transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's Flex Path learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

Speaker 2:
[00:15] A warning to listeners, this episode includes an extensive discussion of pornography and masturbation. Have you ever done a month-long challenge?

Speaker 3:
[00:25] I have for a story. It was for journalism, but yes, I have. A couple of years ago, I did a story about the rise of glow-up challenges, like these self-improvement challenges. I did this one called 75 Soft, which is 75 hard, you may have heard of it.

Speaker 2:
[00:41] Right, the strict regimen where you have to follow a diet, exercise twice a day, read a certain amount, and all these other things for 75 days.

Speaker 3:
[00:49] But 75 Soft is just like, just think about moving your body and think about what you put in. It was great. It was fine.

Speaker 2:
[00:58] Oh, that sounds nice, that sounds nice. What about you, Scott? Have you ever done a month long challenge?

Speaker 4:
[01:02] No, not at all. I have absolutely no self-discipline. I'm of that sort of Oscar Wilde persuasion that the best thing about temptation is when you yield to it.

Speaker 2:
[01:13] I love it. You make it sound so beautiful. I fear that I'm living the same way except, instead of sounding very glam, like how you have it, I'm currently surrounded on my desk by stacks of notebooks, where I act like I'm going to, like I fully believe I've like hyped myself into thinking through all these written entries and master to us that I am going to do something for 30 days. And it never happens. I will say that there is one month long challenge that when I heard about it, it had me scratching my head a little. I will spare you the name, but it's where men try not to masturbate for the month of November. Some of you may have heard of this before. And then I realized that some men were turning that one month challenge into entire years of zero masturbation. Because now, there's a much broader discussion among some men about the role of porn and masturbation in their lives. The majority of men consume porn and most use it for masturbation, but two-thirds of men under 25 think porn should be harder to access, according to research from the Survey Center on American Life. Masturbate figures like Andrew Tate and Hamza Ahmed are urging their listeners to stop watching porn or giving tips to help them quit.

Speaker 5:
[02:28] Pornography as a whole is simply just, I think, a tool which is used to ensure that the male populace stays as docile as possible. I mean, how much more docile can you get than a man staring, sitting there looking at a screen, not even want to reproduce for real?

Speaker 6:
[02:41] I'm afraid we're not actually helped by our original caveman desires anymore. The closer you are to that unrestrained version of you, the worse you're going to do in this modern world.

Speaker 2:
[02:52] Some men are cutting it out entirely. They congregate on Reddit pages like r slash porn free or use porn addiction alleviation apps like Quitter and Fortify. In my opinion, it's really not anyone's business whether someone masturbates and watches porn or not. But I do think there's more hidden under some of the public messaging around men's masturbation and porn watching habits that's worth discussing. Like, what do men think watching porn says about them? And is this just, quote, purity culture for boys? To get into that, I am here with Rebecca Jennings, features writer at New York Magazine. Hi, Rebecca.

Speaker 3:
[03:29] Hi.

Speaker 2:
[03:30] And Scott Burnett, assistant professor of African Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, who has published research about men's anti-masturbation trends. Hey, Scott.

Speaker 4:
[03:42] Hi there.

Speaker 2:
[03:47] Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. First, Rebecca, I want to talk to you about this piece you did in New York Magazine where you profile the founders of this porn addiction app called Quittr. And you looked into this phenomenon of anti-porn men. Talk to me about what fascinated you about these founders and this whole movement.

Speaker 3:
[04:19] Yeah, I think what is so different about the way, specifically men of their generation, which is Gen Z, they're in their very early 20s. And my generation, which is about 10 years older than that, is that they have so much more shame around the amount of pornography they watch. I did so much research on Reddit and talking to people all over the world, young men, about their porn habits. And they were telling me that they watch porn once a day, maybe, maybe a little bit more. And they were really trying to quit. They thought they were addicted to porn, whereas I asked some of my millennial male friends and they were like, that's not that crazy. And I found it really interesting, the way that these men thought that they had this very serious problem and where they were getting that messaging from. And where they were getting that messaging from was from a lot of these secular Manosphere influencers on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Discord. They felt like in order to improve their lives and improve themselves and make their lives the way that they wanted their lives to be was they needed to kick this habit to remove porn from their lives and take control over it.

