By David Futrelle
Andrew Torba, who runs the Nazi-friendly “free speech” site Gab, is not exactly a big fan of porn. He banned porn from his platform back in July and regularly inveighs against “coomers” — chanspeak for porn addicts — on his much larger competitor Twitter.
But now he’s taking his anti-porn crusade to a new level. In a series of tweets over the past few days he called for a “cultural revolution against porn” and “unity against lust” as well as stringent new governmental restrictions on porn sites.
He threw in a little antisemitism to sweeten the deal:
He also hopes that all the semen conserved by penis-havers who give up porn could be repurposed to produce more white — sorry, Western — babies
Torba clearly thinks that jumping on board the NoFap(TM) train will bring his platform more traffic, and has said as much in a number of tweets, boasting that Gab has picked up more than 100,000 new users since the porn ban in July — including 4000 over the weekend.
Of course, there’s no way of knowing how much of this has anything to do with Torba’s stance on porn. And the initial social media reaction to Torba’s newly expanded anti-porn crusade has been, well, just a teensy bit negative amongst those who otherwise might be some of Gab’s biggest defenders.
He’s also lost the support of some far-right YouTubers, among them the frequently shirtless Styxhexenhammer666 and video game ranter The Quaterting, who has removed himself from Gab.
Still, Torba has his defenders.
So it’s entirely possible that Torba’s escalated antiporn crusade could work to his benefit, garnering Gab many thousands of new users from NoFap world even as it alienates some fans and potential fans, and helps to fuel a cultural civil war between trad-right puritans and what game developer Rami Baker calls “The Anime Tiddie Right.”
As far as I’m concerned, anything that gets these idiots mad at each other is a blessing. So you go, Gab.
PS: That dog in the pic above really is something of a porn addict — and here’s the proof:
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@danielrigal
They figure it is balanced by “Strength Through Goy.”
From 1984:
@lainy: I think the current research on the subject is tending to conclude that “porn addiction” isn’t an addiction per se but a form of self-medication for other underlying issues.
Though I’m not sure it is entirely settled.
@Lainy
That is great to hear, although sadly, the stance of the Vatican and other Catholic institutions are still firm – I remember at least in my teen years seeing a pamphlet in Polish that was against pornography, in a Catholic church located near the heart of a progressive town I live in.
I feel vaguely like that some Catholics, specifically younger ones born from at least the 90s, may be more tolerant of LGBT individuals, but I am still doubtful regarding their stances regarding abortion and extramarital sex. I don’t know many, if any people, especially of my own age and race offline who has a sexually active life even if it involves only themselves, and their beliefs regarding abortion and gender.
I have been more and more involved with one or two LGBT-friendly churches, although I’d imagine it’s uncouth for me to try and get involved with people’s sex lives there, whether they are engaged with it or not. Many attendees of this church I’ve seen so far in the evening services are white so it does make me feel a little bit hopeless in that regard – thankfully they are a progressive church that tries to fight racism.
I am someone who has in the past wished I were white on a few occasions, because in my experience, I’ve pretty much seen only white people who are socially liberal, and I would feel free to be “degenerate” from being white. This is where my concern comes from in an earlier comment. It may also make me less easily exploited from a pyramid scheme my parents are involved with that targets one race, which is a pertinent issue for me that’s unrelated to the thread topic.
CN: Discussion of partner violence and murder methodology
The whole guns and knives protecting families assertion is just so incredibly wrong.
3 women a day are murdered by current and former partners.
I don’t have statistics on the methodology in front of me, but I have to imagine a lot of those murders involve shooting or stabbing as those are two of the easier methods.
Not to mention all the numerous times women survive being shot or stabbed by a partner.
I’d be much more unsettled by a weapon stash than a porn stash. Unless the porn was all rape or snuff.
@Lainy
To my knowledge such a thing as “severe porn addiction” would be better classified as an impulse control disorder, much like pyromania and compulsive gambling. There’s no mechanism for tolerance (more and more is needed for the same initial effect- if anything the research suggests the opposite happens) or withdrawal (deprivation has severe physiological and psychological effects) involved, and those are the key parts of any addiction as psychology understands it.
@Nagalfar
That’s what I mean, the “addiction” is just subjective feelings of guilt over what would be just a perfectly normal sex drive.
@WWTH
I read somewhere (I forget the source) that if you own a gun, it is twice as likely that someone will use it against you than that you will use it in self defense. Then there’s how the presence of a gun increases suicide rates (which MRAs complain about endlessly but glorify).
