What is becoming an annual ritual, Halloween’s growing pagan adult festival ends and No Nut November begins to internet crews encouraging one another to refrain from reckless sex with a few scare stories in the media about this odd phenomenon. It has overtaken Movember for male oriented November activity. This year Rolling Stone fired shots at NNN due to its far right connections and antisemitism due to its awareness that Jews are overrepresented in porn (a fact they freely admit). Lost in this framing of the phenomenon is that this is a modern expression of the ascetic drive within us all, building a community and offering a Schelling Point for those who reject the system and its status quo.
This seems like a stretch because it is so quirky and even as little as twenty years ago would have been considered an overblown target, but porn’s ubiquity has changed culture. Porn is everywhere and available on demand in any form. Our culture is one of permissiveness that pushes all to satisfy all hedonistic urges and answer any momentary pleasure without thought for consequences. Life happens is the excuse given for unplanned pregnancies between two 28 year olds well versed in how babies are made.
This fits the idea of asceticism because it is a self-discipline and avoids giving into a temptation and indulging in passions. It is demanding. The origin of asceticism is from the Greek word askesis, and this means serious, demanding physical training. For thirty days, modern men must resist the porn, not just hardcore visuals but the temptation all around them, and not allow that demonic vice to grasp them. This is far more daunting of a task today. Women of the West can feel their ascendancy within the rules of polite society and dress accordingly. No matter the woman’s shape or size, women are likely to wear form fitting clothing with plunging necklines or trousers that are just spandex. Corporate dress codes are meaningless now with women oscillating between dressing like slobs and dressing like it is 1979 and they are waiting in line at Studio 54.
There is also the idea of purgation. Men discuss not just the no fapping but the idea of purging their vision, thoughts and minds of pornography as a means to purify their souls. They see it as becoming better than the reddit men who point and laugh at the idea of not giving into fapping to whatever the latest uploaded deviancy is on a tube site. The pornogaphy mafia has had several stars, even their hall of famers, die mysteriously before age 45 this last year, but per the internet punditry, you are the weirdo for not indulging in sin. It is another inversion where the pure are weird and the demonic are good. This is deep within Christian history where men engage in purgation to purify their souls, prepare the way for peace and to hopefully ascend in spirituality.
This is not a cargo cult. The men participating are not trying to punch specific buttons to make the old gods deliver the goods. It is a test of one’s willpower and one’s purity. There is no material gain. This is the sign that it is a process by which men can form a community. Actual participants resemble an online sexaholics anonymous of sorts. Maybe they last, maybe they do not, and maybe they can last long enough to transition from thinking about not masturbating to porn that day to not even thinking about not masturbating anymore. The emergence of memes and jokes are further glue to the community. These memes can reinforce the ingroup/outgroup divide and create a fence. No one wants to be the coomer, and all men, whether trying to last the entire month or not, knows a coomer. It might be possible for NNN to help these men unlock one of the strongest powers in today’s culture, the power to not sleep with any woman who presents herself before you: the volcel.
The participants in NNN may not see it as a religious act but the spirit is there. Camille Paglia wrote in 2017, “A purely secular culture risks hollowness and, paradoxically, sets itself up for the rise of fundamentalist movements that ominously promise to purify and discipline“. These men engaging in NNN are doing exactly this. They are rejecting the hollow world of secular America that cannot offer them a loving wife but can offer them endless loops of sex on their phone, their laptop and via VR headsets. This is why NNN scares the system and they seek to immediately smear it and make it low status as a far right anti-semitic thing and no one wants to be anti-semitic, right boys, or else we will fire you right, wink wink hint hint.
The knee jerk reaction to using the anti-semitism smear reveals just how weak the argument is for our current situation with porn. Everyone will admit what is on the internet is obscene. Everyone will admit that this should be blocked in some form from easy access of children. Everyone also knows how fast Google expunges videos off YouTube for a variety of reasons. The industry is collapsing into a handful of producers and one big company (Mindgeek), so how hard could it be to properly corral it? There is no defense of the status quo, so smearing the entire debate as anti-semitic ends the discussion in normie-ville.
The system’s fear is men who will go this route are auditioning themselves as honorable and pure men. They are proclaiming a higher status via their rejection of vice. They are just waiting for leadership. They want the pure of heart leader to match their purity of intent to wipe away a culture sliding further into territory that imperial Rome or Weimar Germany would have considered a bridge too far. Simpler in drive might be that they are looking for the fatherly leadership that their Boomer fathers never gave them. Maybe a few brave priests and reverends would be enough to marshal this force and guide them to a holier life. This is a near impossibility in modern society as the Catholic Church removes priests that destroy the rainbow flag. Even if these young men explicitly called for leaders to express themselves within our religious institutions, it is certain that our religions, long corrupted ideologically and now even financially, would disavow and defrock any figure of invested spiritual authority that stepped forward to lead.
The joke is on the institutions and our regime’s leadership that would crack the whip. The men forming the loose network of No Nut November know better than to expect a large institution to answer the call. They know the score of where all this hedonism is taking us. Forget a lone wolf priest or reverend stepping forward to be a beacon for them. The likelier outcome is the memes of the community will affect more and more young men while the first wave of men build up their souls and stature as virtuous men in their communities. These will be men who will not be placated by the system’s lies nor by the soma that it offers up as social conditions continue to decline.
-By Fred Watson, Jr.
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