Speaker 2:
[05:29] Yeah. I mean, I know Gen Z has had like potential access to Internet porn a lot younger than Millennials too though. But talking specifically about these porn quitting app founders, their app charges users $30 a year. From your reporting, it sounded like they were not necessarily the originators of this kind of messaging, but they were capitalizing on this broader messaging toward young men. Is that right?

Speaker 3:
[05:52] Exactly. Yeah. So the two founders, Alex Slater and Connor McLaren, they were these guys that they really wanted to be entrepreneurs. They wanted to emulate the lifestyle a lot of influencers have. They built an app and they can just have passive income for the rest of their lives. So they both simultaneously had this idea to do a porn quitting app, and this app has been very successful.

Speaker 2:
[06:14] I noticed that you mentioned that this messaging around not using porn or not masturbating is coming from quite a few secular Manosphere influencers. I know the idea of forgoing porn and masturbation also has roots in some Christian communities. What is behind the more secular version of all this? I'm wondering, Scott, what have you seen?

Speaker 4:
[06:37] Anti-masturbation is really old and it's also been secular and religious for a very long time. There are anti-masturbation trends in a variety of different eugenic traditions, different religious traditions, and these things have been picked up on across generations. What we're seeing at the moment is that anti-masturbation has become almost a product that is part of a suite of products that are seen as being part of personal development. There are all of these theories that they develop around, I mean, it's not a theory that is based in any kind of scientific evidence. This idea that masturbation makes you weak, it lowers your testosterone levels and specifically masturbating to porn interferes with your dopamine creation cycle, it makes you more depressed, it causes something called porn-induced erectile dysfunction. If you want to grow as a person, if you want to make lots of money, if you want to be successful in love and life in related ways, if you want to be a real man, if you want to be an alpha man, or if you want to be a Western man, if you want to be the kind of man who can protect whiteness, if you want to be the kind of man who can fight against the shadowy forces, the globalizing forces that are trying to make us all weak, then you will go on an anti-masturbation challenge.

Speaker 2:
[07:58] Can I ask you a question real quick? How does not masturbating, like, protect whiteness? Is it like a thing of, like, you don't want to just, like, waste sperm on personal fun time, and instead you would rather save it for procreation? I mean, this is just conjecture from my brain. Forgive me if that's wrong. But like, is that the thought process behind that?

Speaker 4:
[08:22] Yeah. Well, it's part of it. It's both that energy, the energy you have for real sex with real women, right? So I'm not saying that, you know, people who are not white don't participate because they certainly do. But there is a section of the anti-masturbation movement that is all about your special white sperm and the special white babies that you're going to have. And that's seen as being part of what you're doing to protect the West, right? They talk about the birth rates. They talk about the fact that, you know, North America and Western Europe are below replacement rate.

Speaker 2:
[08:54] Yeah, I heard that one. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[08:56] You're making sure that when you are having sex, you're having sex in a way that is going to reproduce the white race.

Speaker 2:
[09:03] Rebecca, from your reporting, what's kind of undergirding this secular anti-porn men movement?

Speaker 3:
[09:09] Yeah, just like how Scott said, sort of using these scientific terms or pseudoscientific ideas about like dopamine, it really reflects the panic over screen time that we're having around kids, adults, everyone kind of right now. And it's like if you spend all of your time scrolling on your phone, your brain is somehow being warped by algorithms, by technology companies, and therefore you will have more trouble being happy in the future because it's doing something to your brain. And this is sort of a controversial take already. It can't simply be said that people who watch porn are making themselves depressed and anxious by virtue of watching porn. There's so many different factors here. And also, like Scott said, there is, to add to another level of racism on certain corners of this debate, like there is some part of the porn-free movement that believe that anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, that these are the people that are making money off of porn websites and OnlyFans because they want to keep you at home, depressed, not dating, not procreating.

Speaker 2:
[10:15] Wait. Hold on. I want to repeat back to what you said to me because I want to make sure that I heard you correctly. So there are some people who believe in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people are running the porn apps and they want to keep them addicted to the porn apps to make money.

