Masturbation abstinence practices have returned to the USA in the form of semen retention communities. Followers on one of these male, anti-masturbation forums, “NoFap,” on Reddit (denoted “r/NoFap”), have engaged in homicidal behaviors that appear to be linked to these sexual beliefs and practices. This study uses a systematic search on r/NoFap and two control forums (r/pornfree, and r/stopdrinking) to define a corpus of violent content. The study’s goals were to describe the nature of threats on r/NoFap and suggest whether the violence might be attributable to sexual deprivation or false beliefs that non-sexual targets caused their violent urges. Of the 421 violent posts identified from September 2011 to September 2022, r/NoFap contained the majority (94.3%). Violent threats on r/NoFap mostly targeted pornographers, women, scientists, specific persons, or any person (i.e. homicidal “rage”). Violent threats against r/NoFap’s own followers were growing most quickly. Violent posts were well-supported with upvotes by other followers in r/NoFap. These data are important because NoFap may represent a growing threat for real-world violence.
I get that they’re trying to keep the scope limited to documenting the amount of violent posts on r/NoFap and trying to come to some conclusion about whether or not this is due to sexual frustration, but they do drift into some speculation outside of the stated scope, “A second potential explanation for violent posts in NoFap is that the Reddit platform promotes violent posts by providing a high level of user anonymity with lax content moderation (Brown et al. Citation2018)”. So why don’t they speculate on the obvious - the control forums they chose have earnest self-help motivations but r/NoFap is rooted in a reactionary conspiracy theory?
