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I interned at VICE after reading their fascinating war coverage. A month in, I was tasked to go on NoFap. My first war coverage, first hand.
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The Blot once calculated that the average male will spend 58,560 minutes, or more than 40 days of his life, masturbating by the time he turns 75 (it’s telling there’s very little information on female masturbation). This calculation was four years ago and internet speeds and hard disk sizes have only exponentially increased. As have types of lube.
No Fapping has entered common parlance, and while no one seems to know exactly the term or movement began, it’s safe to say it’s most well-known through the subreddit r/NoFap, though there are plenty of sites and forums dedicated to it.
NoFap is the theory that abstaining from masturbation results in a reboot of the male psyche and body (some have even claimed it gave them superpowers, but I wouldn’t put much stock in that, Pavitra Prabhaker). Time and energy spent masturbating, the theory goes, can be dedicated to doing other things. Reddit’s r/NoFap and NoFap.com have inspirational posts such as “Celebrating the first month of my new life, the happiest day in my last decades” or “Gained confidence and clear skin (7300+ days)”.
Every other thing reminded me of my inability to fap.
I started fapping at 13 (don’t read this, Amma) and developed a feeling over the time that I’m doing something good to my body, something soulful. Why meditate, when you can masturbate? My editor suggested I try to go a month without. I thought, shit, how long is a month after all?
In the initial days, all I could think about was fap.. fap.. Fap! Every other thing reminded me of my inability to fap. Even this fucking banana.
My motivation to continue was to save my internship (it turned out nobody really cared, the editor who’d assigned this to me had already moved on). I turned to r/NoFap and its Fapstronauts’s guidelines and posts. It was mostly a catalog of success stories, all of which seemed to make this into a bigger deal than it was. One of the things recommended was install a Panic Button, a Chrome extension you click on when you feel most tempted to stray. It merely displays asinine motivational quotes. The only one vaguely relevant was one which said, “A clock has hands, but never touches itself. Be like a clock.”
A month in I was bored. This just became one of many things I couldn’t do, like bunk classes (college blows). My body was learning to live with it. I decided to kick it up to “hard mode”. I turned on proxy sites (sorry government) and started streaming Korean lesbian porn.
It made no sense. I freaked out. I questioned the ethics behind porn and the industry. I haven’t seen any porn since.
My editor would mail me a checklist to keep track record of any changes in my life. I stopped after three weeks—it felt like I was institutionalising NoFap. The only time this project made sense to me was when I imagined myself as Christopher Mccandless from Into The Wild. Maybe I was part of something bigger than myself. It felt like, if I die in some shitty corner of this fuck-all world, people will read my story. I won’t die.
The following is a scale often used by Fapstronauts as a metric of health. I’ve tried to answer these out of 5.
- Increased Energy: Varied on the day.
- Increased Testosterone: I don’t really know how to measure this, so let’s say 3.5 Better Alertness and Reduced Brain Fog: Can’t relate.
- Elimination of Premature Ejaculation and Erectile dysfunction: Can’t answer to the latter, but for the former, 4.
- Increased Quality of Sleep: Unrelatable. I felt I slept better earlier.
- Increased Confidence and Happiness: Unrelatable.
- Deeper Voice: Chutiya ho gaye ho kya?
- Better interaction with members of the opposite sex: Weirdly heterosexual question. And no, being jizzed up for over a 100 days didn’t affect how I interacted with women AT ALL.
- Better sex: Yeah. Yes. It worked in that case. 4.5
As I write this, it has been over 100 days I haven’t played with my mushy mate, and I’m still trying to figure out if anything productive, including the red-revolution in India, is worth the initial pain of this mind-fucking and soul-screeching process.
I haven’t relapsed and i’m not planning to. Primarily because I’m not bound to it anymore. I’m no different than I was before, I simply have more time to myself now. The best I can do is offer my hand to anyone struggling, but also to say, it’s okay . Life is short. Fap.
Start date: 25 Jan
End Date: 15 May
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