Speaker 3:
[10:38] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[10:38] So that's like a wildly compounded and vulgar anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that some people who are a part of this movement or a part of this greater sentiment belief.

Speaker 3:
[10:49] Right. But I will say that this movement has so many different tentacles in so many different spaces. I don't think you can paint it in one large brush, but this sort of language of self-improvement and science-backed evidence and also resentment towards women in the sex industries, women in general, feminism, etc. These are all sort of combining into creating this movement that a lot of men, even men who are politically or socially liberal, but they think that because they are spending time watching porn, that they have a problem that it's a really, really bad habit that they should be ashamed of.

Speaker 2:
[11:28] I'm glad you brought up how some of these men might be thinking about women. Based on your research, Scott, how do these anti-porn men feel about women?

Speaker 4:
[11:37] It's an area of great contestation. Even the most liberal corners of this movement tend to construct women as being somehow a prize for good behavior. Achieving real sex with a real woman is meant to be a thing that guys can share stories about and then feel as if they've won the prize. It goes all the way from that through to people who believe that pornography makes you addicted to women or somehow under their spell. Even though not all of it, again, both Rebecca and I agree, it's not one thing, but it has a tendency towards misogyny.

Speaker 2:
[12:16] Rebecca, in the men that you spoke with, what did you perceive about their attitudes towards women?

Speaker 3:
[12:21] Yeah. I think by virtue of being a woman, they are less likely to say these things to me. You see a lot of men in these spaces feel as though women have out achieved men, and that the women that they do desire, they are getting rich off OnlyFans on money that guys like them are paying them. I will say a lot of the men that I spoke to, especially ones that were on their own self-improvement journey that I met via Reddit, often they were the kind of guys that I'd be friends with if I were 10 years younger, or if I went to school with them. A lot of them had a lot of female friends, a lot of them had had girlfriends in the past. They didn't believe in the more toxic parts of this philosophy, but they did feel like they had a real problem and that they wanted to feel in control of this aspect of their lives. And so I really do have so much empathy for that. And I talked to one scholar who studies this and he was basically like, yeah, when someone is doing a habit that they think is wrong and that they don't want to be doing, that's a good thing that they should be reevaluating their time spent doing this thing. If someone doesn't want to be watching porn and they find themselves watching a lot of porn, that's not a good sign. But I think the problem, again, is the shame and where that shame is coming from, who is telling them that they're wrong for this, and why are they telling them that they're wrong for this? And so, again, as a woman, you see this rhetoric all the time. Like, you're not good enough. You need to be optimizing. You need to be skinnier. You need to be prettier. You need to be paying all this money and spending all this time to make yourself more attractive to men. And we're seeing that for men now. And I think it's unhealthy really for everyone. But at the same time, you also have these people who are making lots of money on young men feeling shame about this.

Speaker 2:
[14:07] We're going to take a quick break. At first, if any of you are finding It's Been a Minute for the first time, welcome. I hope you're enjoying the show and that you come back every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday morning for brand new episodes. Coming up on Friday, the dream homes of reality TV shows like Selling Sunset and The Real Housewives have long stoked our envy. But what are they obscuring about the reality of homeownership in America? You can find that wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up after the break.

Speaker 4:
[14:36] I think here maybe we can introduce the figure of the gooner.

Speaker 2:
[14:41] Stick around.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[16:28] One of the things that really sticks out to me about this is that, it goes against maybe some of the other cultural scripts about masculinity, like that being interested in watching porn is masculine, or that boys finding porn is like an initiation into grown manhood. How does being anti-porn square with that?

Speaker 4:
[16:48] I think here maybe we can introduce the figure of the gooner.

Speaker 2:
[16:53] Okay, go for it. I mean, I am familiar but many of our listeners may not be.

