By David Futrelle
We’ve watched as the more misogynistic offshoot of the Men’s Rights movements known as MGTOW has gotten more Nazified over the last several years — more friendly to alt-right memes, more open to Nazi ideology. Given that the Men Going Their Own Way is rooted in the hatred of women, it’s not surprising to see so many MGTOWs open to other forms of hate; hate often comes in clusters.
The same thing seems to be happening to the more extreme offshoot of the NoFap movement known as Semen Retention. There’s nothing inherently hateful about giving up porn and masturbation, but many of those who’ve embraced the movement have brought with them a deep suspicion of women and of anyone else who might want to steal their precious bodily fluids.
And so the Semen Retention movement is filled with talk of dark conspiracies — particularly involving the alleged dark motives of those the more hardcore Retainers see as trying to enslave them with porn and rob them of their male energy. Picking up on a talking point widespread among internet Nazis, many Semen retainers end up pointing their fingers at the supposed evil masterminds of the porn industry — the Jews. They’ve also accepted another weird and related antisemitic trope: the idea that Jewish men don’t masturbate — at all.
The basic outline of the “theory is that
- Semen Retention makes men men mentally stronger
- Jewish men don’t masturbate
- Jewish men run the porn industry
- Therefore porn is part of a massive Jewish conspiracy to weaken non-Jewish men and TAKE OVER THE WORLD (which they’ve already taken over)
The idea that Jews don’t masturbate is, I admit, something of a surprise to me. I understand that “spilling your seed” is not exactly encouraged in Jewish tradition (it’s all rather complicated) but I’ve also read Portnoy’s Complaint. Still, the absurd notion that most or all of Jewish men don’t masturbate seems to be accepted as an article of faith by a significant portion of the Retainer community. Some even claim to have been let in on this alleged secret by alleged Jewish friends:
“Jews don’t fap at all,” wrote a Retainer called Spiritual-Monk.
Many of my jew friends stayed away from porn and sexual stuff. And girls come to them like magnet
“I had a jew friend in the equiviliant to high-school in my country,” wrote another r/SemenRetention commenter.
He was pretty ugly tbh, but a lot of girls liked to talk to him. … I remember him asking me at the end of the last year how much I jerk off. I said ”Maybe three times a week (While it was closer to 9-10 back then)”. And he said that he never jerks off, ever. He never really gave a direct answer to why.
But plenty of Retainers think they know why: to dominate the other “male races.” According to one NoFap conspiracy theorist,
the only real difference between Jewish men and all other men is that they don’t masturbate. Of course many do, hence why not all Jews are successful. But with their religious beliefs being anti-masturbation, it encourages a greater proportion of Jewish men to follow this rule. Could this be why Jewish men are walking over all other male races right now?
A commenter in the Semen Retention subreddit takes this conspiracy theory a little farther:
Men who ejaculate daily and spill their vital fluid on a regular basis are inferior to women yet those who practice semen retention demonstrate better mental performance, which means they are superior to both weak men and women. They reach faster brains compared to constantly mediocre female brain! Doesn’t that prove that men are inherently superior.
Judging from the “logic” here, no.
The only way for women to win is corrupt male psychology. Do you see the conspiracy? You are slowly and steadily being made to believe that you are inferior by toxic feminism which benefits Jews who don’t masturbate most. I am not an Anti-Semitic but can you see the indirect love triangle?
A commenter called AfricanSocialist was even blunter:
jews want us to fap to weaken men, Zionist jews. not the normal ones
And so, the logic goes, Jews have built up and taken over the porn industry in order to “weaken men” by inspiring them to jerk off.
“Jewish peeps run almost the entire porn industry in the US,” wrote Plz_Save_Us_Trump_2
Maybe not all Jews are involved, but powerful ones push the filth out to the masses, and to what end do you think?
Another insinuated the same thing:
When you figure out who produces 97% of the porn in the world you’ll start to understand not only this war on men but our broken financial system, open borders, endless wars in the Middle East et all
Still another in the same thread begged his “peeps” to speak openly of their favorite enemy:
Name the jew, it’s simple. It’s the (((Kabbal))) and people are waking up.
