Masturbation appears to have lost the election.
In the days preceding last week’s presidential contest, a Democratic SuperPAC called Progress Action Fund (PAF) made a final pitch to men. Two advertisements in a multimillion-dollar campaign warned young male voters that Republican officials, if elected, would ban emergency contraception (the “morning-after pill”) and online pornography. One spot implied specifically that right-wingers want to keep men from pleasuring themselves to climax: “I’m just going to watch, and make sure you don’t finish,” says a stern patrician congressman as he looms over a young rascal mid-stroke.
It’s ironic that the party of Donald Trump, who is himself only a few degrees of separation away from the pornography industry, should become associated by his enemies with the threat of a porn-less world. It’s certainly unlikely that Trump, whose attitudes about abortion and other reproductive interventions are much more blasé than his socially conservative supporters would prefer, will preside over some kind of anti-contraceptive purge. But vulgar and implausible as the nightmare scenarios in PAF’s ads were, the most remarkable thing is that they didn’t seem to scare young men all that much.
In principle, PAF was making a double offer: voting Democrat means Plan B for women and limitless porn for men. But, in practice, both ads appealed to the male libido. In the birth control ad, it’s the male character who, after his condom breaks, goes to his hookup’s bathroom to fetch the pill for her. When Senator McSinister materializes to thwart him, Prince Charming pleads: “You can’t do this. I can’t have a kid right now.” It was young men whose flagging support really worried the Kamala Harris campaign, and the PAF ads were part of a larger effort to win “the bro vote” away from Donald Trump. Wally Nowinski, head of another Democrat Super PAC, actually placed ads on porn sites because, he said, he wanted to persuade the fellas “that this guy, who you might think is ‘king of the bros,’ actually has a very conservative agenda that is going to take away your porn, is going to ban abortion.”
Several aspects of this strategy merit contemplation. First, it was pursued by middle-aged men. Nick Knudsen, who posted the masturbation ad to X, has been working in media for 20 years. Nowinski doesn’t look a day under 35. They were hoping to reach the kind of man who admires Dave Portnoy, a scruffy guy’s guy whose frat-house aura defined the brand of his company, Barstool Sports. Portnoy supports abortion. He’s also 47. VP Candidate Tim Walz (aged 60) was aiming at the Barstool audience when he appeared on a podcast with Dan Le Batard (55) and said, on the subject of adult entertainment, “you be you.” The argument that Republicans will steal your porn was not one that Harry Sisson, Harris’s biggest Gen Z advocate, chose to emphasize. Its champions were almost universally applicants for the position of Cool Dad.
The second interesting thing to note is that these older men clearly think younger men view women’s birth control in the same way they view porn: as a route to sexual gratification for themselves. In less pressurized settings, the Portnoy stance on abortion can be represented as one of male feminism, adopted out of concern for women’s self-determination. But in the desperation of election season, these gentlemen went straight to the heart of the matter: orgasms for men. It was, in every sense of the term, an appeal to self-interest.
The final and most noteworthy fact is that the appeal seems to have been pretty much ineffectual. Data from Tisch College at Tufts indicates that Trump won decisively with men under 30. He even picked up 8 points among women in the same age group compared with his 2020 performance. Young people of both sexes in every major racial group shifted to the right, in some cases dramatically. Most distressingly of all for Democrats, given the tenor of their racial politics lately, Trump gained an astonishing 20 points with young black men relative to 2020. For obvious reasons, it would be inadvisable and probably fruitless to conduct an exit poll on the delicate subject of how prominently the matter of radical self-care featured in voters’ decision framework. But among those issues which can be reasonably measured in polite company, even abortion only ranked third. Number one by far was the economy, since it’s the rare man or woman who can live by OnlyFans alone. It’s safe to conclude that “they’re coming for her pills and your porn” was not a particularly winning message with the lads.
The whole affair is indicative of a dramatic generational shift in men’s attitudes toward their own appetites. A healthy male sex drive is like a kind of nuclear reactor. From the moment it cranks into gear, every young man has to devote a non-trivial amount of time and effort to figuring out how he’s going to tap this radioactive energy source without allowing it to careen into a full systems meltdown. There’s a reason Plato represented the playwright Sophocles as thanking God his arousal had abated: channeling it is at least a part-time and, at some stages of life, a full-time job. Some of us are more effective at it than others, but all of us get cues from peers and pop culture about the ideal we should be aiming for.
When I was in middle school, the general suggestion was that masturbation is a fine, maybe even a manly way to let off steam—like watching football or playing video games. In the 2009 bromance I Love You, Man, Jason Segel lets Paul Rudd into “the man cave,” where he has a chair set aside and equipped specifically for the purpose. “Masturbation is a part of life,” he tells Rudd. That was pretty much the standard idea back then.
Walz thought he could appeal to the I Love You, Man sensibility on Le Batard’s podcast. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize the mood has shifted utterly since the 2000s. The jocular nonchalance about sexual incontinence I grew up with has evaporated, dispelled by the shocking advent of digital technology. In the days of dial-up, you could just about get by on the vague assumption that whatever outlet men chose for their superfluous energy was normal, healthy, and natural (so long as nobody got hurt). Porn and birth control were both essential to this arrangement—porn to facilitate a satisfying private release, birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancy from muddling the ethics of mutual catharsis. Both were intended to keep things from getting serious. But then the iPhone appeared, and things got serious anyway.