Speaker 4:
[16:57] Yeah. The figure of the gooner is the kind of the uncontrolled masturbator, the masturbator who is compulsively doing it over a long period of time. It's a figure both of derision within certain communities and of sexual enjoyment and sort of kink in other subcultures. And the gooner sort of taps into a particular, again, an anxiety about success and anxiety about growing up, about being a proper grown up person. And the gooner becomes like that thing that you absolutely do not want to be. I don't want to be like that. I might be told sometimes culturally that, oh yeah, it's like an initiation into heterosexuality. But I know better, I know better that real men don't do that. They're turning us into weak people who think that this is masculinity. But we understand the real definition of masculinity. And that's about saving our energy and our sperm and our virility for other projects.

Speaker 2:
[18:01] Obviously, this is like a multi-layered situation. I mean, there's so many different tendrils to all of this that we're discussing. But I do think that there is or there could be something here where it's a real problem. Like a lot of boys become exposed to or seek out porn at a young age. Some of it may be extreme or even non-consensual. And I think it can feel compulsive for some people. Also, we discussed that specific kink that you had brought up, Scott, where the point is for people to masturbate for hours and hours. And part of that kink, I think, is being aroused by the shame of being unable to stop watching porn, to the point where it impacts your life. Like it being unhealthy is kind of like the point of that kink. But there were also some people in examples in your story, Rebecca, where people thought they were porn addicted for watching porn once a day. And I'll say the science around porn addiction is murky, to say the least. But I think there's an open question about what's healthy and what's not. And like when it crosses the line from a healthy expression of sexuality into an unhealthy compulsion. But regardless, more young men think open access to porn is a problem, than don't think that. Again, almost two-thirds of men under 25 believe porn should be more difficult to access, according to the Survey Center on American Life, which is up from half in 2013. What do you make of this?

Speaker 3:
[19:28] One of the researchers I interviewed said, there really is so little funding into this space. We don't know so much and there needs to be so much more research that going into people's attitudes towards porn, how often they watch it, how it affects their lives, etc. We just don't know so many of these answers. But I think that that data point was really shocking to people because young men historically have been the demographic that support the most amount of access to porn. This was a big jump from previous generations of young men. I find it really hard to decouple that data from other data about a big conservative swing among young people that is very real, that shows up in data and attitudes towards sex and gender. I think this is a part of that.

Speaker 4:
[20:13] I think that there are many reasons that young men might be answering in that particular way to this particular question. It could also have to do with the harm that they might be seeing with non-consensual porn. There is absolutely a conservative swing, but I don't think it's only about that. Other studies from the Center for American Life have shown, for example, that the majority of young men still don't see porn as a moral question, don't see it as being necessarily problematic. But when it comes to that question of accessibility and who should be able to access it and when, I do think that can be driven by many different things at the same time.

Speaker 2:
[20:52] As we've discussed, a lot of this revolves around shame. In your reporting, Rebecca, you interviewed Noelle Perdue, who's a writer and porn historian, and she described it as, quote, purity culture for boys, which I thought was really interesting. I think that while a lot has been said about learned shame around women's sexuality, maybe less has been spent on men's. Why is there shame there and what does that look like?

Speaker 3:
[21:20] Yeah, I think there's so much shame around sex and pornography in general. I think for almost everyone that is an adolescent and is exploring this for the first time, it's uncomfortable and especially when many young people today say they felt like they were exposed to porn too early. Billie Eilish, for instance, has talked about this.

Speaker 8:
[21:40] I had like sleep paralysis and these like almost like night terror slash just nightmares because of it. I think that's how they started because I would just watch abusive, you know, BDSM.

Speaker 3:
[21:52] And they are in some cases very traumatized by that. And so I think having one of their first experiences with porn to be something inherently shameful and scary that maybe can carry over into how they feel about it as they age. And so Noelle Perdue, who is a writer and porn historian, she says that like every day her DMs are filled with people who are being like, is this normal? And one thing she mentioned was that internet porn was one thing that made pornography consumption a lot more individualized. And so people weren't gathering in spaces. They weren't going to a store to buy a magazine or a theater or something, or a theater or a video store to rent. They did this all by themselves. So there was no sense of community really, unless you go on the comment section of a porn video, which I don't think very many people do.