“I want to share a coincidence,” wrote another.
Jews don’t masturbate but they own all the largest pornographic sites and media.
There are some in the Semen Retention, to be sure, who oppose this blatant antisemitism. But they antisemites get attention and, often, upvotes, and their conspiracy theories have become omnipresent in places like the Semen Retention subreddit, alongside autodidactic takes on eastern philosophy and the regular discussions on the sudden attraction all women allegedly feel for men full of their own sperm.
The semen retention subreddit isn’t just a somewhat comical sideshow to the manosphere circus; it’s turned into quite an ugly and hateful place. And I imagine it will only get worse over time, because in our current timeline how could it not?
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I seem to recall a certain Harvey Weinstein accumulating quite a lot of power in a madia industry and being infamous for wanking it in front of his victims. Something doesn’t add up here.
@Alan, from that article:
H-how does one insert a cotton bud “rather sexually”? I’m really out of the loop on this whole sex thing.
I must admit, that example bothers me a bit, though I’m sure it shouldn’t. Ear-cleaning crops up in a lot of ASMR videos. It’s never appealed to me. But as someone who finds ASMR pleasurable but non-sexual, it’s kind of jarring to see a common ASMR scenario linked to porn.
I can’t. I just can’t.
The ability to spew out more muddled conspiracy woo per minute is…not actually a good thing. SR hasn’t made them any smarter, as far as I can tell. It only makes them more convinced of their superiority.
Is this the Dunning-Splooger effect?
@ Katamount;
Fixed that for ya…
re: xians fappitude, I recall a teaching in my early mega-fundy Nazerine church that a boy should rise and dress IMMEDIATELY upon waking, lest he “touch himself improperly”….
Welp, Warren dropped out.
Prepare for Bernie Bro gloating, I guess. ?
Of course Warren has dropped out. This election has to be one doddering old molester vs. an even worse doddering old molester.
It’s so exhausting living in a world that hates women this much. I’m just. So. Tired.
@Cindy
Sigh. I’m sad she dropped out, and it just adds insult to injury how there will be a manyfold increase in every Bernie Bro insulting me and in the same breath demanding that I vote for their candidate. I will vote for whoever gets the nomination, but the Bros certainly don’t help Bernie’s appearance in my eyes.
RE: Warren
If there’s critical issues that Warren supported that you care about, keep working on them. Back the candidate that fits that issue set. Phone bank. Volunteer. Knock doors. Chop wood, carry water, as Fran Langum says on her podcast.
Wonkette: An Elegy for Elizabeth Warren
…Aaaannd they went there because of course they did. Pretty sure there are Jews in porn for the same prosaic non-conspiracy reasons there are so many Jews in other media (i.e. TL;DR there was demand but nobody else wanted to provide supply so the decided “why not us?”). Pretty sure plenty if not most Jewish men masturbate with a frequency comparable to men of other groups.
Also, given that Zionism can, depending on person, go from the quite reasonable “Israel has a right to exist but I’m really not sure it’s a good thing to be assholes to everybody around it” to the full-fledged extreme fascistic “basically the same ideology as Nazis but with different groups of people in each role and different geographic location”, it’s a bit hard to generalize it except as an all-purpose antisemitic dogwhistle.
As for masturbation being looked down on by Judaism, well, AFAIK all mainstream Abrahamic religions (i.e. most denominations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) look down on masturbation as a no-no, albeit it’s not usually enforced very strongly methinks, and if we give credence to some of what they say (tall order I know), many Dharmic religions/philosophies seem to have a similarly dim view of it. So really singling out Judaism when it looks like almost every major world religion has at least some beef against people fapping and/or schlicking is just silly. And/or proof that they’re just trying to fit yet another bigotry into their twisted worldview.
Well, since if those guys told me the sun rises in the east I would get up a bit early and check, I admit to wondering. Are most of the porn sites owned by Jewish people? I mean, it doesn’t really matter, but just out of curiosity, does anyone know?