Guns will not protect your family. They are far more likely to destroy it, whether by your hand or someone else’s.
@Anonymous
I recall reading a case study of an adolescent male in a conservative Catholic family (note: this is not an attack on all Catholics, it is merely a story of one family) who said he was addicted to masturbation because he did it once a week. Like you said, that is guilt, not an addiction in the formal sense.
I’ve had something that felt like video game addiction, but it was really a coping strategy. I was avoiding other things in my life, and I was using video games to use up the time that would otherwise be available for the things I was avoiding. Also, if I stopped myself from playing, my mind would go to all sorts of anxious thoughts, and I craved distraction from those thoughts.
The reason I think it wasn’t an addiction is that I could fairly easily divert it into other distractions, such as Netflix binges.
@Amtep
That happened to me once with comedy. I kept watching all these clips of SNL and other comedy shows on YouTube to waste time. In reality, I was coping with more severe than usual seasonal depression and I was using it as a distraction, like what you described.
@Kevin:
Class privilege alert. I’ve yet to see any “age verification” system that didn’t require using a credit card. The only alternative I can envision would require instead government-issued ID, and then all your viewing habits could be tracked. So I don’t see any practical way to enforce age verification without either eliminating free and freemium offerings, leaving only pay, or else completely obliterating privacy in an area where people tend to want extra privacy.
It’s worse than that, of course, as it would also require geoblocking web censorship to deny access by citizens in your country to sites hosted in every country that didn’t enforce age verification. And blocking Tor and Bittorrent. And …
Ultimately it would either leak like a sieve or balkanize the net while also adding even more to our surveillance woes. And who’d pay for all of this? Most likely the viewers, through some sort of sex tax.
No thanks. I like my internet with still some of its original free and uncommercialized niches intact, rather than every last byte of it locked down, surveilled, and paywalled …
@Surplus
What else do you suggest? I too want an internet free of commercialized BS, but what Kevin is trying to get at here is to prevent access to porn for some people.
The way age verification was envisioned in the UK (I’m not sure to what extent it’s been implemented) was that you could buy an age-certification token in convenience stores, similar to how you can buy prepay SIMs or Google Play credits.
The store would check your age but wouldn’t (in theory) keep any record of whose ID was used to buy which token.
I have no idea how they’d stop people from reselling their tokens to minors, though.
That’s literally what addiction is. That said, ‘porn addiction’ is BS.
Yeeeesh, they really think “coomers” will catch on. YouTuber Gwen_No_Fear documented a Paul Joseph Watson video where he repeated the word over and over again in the cringiest possible fashion. Like Gwen said, the sexual neuroses of PJW could be expanded into a case study all its own.
Just to follow-on from what WWTH, Anonymous and Naglfar have mentioned, the shame component isn’t one I quite understand outside of a religious framework. Shame seems to be the only rationale I have for why of all the reasons for their perceptions of failure they zero in on sexual imagery. Just speaking for myself, I know my vices. I know what keeps me from the things I really want to do, and the half-hour I spend a day with adult material ranks pretty low on the list of obstacles. Higher on my list is “work” (the big one) and “video games” (a close second). With a generous dollop of imposter syndrome.
Obviously, these guys believe that their contentment with adult material precludes their ability to obtain the “nuclear family” that our various societies have indicated is the “norm.” As opposed to, say, the price of housing. Or food. The costs are what’s keeping the precious “Western” birth rates low, not the occasional stroking habit.
@Katamount
Is there a non-cringey way to say it? It’s cringey by nature.
My biggest is wasting time on the internet. I fall down rabbit holes on Wikipedia or other sites and a few hours later have dozens of tabs open of random crap I don’t care about.
My biggest waste of time on the internet is probably this blog. And I don’t mean that in a bad way at all, I love this blog. There are just so many articles I wasn’t around for when they first came out that I’ll end up laying in bed when I should be sleeping reading them on my phone. And then reading the comments because of course. Next thing I know several hours go by.
Also @Naglfar
Just to make sure you know, this did not come out as attacking Catholics at all. Like I said above, all different types of Catholics because Catholics are people. I just wanted to ease any anxiety you might have with that.
@personalpest
Or until the kid, having spent too much time on Gab, decides that it’s time to “take action” against the “cultural Marxists” in his cafeteria.