Speaker 2:
[22:47] I think a lot of people are trying to get out of there. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[22:51] But it made people intensify their shame because they felt like they were the only ones who thought this was interesting or hot or sexy. And she also mentioned, which I think is an interesting strain of this, is that with the rise of AI porn, that will only further intensify that shame. Because if you're the one prompting for something that you thought of, then you probably think you're an even bigger freak for wanting to look for something.

Speaker 4:
[23:16] I wanted to pick up on this idea of isolation. One of the things that a lot of young men get out of these anti-masturbation programs is a sense of community. They're sharing the number of days that they've gone without masturbating. They are encouraging each other. Again, practice varies across different groups. Sometimes they're calling each other brothers. You're building your sense of self-respect and pride. Failing, of course, is shameful. But certainly, you are experiencing that in a far more social setting than the one you were in before, perhaps, which was all on your own, where that shame was unmediated by a peer group. It's a movement away from shame and towards pride, whether that's white pride, pride in being a man, pride in being straight, all of these ideas. As many commentators have observed, whenever we mobilize pride, it's very often because we've been made to feel shame.

Speaker 2:
[24:19] I want to point something that you mentioned, Rebecca, which is that some people are just embarrassed by what they're into.

Speaker 3:
[24:31] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[24:32] And perhaps there's a lot of shame around that. But also something I find very interesting about all of this is that, like, I think women perhaps, perhaps may have a lot more practice at processing shame to a certain degree. Like in my opinion, there are a lot of women out there reading freaky, freaky little books, okay? We've talked about some of them on the show. I've read my fair share. And I think that some women, they can kind of be with their desires and set them down. Like, I think I talked on some other episode of this show. I mean, sometimes I say stuff, I'm like, God, this is really out there about me. But I think I mentioned on one episode of the show, I don't know, a few months ago or something like that, that I love reading forced marriage plots. I do not want to be forced into a marriage. I don't want that for myself. But I love when someone's relative dies and they get a letter in the mail that's like, you have to marry this sexy cowboy in order to get my millions.

Speaker 3:
[25:27] Oh no.

Speaker 2:
[25:28] Yeah, and I love it. I love it down. I love it. But I don't know, I feel like I can sort of sit with that, absorb it, love that I love reading about it, but don't actually want to live it and kind of move on with my life and not really think about it too much. But I don't know, I think that maybe perhaps men's desires are like connected to their productivity, as we're discussing, their success, their masculinity, and if they desire something a little out of the box, I imagine that feels really tough.

Speaker 3:
[25:59] Yeah, exactly. And that's what I heard from so many men. It's like they didn't think that they were supposed to feel this at all ever. And the fact that they are is very uncomfortable. Whereas I think for a lot of young women, the experience of being a woman already is so humiliating in so many ways, that you just sort of like the things that you may be into reading are the least humiliating thing about you. One of my sources was of he had a foot fetish, and it caused him so much psychic anxiety. And I'm happy to say that now he has a girlfriend who's like, oh, you have a foot fetish? Okay, great. Like, here's my feet. I was just so happy to hear that. And hearing that story of how these things can sort of be worked through and overcome, because they can. In my experience of being on the message boards and the Telegram chat of the Quitter users, I will say so much of it was just, it was really just loneliness. It was a lot of people having active suicidal ideation, a lot of really young people, but then also people really encouraging each other in those moments and having these very wholesome, it's going to be okay. We got you, brother, interactions with each other and to lighten it up a bit, I will say my favorite one was a guy who was like, do you guys think it's a relapse if I masturbate to a picture of my wife? I was like, that's so sweet that you want to look at your wife, that you love her so much that you miss her. Then they were all like, yeah, that's relapsing.

Speaker 2:
[27:34] Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

Speaker 3:
[27:37] I was like, come on, let him have it.

Speaker 2:
[27:40] Well, I tell you what, y'all have really enlightened me today on all of this, and I really appreciate this conversation. Rebecca, Scott, thank you both so much.

Speaker 3:
[27:50] Thank you so much for having us.

Speaker 4:
[27:51] Thank you for having us.

Speaker 2:
[27:53] That was Rebecca Jennings, a Features Writer at New York Magazine and Scott Burnett, Assistant Professor of African Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Nina Potthuck. Our supervising producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right. That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 7:
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