By David Futrelle
The NoFap movement has always been home to a certain amount of mystical woo.
Browsing through the NoFap subreddit — where self-described “fapstronauts” share advice and inspiration to help one another refrain from wanking it on the regular — you’ll find people not only touting the supposed health benefits of Not Fapping but also talking about the almost magical power of “semen retention,” said to transform ordinary wankers into sexy, irresistible geniuses.
But this sort of talk is pretty tame indeed compared to what goes on in the NoFapChristians subreddit, where the battle against wanking is seen as a part of the larger fight against Satan himself, and where talk about the alleged “demonic” power is often meant quite literally.
When we masturbate, a Christian fapstronaut called wsba910am tells us, “we are all having sex with demons.” And in his mind this is no mere metaphor.
It feels like a simple urge. It feels like some kind of harmless feeling. Then it takes control, and we’re an obedient slave to it. Think of the last time you masturbated but didn’t have porn. Heard any voices that weren’t there, like a woman moaning?
Er, what? Sometimes I hear my neighbors having sex. But I definitely haven’t heard any sex ghosts. Are you sure you aren’t just having phone sex, dude?
Felt something against your heart or your body that aroused you? A pull?
A pull? That might just be your own hand, dude.
What about when you watch porn? It’s a 2-dimensional screen. So, why are you turned on by it? Why do you think you’re having sex with this woman, while you’re really just touching yourself? Is it really fantasy, or is it a reality that we just choose to ignore?
I’m going to go with “fantasy,” but that’s not the answer wsba910am is looking for.
I mean, we’re all Christian. We all at least pretend that there’s a spooky devil out there trying to get us. But what if it’s really true? … Think about it: When you’re masturbating, is it really your highest and most aware/thoughtful self playing with your hand down there? Or is your brain turned off in a sense, and it’s something else that’s taken over?
Your brain is definitely working. Researchers have literally run fMRIs on people as they masturbate and tracked the parts of the brain that light up.
But again, that’s not what wsba910am wants you to think.
These are evil spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, incubi and succubi that prey on our desires for connection and validated sexuality, and they entice us through an addiction to cheap pleasures that we can get without having to risk any hurt by connecting to a real person.
Incubus Succubus? That’s one of my all-time favorite songs!
You are letting a spiritual demonic whore fornicate with you.
And she shall be known as “Rosy Palm and her five sisters!”
The enemy and his agents (sometimes teachers, parents, relatives, peers, exes, etc.) will hurt you and blame God as the evil one, but these are lies. All you have to do is think. Did Satan make the penis?
Well, to be fair, he might have made this one. (NSFW link, obviously.)
God is on our side. Trust him.
It’s the enemy who is trying to sleep with you and trick you into thinking that it’s all you. … wake up.
tl:dr: Don’t wank yourself into hell.
In a follow-up comment, wsba910am offers some more thoughts on the evil spirits that keep putting the moves on him while he tries to get to sleep.
I’ve been for 5 years afraid of … admitting there’s anything demonic in my life. But the effects are obvious, both for good and evil. When we have sex with these imaginary women, we are letting bad spirits f**k us.
Uh oh.
Is there a possibility that the voice you hear in your head, that the feelings that wash over you when you are being remotely aroused (i.e. not with a woman, or not even sometimes near a computer), that this is a spirit that is trying to sleep with you? … What if … this temptation was a pull from demonic sources?
Damn, dude, how fucking horny are you anyway?
It dawned on me the other night while I was lying down that there was something ‘on’ me. … what if there was some spirit that would try to sleep with me when I was trying to fall asleep? I mean, it’s not like a person who crawls into bed with you. It’s not that obvious. But there is still something there, that washes over me, that overtakes common sense and reality – the reality that it’s just me in my bed and not very romantic.
Dude, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be popping boners quite so frequently if you maybe … masturbated once in a while?
Just playing devil’s advocate here.
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“Heard any voices that weren’t there, like a woman moaning?”
…anyone else slightly aroused by the idea of succubuses descending upon you as you masturbate?
Unlike sexbots and gym socks, succubi don’t need to be cleaned afterwards. Not really seeing the downside here.
…oh, the feeling of violation and the lack of consent? I thought rape didn’t exist as far as these guys are concerned.
“Hearing voices that aren’t there” – that probably has more to do with falling asleep than masturbating. You don’t need a mystical explanation. The brain is starting to go into sleep-mode, which can cause auditory hallucinations.
Sure I’ve heard voices in my head when I masturbate. We call that “imagination.”
Do yours complain the floor needs a good vacuum too?
THIS ELECTRICAL BOX OF WITCHCRAFT, HOW DOTH IT FUNCTION?
Gender-inclusive, how considerate!
Lastly, I’m gonna have to agree with everyone else; the silly notion that arousal/masturbation magically summons a demoness to pleasure you is…
…hawt.
I wonder how much his mind would explode if someone reminded him that incubi and succubi are genderfluid spermjacking vectors? I.e., a succubus goes and gets a guy off, then turns into an incubus to go impregnate a woman with the guy’s load.