Anyway, just as a purely non-scientific experiment, I looked up the Alexa data for Pornhub and some other porn sites. “No Nut November” seems to have had next to no impact on their traffic, at least if their Alexa rankings are anything to go by. There was a drop-off for many of them in September, but something tells me it’s seasonal (i.e. horny teenagers going back to school and having less time to watch porn). In other words, these guys think they’re a lot more important than they actually are, which is a bunch of dweebs on the internet.
For me, it would depend on what kind of gun/knife stash it is before I decide it’s a dealbreaker. Like, if the other person likes to collect historical firearms and knives from the last three centuries, and likes to keep them in good working order for fun, that would be one thing. Or if they like target shooting (skeets and clay pigeons and things like that), that would also be a good reason to keep a stash around.
But if they’re keeping a stash around to fend off hoards of thieves and thugs, or preparing for doomsday (that’s always just around the corner), then that miiight be a sign to get out of there. Because that’s a dangerous reason to horde guns in your house, at least in my opinion. YMMV.
@Lainy
The exact same thing happens to me. There’s even more for me to read because I joined relatively recently (July of 2019). I click on some of the random articles in the sidebar, then all the other articles linked there, and soon I have tons of tabs open of articles.
@Kevin R.
A lot of these people’s plans are contingent on people actually caring about them. MGTOW’s plan, for example, is based on the idea that anyone else gives a fuck. Or the idea that somehow these men “going their own way” (by which I mean moaning about women on the internet) will cause women to immediately change course and/or society will collapse. I don’t think either of those will happen. Similarly, No Nut November probably has little to no effect on the porn industry.
Good to know the porn stars aren’t starving :).
Well, Mustache Movember barely had an impact on an average cis-man’s face-fur, and it’s at least twice as catchy as “no nut November.”
And facial hair grooming can be cool and interesting. Masturbation habits are just… who would even want to know about them who isn’t already an intimate partner?
However this scuffle between the anime-fixated Right and the puritanical Right plays out, I think it’s safe to say, this is good for Bitcoin.
Er, I mean – this is good for the Left, that they spend their time on infighting.
Tatsuya Ishida, the SWERF ‘n’ TERF artist behind Sinfest, has found a home at Spinster.
I was recently involved in a lengthy, girthy Reddit thread about the deadly peril of online p0rn. The man who posted it was lamenting how he can no longer ‘perform’ sexually due to his p0rn addiction. He argued that this was a totally real problem, dudes and gals, and why why WHY is nobody talking about it?! There were a number of commenters supporting him and recommending Fight the New Drug, NoFap, the semen retention cults, and other promotes of erotic constipation.
Of course, he insisted that he’s a leftist atheist who doesn’t have a problem with masturbation, he just wants to save other men from his dreadful fate. What a noble guy.
@ Surplus
I thought I’d already mocked the sex tax concept in my post.
I acknowledge the difficulties you raise, and even that universal age verification may not be practical. Even the Great Firewall of China may be more porous than the Chinese authorities are willing to admit.
I didn’t come to my position on protection of minors on the Internet through pearl – clutching either though, but via lived experience.
While Kevinsson was still a minor, he was one of several who were sent inappropriate social media communications by one of their former teachers, as a result of which, out of the blue, we were on the receiving end of a pants – wettingly alarming visit from a copper and a social worker.
That kind of event can definitely be something that influences personal opinion.
@Robert
Doesn’t surprise me. The whole point of Spinster seems to be as a home for TERFs who got banned from Twitter or had to turn down their hate to avoid getting banned.
I can see a couple possible causes for this. One is desensitization by repeated masturbation aka the “death grip syndrome,” the other is unrealistic standards (from watching too much porn he can only get it up for people with impossible proportions or doing unusual acts). Either way, that’s not necessarily the fault of porn and does not make porn evil.
Fight the New Drug AFAICT is a crypto-Mormon recruiting program with pseudoscience not that different from semen retention, just with a more publicly accessible façade.
Sounds more like someone with some issues around his penis. Or just someone who really wants to talk about his penis problems.
@Kevin
Of course it is. For crying out loud, the Soviet Union couldn’t manage the equivalent, and back then stuff had to be passed around on bootleg cassettes or home-pressed vinyl records. The idea that such a thing could be seriously maintained when everyone’s walking about with a pocket computer stuffed with communications gear is absurd. I mean, yes, there’s lits of censorship, but people who actively want to know the score certainly can.
Which has got what to do with online age verification, prithee? That’s like saying that preadults ought not be allowed into the mall to hang out with their friends, as we did in the olden days, because some creeper once approached someone there. Or indeed, on like suggesting that women ought not to go out at night, lest they should be attacked.