But then, how would they know?
Never mind.
@Paireon
That’s what I thought, and I know that evangelical Christianity in particular has strong views about it. But of course the conspiracy theorists would never spin a conspiracy about a large primarily right wing group that agrees with them, because it’s much easier to spin yarns about minorities they don’t like.
@otrame
I don’t think so at present. I know in the past there have been several prominent Jewish porn publishers and producers like Al Goldstein (though he wasn’t a religious Jew), one of the first major publishers of hardcore pornography. In the present I don’t think most porn sites are owned by Jews, but I do know that there are a significant number of Jewish porn stars (though again probably not religious).
@ Jarnsaxa;
I spent my entire working life in factories and manufacturing plants — working with anti-intellectual conservative white men. While anecdotes are not evidence, it is clear to me what those men would see in trump, or if they were democrats, in biden. I think a lot of the electorate, and ALL of the power players see this as the last chance to “save” male privilege.
The word “onanism” for masturbation comes from Onan in the Bible, although I read that “spilling his seed” could still mean having sex but finishing, well, outside. The problem was he apparently refused to get his wife Tamar pregnant; she was married to his older brother first but he died and they didn’t have children, and there was a law that her firstborn son would inherit the older brother’s name/title/whatnot instead of Onan’s.
So Onan’s “sin” was probably more like “refusing to reproduce out of spite” than wanking.
Buuuut then you have a lot of sexual restrictions in Moses’ laws* – not to mention Paul’s letters in the Christian Bible – so it’s no surprise that people put them together and went “masturbation = bad.”
*Along with lots of other things about ritual cleanliness; in my experience it’s Christian evangelicals who seem more obsessed with sexual purity and anti-abortion stuff. But I don’t know any Orthodox Jews well – the Jewish people in my family/social circle are Reformed and/or not religious.
(I grew up Presbyterian, which is kinda in between the liberal and conservative sides of Protestant around here, but I went to an evangelical Christian school for a couple of years – I could tell stories about that, but I’m already being too wordy :P)
@Epitome
In my experience most Jews don’t really talk about it much, but outside of the Orthodox I don’t see many people stressing about masturbation. At least, not stressing over it enough to mention it.
“If the first premise were true, does he seriously think pornographers don’t ever masturbate?”
There’s a vein of male traditionalism which says that you either sell sex or buy it: if you’re interested in sex, you’re a customer; however, if you’re selling, you’re aloof. This is a view of the world which presupposes an eternal seller’s market. Jews and women, according to this way of thinking, are not interested in sex, which is why they can use eroticism to yank everybody else around by the short hairs. Male Jews naturally are better at this avocation than women of any ethnic background can train themselves to be, because male Jews are male; nevertheless, Jews and women are held to be alike in their immunity to certain physical urges and in their proneness to take advantage of people who aren’t likewise exempt. That’s why no-fapping is the go-to rough-and-ready defense against their predations, as well as a rudimentary form of consumer protection.
In this context it makes excellent sense that of course a pornographer doesn’t masturbate, because he’s selling and not buying. The recreation he peddles is not for himself but for his clients; and what’s more, he’s using it to make them less self-sufficient (or ‘weaker’) than they might otherwise be. (IOW, he has a lot in common with a hooker, and if you think all women are hookers, you can see where this is going.)
I doubt that this has much of anything to do with anyone’s religion, though it seems (to me) to owe something to down-market occultism. The purest example I can think of (as well as the most old-fashioned) of the fable of Jew and the Woman united in their quest to dominate male Christendom by means of its amusements is George DuMaurier’s Trilby, which is the genre classic. One peculiarity of the book is that Svengali and Trilby traffic in a transcendence in which they don’t seem to share. There’s no hint anywhere that Svengali cares much for music as such, and (as DuMaurier often reminds us) Trilby is tone-deaf. What DuMaurier does intimate is that this is the reason for their devastating effect on their audiences; they don’t buy into their own bill of goods and are left unmoved by their own act. It’s their indifference which enables them to perform as brilliantly as they do. What’s more, though DuMaurier calls Svengali a ‘hypnotist’, what Svengali obviously is, is a magician. (As in Doktor Faustus, musician = magician.) I would defy anybody to read Trilby and say that it’s a religious book — it’s a gothic novel and like most Gothics it strips the religious element out and substitutes magic instead. And as in most gothic novels written by men, the magic is never explained away or rationalized, though it is renamed ‘hypnosis’ (whereas in gothic novels written by women the magic is usually disinfected by means of sunlight in the end).
