishing permanent organizational structures, but r/NoFap has neither of these. Account names on the subreddit have the lifespan of fruit flies, coming and going after every relapse, making serious governance impossible. r/NoFap was always doomed to fail at achieving its stated goals, and becoming a human buffet for corruption fetishists is actually a positive outcome compared to the alternatives, as incels and some elements of the movement have demonstrated.
There is, however, one arena in which NoFappers are out-competing their gooner counterparts—posting banger memes about the banal realities of heavy porn consumption.
Like, hey man, you said it. Jerk off. ✨