As Jonathan Haidt and others have ably documented, mobile internet access violently reconfigures young brains. Writing for American Greatness, Pascal Emanuel-Gobry observes that the most disruptive effect smartphones have on boys is to drench their emergent neural pathways in practically narcotic quantities of dopamine, priming them to crave levels of variety, eccentricity, and aggression that no mutually loving encounter with a real-life woman can provide. The result is what ancient philosophers would have called a habituation to vice and modern psychologists call an addiction to porn. Either way, its consequences are spiritual imprisonment and early-onset erectile dysfunction. The laissez-faire sexual morality of my youth, fitted as it was to the age of Playboy and Skinemax, failed utterly to defend boys from a full-scale digital assault on their psyches.
What this means is that many young men now associate their history of porn use not with harmless self-discovery but with oceanic depths of misery, isolation, and shame. Truth be told, there was always a fair amount of all that among the young men of my generation too, along with some confusion and resentment that our culture didn’t seem to have any better ideal of manhood to offer than that of the onanistic doofus. But the discontent got so widespread and so intense in the Internet age that it finally became an open secret. Young men got desperate for better rules to apply to their sex lives. That’s how NoFap was born.
“Fapping” is online slang for masturbating (named, I’m afraid, for the sound a guy’s hand makes while in the act). The ultimate issue of fapping is “gooning,” and someone who routinely goons to excess is a “gooner.” This is, importantly, a pejorative. To be a gooner is to be associated with low initiative and poor self-control. If this taunt has the cruelty of the schoolyard, it has the schoolyard’s honesty as well. It reflects widespread and agonizing experience. Boys and young men who want help giving up the habit can join accountability groups and text threads with their friends, can reach out to a wider network at the official NoFap website or on the Reddit forum r/NoFap, which as of this writing has 1.2 million members. Participants there coach one another, often with touching degrees of compassion and transparency, on healthy ways to redirect sexual energy. They also celebrate anecdotally the manifold benefits of doing so.
Some of these purported benefits have a touch of kookiness about them. (I personally am dubious that even an extreme degree of chastity “will unlock naturally your chakras.”) But mostly the advertised virtues of NoFap are the blessings that responsible fathers have always taught their sons to associate with good impulse management. They include sharper focus, higher energy, and more drive to redirect into activities besides scrolling PornHub. Gen Z has, in general, been recoiling from the mess their elders have made of sex, and one 2019 study indicated that this includes masturbating less than either Millennials or Gen X. For the first time in my life, indulgence is low-status and discipline is in.
Because it is popular in the pro-male and sometimes anti-female online ecosystem known as the manosphere, NoFap has been treated with suspicion in outlets like NPR. Sociologist Kelsy Burke of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has associated it with (what else?) white supremacy. The whole thing has become right-coded, which is why observers with more contemporary understanding than Tim Walz were able to predict that ads like PAF’s would backfire. Hasan Piker, a famous left-wing YouTube and Twitch streamer, said of conservative men that “A lot of them are anti-sex work and anti-porn, there’s an entire culture surrounding ‘porn addiction’ that even goes to extremes like ‘no fap’ which is repackaged as holistic self help to masculine men.”
The tone of derision here is extremely telling. If practices of restraint have found favor with young men, why not try to extricate those practices from their manospheric setting and incorporate them into the Left’s aesthetic as well? Why not compete with right-wing NoFappers, instead of casting aspersions on them and further alienating badly needed voters? It makes no sense unless sexual self-control is, in itself, somehow threatening to the Democrat Party’s project as it is presently constituted. And this is where women come in.
One of the most painful consequences of porn addiction is what it does to young men’s relationships with the opposite sex. Feminists like Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have often lamented that porn trains men to see women as disposable receptacles for their own lusts. But the tragic discovery men have made in the wake of the Internet’s porn boom is that most of them hate seeing women that way. Gobry writes that those who can only get turned on by their porn-inflected fantasies “understand perfectly well how absurd it is to be more attracted by the substitute than by the real thing, and it distresses them.” It’s not just that men are getting mired in a tar pit of sick desire, it’s that they recognize they’re being held back from real affection, real love.
So if they start questioning how they were taught to relate to their own bodies, they may start wondering whether the conventional wisdom about women is wrong as well. It’s not just the premise of PAF’s porn ad they’re skeptical of—it’s the premise of the Plan B one, too. Meanwhile, even Kamala’s most devoted female supporters are getting not morning-after-pilled but Lysistrata-pilled, appropriating an obscure South Korean protest movement and swearing off sex to punish the men who supposedly voted them into dhimmitude.
But, as Mary Harrington pointed out yesterday, the funny thing about this melodramatic little gesture is that it suggests liberal girls and conservative boys are arriving together by very different routes at nearly the exact same set of conclusions. It’s almost as if all roads lead these days to the suspicion that sex is about more than satisfaction, so that a little more choosiness, and a little less levity, wouldn’t hurt.
All this is happening at a time when many women are already reconsidering whether the freedoms afforded by hormonal birth control are worth the emotional risks of granting men consequence-free access to their bodies. At the same time, men are remembering that women’s bodies, like their own, are vulnerable to more than physical harm in the act of love. It could be we are groping, often in spite of ourselves, toward something like a new digital-age consensus between men and women to the effect that sex is serious business, to be approached with mutual care. And if that’s true, then the war between the sexes is over—if you want it.
This is bad for Democrats exactly to the extent that they’ve positioned men and women as competitors in the sexual marketplace, which lets them present themselves as ministers of biotechnology that blocks the physical consequences of sex and philosophy that obscures the spiritual cost of doing so. In the domain of the heart, that’s the essence of the Democratic platform. But, as last Tuesday’s results attest, it’s no longer such an attractive offer.
