Originally published at: Participating in anti-masturbation groups tied to depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts | Boing Boing
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Someone should extend these poor persons a helping hand.
Maybe their own.
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“If you cant love yourself, then how in the hell are you gonna love anyone else?”
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Does anyone know how this compares with the effects of relapse in the context of other obstaining-from-behavior objective groups? People whose gym memberships go unused within a month or two; addicts who start drinking again, that sort of thing.
I would not be even slightly surprised if a self help group that promises people who feel inadequate in various ways improvement through strict sexual purity taboos and stemming Gen. Ripper’s loss of essence skews more dysfunctional than average; but I would also tend to assume that people who have failed to achieve some objective on which they’d pinned hopes for improvement are unlikely to be just overjoyed about it regardless of what those objectives are, what the desired areas of improvement are, and whether there’s good evidence that the behavioral objective will lead to the desired improvement or not.
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I would imagine the overlap between “no fap” groups and incel groups is significant. The incel community is notoriously mysoginistic (which attracts a lot of the other -ists) and their form of “self-help” is generally self-loathing. So, too, it seems is the case in no fap groups, where, unlike an AA or something, falling off the wagon is seen as a failure of will; i.e., you relapsed because you’re weak and pathetic (and that of course is the opposite of helpful).
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I suspect the organizers of these groups are a bunch of wankers.
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Seems a decent psychological thesis topic to ask these people the very simple question: “What do you believe abstinence from masturbation gains you?” (“Bayesian prior: 37% suppressed religious guilt, 43% ‘self-abuse’[snirk] masochism, 20% ‘other’”)
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It’s all about shame, which sells fad diets, gym memberships, all sorts of luxury goods, and so on. Belonging to an unsupportive internet community just exacerbates the problem.
By coincidence, I just read this book, which has some interesting things to say about good and bad forms of shaming.
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They’re basically an anti-support group. And yes, there is a large overlap.
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Hopefully.
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Like the christian church?
By the 3rd grade I was already going through cycles of anguish over “when am I going to be able to stop this”; wish I could go back and reassure myself: “never, might as well get over it”
I recall that Seinfeld episode referenced the old saying “your body isn’t an amusement park”, with which I beg to differ; it’s the best fucking amusement park ever invented.
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“If only there were some way to relieve the stress of being in this anti-masturbation group.”
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Can I get an amen?
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You can!
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gee, ya don’t say.
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Now I’ve had my cataracts fixed, I won’t need glasses. Except for watching videos on my phone screen… 
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You list it, but does an unused gym membership count as abstaining-from-behavior? In any case, it’s probably the one I can relate to the most and the one I’ve been feeling the strongest. I’m but a single data point, but I can talk about my experiences. I have depression whether I go running my planned amount of time per week or not. Getting the exercise does help, but in grand scheme of things, if I’m missing runs for an extended amount of time it’s not the only thing contributing to my depression. It’s far more likely to be one of many things that push it and more to the point, it’s an inverse relationship: being depressed is far more likely to result in me missing runs than the other way around.
I’m trying to have sympathy for these, er, jerks, but I’m mostly finding a barren field wherein I grow my fucks about them. I can sympathize with having depression and I wouldn’t wish that nor suicidal impulses on (almost) anyone. It’s just … well, what’s in the next reply here:
I won’t say it’s a perfect circle because I suspect that every “no fapper” is an incel, but not every incel is a no fapper. Therefore it’s a concentric circle of one center and an outer ring.
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There’s a whole lot of “no duh” involved here, but I do wonder how much causation vs. correlation there is. The anti-masturbation groups are no doubt universally toxic and damaging, but people who join such groups clearly have issues (around sexuality, self-esteem, etc.) they’re trying to resolve (in the least helpful possible way), and are likely to feel pretty shitty even without being in those groups. (The groups being recruiting grounds for fascists being another issue.)
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