Hey, thanks for reading and pointing out these fascinating tidbits. I think we can chalk it up to not trusting what people on the internet say, willy-nilly. People have a vested interest in monetizing the things they say online, or, at the very least, a lot of people are online simply for attention, and they’re willing to say anything to get what they need.
I’d imagine this movement is also a right-wing-adjacent movement, like Fight the New Drug and other anti-porn movements. They’re disguised as secular organizations, but their constituent members are deeply religious and fanatical right-wing.
Not to get too political about it, but the point is to push a political agenda without doing so under the banner of politics. A lot of anti-science movements do this.
The anti-science strain at current is robust, and these movements are now starting to merge. Let me guess: the NOFAP movement consists mostly of young, conflicted men, with typically conservative views, often religious, who worship the ground Jordan Peterson walks on.
How do I know?
I’ve covered pornography “addiction” more in-depth, though since then Oxford released a recent paper that says, yeah, after reviewing all the literature, porn and sex don’t meet the criteria for addiction.
The greatest predictor of self-reporting for “porn addiction” is conservative sexual views. Most of the people who claim to be addicted to porn are Evangelicals, Mormons, and even some non-religious people who’ve adopted very puritanical secular beliefs about sex. Those beliefs are growing, ironically, thanks to the anti-porn messaging put out there.
It’s a vicious cycle: make people feel shame about sex, then they start to feel guilty about sex, then they question whether their sexuality is a problem, then boom, they have a problem. This is the often stated (in their own literature) goal of these religious organizations. The quest is moral and far-reaching at that.
It’s especially important because “too much” and “too little” sex is a normative judgment. And how much of “porn addiction” is truly because of the porn or is it just that these people, usually men, make really bad decisions in life generally?
Porn is also an easy scapegoat.
“I swear! It’s not me! It’s those damn porn companies! I’m hooked! I need sympathy, not a lecture!”
Now to dive into NOFAP, but Benjamin Davis already covered it, comically.