This is straight out of medieval monks and theologians finding reasons why they had “nocturnal emissions.” That’s the whole reason they came up with the idea of the succubus in the first place — they had to reckon with how they could avoid sex that violated natural law and their vows of chastity (i.e., anything that wasn’t PIV procreative sex within marriage) and explain a natural phenomenon that no amount of prayer or willpower could prevent. When left to their own devices and within an echo chamber that sees the body as inherently given to sinful behaviour, despite that being a gnostic heresy in the first place but who’s counting, Christians often create demonic scapegoats to explain away the body and natural human biology. It’s just how the history of theology has played out over the centuries.
Naturally, being a Jew who mentioned this in a class full of Catholic seminarians and monks in a PhD class on theology went over like a lead balloon. Biology isn’t necessarily a strong point of more conservative Catholic theology either, sadly.
It could’ve been worse. One of them could’ve heard the apocryphal story about how male converts to Judaism who’ve masturbated at any time beforehand* have their sperm retroactively jacked by Lilith and become instant father(s) to a horde of demon ghost babies. [citation desperately needed]
(* I didn’t do this on purpose, but I’m not going to change it either.)
@Alex
I forget the name now, but wasn’t there at least one saint who apparently autocastrated after prolonged prayer? Clearly anyone who hasn’t managed that just doesn’t really want it enough.
Well, if they really believed that they’d have no problem in fixing the sinful bits, would they? As some guy once said,
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Let those members perish, christian nofappers.
Hurr hurr… sorry.
…So that scene* in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a succubus encounter?
*The one that irrevocably ruined–or enriched! –“Moving in Stereo” for a generation.
Do the various mentions of “Satan” in the Old Testament (including, notably, in Job) not count?
Now, if you had said “Hell” instead of “the devil”, I’d be more inclined to agree.
@Ariblester:
There’s a case to be made that the Old Testament “Satan” is not the New Testament one, or really much of a devil at all (at least, not any more of one than the OT God is).
The one in Job is probably properly lowercase “satan”, a word meaning “prosecutor”: assigned by God to test Job’s faith. Think the production quality tester at the factory here, since they had that sort of proprietarian view of people’s relationship to God in those times. (The Bronze Age also famously gave us “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport”. The OT God was no better than the Greek pantheon in that regard, not only yanking Job arbitrarily out of his life for testing as one would a widget on an assembly line, but doing that whole flood thing, not to mention siding with one group of humans against others to obliterate the latter if they got in the former’s way. Imagine Star Trek: Voyager, except that Q is a lot nastier and every alien, from the Kazon to the Borg to the Hirogen, the Krenim, and the Devore who get in Voyager’s way get finger-snapped out of existence or suffer some horrid natural disaster, or their shields just stop working and Voyager gets them with a torpedo or two. And when they get to Earth Q wipes out the population there and cedes the planet to just Voyager’s crew, and their eventual descendants. That’s the OT’s God’s morality. Un-coincidentally, it’s also the morality of every Bronze Age conqueror, such as Alexander the Great. Of course the OT God claims justification from having created humans to begin with; just as every abusive parent claims justification for beating their own children.)
Furthermore, there’s really nothing in the OT that establishes identity among a) the Satan in Job, b) the snake in Eden, and c) the fallen angel Lucifer; or even any two of those three. They seem to have been combined into one entity by later thinkers than the OT’s authors.
As for Hell, AFAIK the closest thing in old Judaism is Sheol, a shadowy realm for the dead. All the dead go there, good or evil, and have a shadowy half-existence. In this it is very much like early versions of the Greek Hades and some early versions of the ancient Egyptian afterlife Duat, as well as the Norse’s Niflheimr, where however only those who died of natural causes went. Most likely all of these are derived from a Sheol-like afterlife in the cultural beliefs of the proto-Indo-European people ten thousand years ago, especially since there are similar realms in early Hindu mythology (later they got a lot more elaborate). All of those locations seem also to have had an associated goddess: Hel, Isis, Ereshkigal, Kali … the ancient Canaanites made theirs male, Shalim, presumably demoted from “god” to “angel” when monotheism debuted. Some of these were associated with Venus in its role as the evening star — and bringing things full circle, Venus as the morning star is associated with Lucifer.
@ Pie
There’s a story told by John Cassian, a 5th century monk and ascetic, of a hermit he encountered in Egypt who was castrated by an angel, but it’s relayed with a lot of ambivalence. Because of the Roman origins of Christianity, castration was seen as participation in Roman mystery cults, like the gallae that served Cybele, or as moving into the space occupied by eunuchs, which is complex enough to require volumes to discuss adequately. I believe Origen castrated himself, but that’s downplayed and seen as a bad approach to a worse problem of lust. Since most of the attitudes about sex and the body were handed down by the Church Fathers who were of the patrician class of Roman society — Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, etc — castration was just Not Done, and by the 12th century, self-castration was seen as diabolical rather than something dodgy. Self-restraint was preferable to physical means. It’s really complex, and I honestly don’t think most Christians today understand where the attitudes towards masturbation and self-control over the body really come from within the wider theology of the body that moves through churches that draw from the Western Church Fathers. (What independent Protestant churches outside a given tradition do is even harder to pin down, as they rarely have much theology to speak of, let alone authoritative bodies to hand it down, so I’m really talking about high/higher church traditions in the West — Catholic, Episcopalian/Anglican, Lutheran, etc, as opposed to low church Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc.)