@bekabot
Jewish woman here, can attest that I am interested in sex, as are most Jews and women I’ve met*.
*Obviously not all, some are asexual or just not into sex, but the majority of people in general seem to like sex and/or masturbation.
Well, you know, Naglfar, I’m talking about fiction, not reality (as you might guess, I classify most manospherian notions as fiction).
@bekabot
I know, I was just playing along.
@Bekabot
I love the Gothic genre but am tragically poorly-read in it, and am trying to remedy that this year. I’ve already gotten some of the essential and most famous works like The Castle of Otranto and much-adapted-but-less-read classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. What other works would you recommend as essential?
Vathek, with its Arabian Nights gloss on Gothic lit, is a really enjoyable read.
“What other works would you recommend as essential?”
1. Anything by Poe.
2. Other classic American works like The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (Also, anything by Henry James.) In context, meaning in the American context, these are mainstream stories and novels, and are thought of as such, but as many critics have pointed out, they’re all gothic works too, since the whole of the American literary inheritance is Gothic. Americans in the early 19th century were knocked silly by stories of moldering castles and mysterious strangers, and read them in great quantity. (This may have partly been because of the exoticism of the subject matter — Europe had already become very foreign — but it was certainly also because Americans were still dealing, emotionally, with the sentiments and issues brought up by the Enlightenment, which gothic novels were invented to deal with.) At any rate, the early mass reading (long story short) later affected the authors, both in their understanding of what their public wanted to consume, and in terms of what they themselves wanted to produce.
I’d start there, and then I’d return to the 18th-century British background. (Ontranto.) Then I’d read British Romantic stuff, which is Gothic through and through. (Frankenstein.) Eventually I’d get around to reading the works of the French and British decadence, also heavily Gothed up (like Dracula), after which I’d move on to modernity.
Enjoy. Wish I could still be in your shoes.
@Allandrel – Does Wuthering Heights count? I know it isn’t exactly obscure. Emily Bronte also wrote some intriguing poems about a fantasy land that she made up with her sisters – those have more of a medieval/fantasy vibe.
@Nequam – Vathek was quite a trip! I read it because one of my more frequent tutoring students was doing an essay on it. It’s like the Tower of Babel meets Faust meets Arabian Nights filtered through a Romantic rebel English dude’s mind. Possibly on drugs.
I would…tentatively…recommend it as a weird/scary/funny read. Of course, it’s got a lot of the cliches of Orientalism. My student, being Muslim, was kind of bemused to see the Caliph al-Wathiq dealt with this way. Like, imagine someone took a well-regarded but rather obscure pope and turned him into this voracious, erratic, sometimes ridiculous figure who makes a deal with the devil.
Oh yeah, and the main villain is the guy’s mother, because women are the most corrupt. OF course.
@bekabot – Doktor Faustus is on my to-read list!
@Nequam – I guess I meant the whole no-sex-before-marriage, narrow-definition-of-sexuality thing more generally. When I was young I didn’t really feel any guilt about masturbation (embarrassment, yeah, but everything was embarrassing back then). Didn’t see it as something to fuss about. But I was genuinely angsty as a teen about being bisexual, thinking it was somehow bad (until I was about 17-18) :/
@ Allendrel
I’d also recommend reading Polidori’s ‘The Vampire,’ (not sure of the spelling right now) mainly because it got up Byron’s nose that people thought it was one of his, when, I believe, Byron’s disdain for the work and its author were among the reasons Polidori broke with him.
@Kevin
It’s generally held that Lord Ruthven is based on Byron, and it’s not a terribly flattering portrait.