That’s a whole novel to say yes, that’s a story that floats around, but the wider body of theological writings around it really see castration as a big no-no, and you ought to pray instead of whack your junk off to deal with those pesky erotic dreams. Repression at its best.
@Alex:
Then there’s the story about how a succubus can take the seed from a man, pass it to an incubus, and then the incubus uses it to impregnate a woman. Because demons can’t actually create life.
And that’s how the young woman who stayed in the rectory got pregnant, Your Honor.
And to think, one of my books got a one-star review criticizing me for clearly not knowing what a succubus REALLY was 😀
@Surplus to Requirements
Fair enough, but I feel that the notion that The Devil was invented entirely by early Christians, as @Pie supposes, sounds too tidy (think burning-of-the-Library-of-Alexandria tidy) to be true.
And Lucifer is entirely fan-fiction derived from a flagrant misreading of a passage in Isaiah that refers to an actual historical figure.
@Shadowplay
If I might get on my soapbox a minute, frankly, it is inherently funny. It’s actually a rather ridiculous ritual that we engage in, which is why I think Oglaf resonates so much, because it does take the piss out of all of the overdone pageantry surrounding it.
And it’s that pageantry that all of these Red Pilled dipshits have swallowed. Despite their claims of having their minds “freed” from the domination of women, they still cling to all of the same metrics and social norms that define our interactions. They’ve built entire an entire skeezy subculture trying to “game” this system they think they’ve figured out and they’d never countenance anybody telling them it’s all inherently ridiculous.
You see it in any of the “comedy” these CHUDs do. I once saw a clip that the Majority Report played of Gavin McInnes on stage with all of his Pwoud Boy dipshits behind him and his routine was a cringfest of transphobic jokes. They weren’t even really jokes, just bewilderment that people could find transwomen attractive; his Proud Boys actually started giving each other confused looks when Gavin started to describe sex with a transwoman in unusually specific detail. They’re so heavily invested in their own phobias and grievances that they can’t for a second deconstruct anything.
That’s one of the things I like about the furry fandom. We’re pretty good at finding the humour in our own subculture. You kinda gotta be.
Just as an aside, all of these sexually-insecure fundamentalists trying to convince other people that they’re doing the work of Satan just for stroking one out, I’d be tempted to send them a Raulo Cacares comic (DO NOT GOOGLE) just to see how they react.
Just any issue of his Elizabeth Bathory series (REPEAT: DO NOT GOOGLE).
What comes out…is your essence….
@Katamount:
That sounds about right. They think they’re playing the system, that nobody’s telling them what to do, and they really don’t want to be told that they’re still playing by the system’s rules while others are actually trying to change the system.
Unfortunately the furry fandom still has its share of troglodytes. I’ve run into Gamergater furries before. Makes you wonder about the level of double-think required, though I suppose it’s easy to hold mutually contradictory ideas in your head when you don’t actually examine either of them.
@ Jenora and Katamount: The far right has tried to infiltrate the furry fandom because it’s a growing subculture that attracts a lot of insecure youths who are searching for guidance, friendship and a place to belong. Fortunately, most “altfurries” have been kicked out of the fandom because nobody wants them around. “Nazi Furs Fuck Off” decorations have also been distributed at some furry conventions. There’s some excellent coverage at dogpatch.press for anyone who’s interested.
@ everyone: So I did some digging on wsba910am’s username. Just as I suspected, it’s a reference to a radio station that specializes in right-wing talk. This particular station is in York, Pennsylvania, and its schedule includes Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Michael Savage. (The website is here if anyone cares.) So our sex demon fetishist is one of the millions who have ingested a steady diet of bullshit from the right-wing media behemoth. I pity them a little, even though they’ve done a lot of damage to, well, everything.
I mentioned on here before about a religious tantric sex advocate who I met on a conspiracy forum. He actually believed that all life comes from the Kundalini serpent, and life begins at orgasm. He had been practicing yoga to withhold orgasm because he thought that orgasming from mastrbation created ghost babies or disembodied souls. I guess he’s not alone in this belief.
Another weird thing I heard once, which I think came from Glenn Beck, but I might have remembered that wrong, was that women should pray for the souls of their periods because it’s a baby they didn’t have. :/
I have been deeply furry lately because I have spent this Christmas cosplaying as the Grinch. I might wear it to a furry con later this summer, but I need a sign that reads “a Grinch is for life, not just for Christmas!”
@personalpest:
Oh, I know, I still remember the collapse of the Rocky Mountain Fur Con in a mess of nazis, sovereign citizen malarkey, and some of the worst PR messaging from a furry con ever (and speaking as someone who still has my ConFurence T-shirt from 1992, that’s a bit of a target-rich environment).
Over the holidays, my family was striking conversation on the meanings some obscure words, such as the medical term hirsutism (also used in Finnish), and my sister brought up the related English word “hirsute”.
Then my mind went randomly “hirsute + fursuit > ‘hirsuit'”