No, you don't need 'No Nut November' this year.
IN TIMES LIKE THESE?
Hey horny readers! Well, maybe not today. I’m writing this newsletter hours after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 Presidential election. This newsletter is a bit about feelings, a bit about facing reality, and I’m tying in that silly annual tradition that right wing chuds love so much—No Nut November.
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Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
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A man representing the America First movement stood on a stage and gave a speech that was so vile and antisemitic that it received national outrage. It was 1941, and Charles Lindbergh’s speech in Des Moines, IA was enough to derail the entire movement. Eight decades later, Donald Trump gave similar speeches about immigrants and other groups, in front of the same slogan, and he’s just won his second presidential election.
We don’t know yet why the campaign didn’t work (despite pundits rushing to explain it on TV, inevitably blaming one or more minority groups). Maybe the young bros just didn’t care about reproductive rights, although the majority of white women also voted for Trump. Maybe it’s hard for the every-day person to understand how existential crises, like the rise of fascism, would feel to them on a day-to-day level. Maybe none of that matters. The reality is that MAGA is still a growing movement, taking in more people from all different backgrounds. They didn’t peak when a hoard of chuds in “Back the Blue” gear stormed the Capitol and clobbered police officers. Our whole country has moved to the right and now we need to brace for the consequences. It’s not just about a presidential election, though. It’s about our ever-limited checks and balances, and the down-ballot races that people didn’t show up to vote for. We can be upset today, but we have a lot of work to do to protect the people we love.
Last night, I was furious, mostly at the pollsters, pundits, and smug podcasts hosts who I trusted to have some expertise, but they didn’t know shit. This morning, while I was doom scrolling and thinking about my friends who are in immediate danger of losing their rights, my girlfriends who will likely not have access to reproductive healthcare, and the school children who will learn that a convicted felon is their president, I got a notification from a male author that I follow. He’s doing “No Nut November” and he needed EVERYONE to know that he’s not masturbating this month. Imagine not jerking off? IN TIMES LIKE THESE?
For reference “No Nut November” is much like Seinfeld’s “The Contest,” where men on the internet abstain from watching p*rn, masturbating, and even ejaculation in general. Unlike Seinfeld, the NNN contest was co-opted by far-right activists just a few years after it began. I wrote a piece on the online anti-p*rn and masturbation movements last year:
No Nut November’s roots were on Reddit, part of a larger “No Fap” movement. If you’d like to be master of your domain for longer than one month, the No Fap community has a website, so naturally I paid them a visit. No Fap promises to help you “get a new grip on life,” which is hilarious, but unfortunately this isn’t a parody. On the homepage, a user writes, “Amazing that a forum like this exists as a support group for people without even having to leave their homes.” I assume if you’re struggling with a p*rn addiction, having to leave your home would be a plus! On the blog, another user bragged that since No Fap, he was able to stop objectifying women. He could have also just…stopped objectifying women! But don’t worry, No Fap claims to be rooted in “science.”
There is an even darker side to the online no fap movement. Many of the message boards contain misogyny. They are also populated by hate groups that claim that p*rnography is a Jewish conspiracy, to control the West by using p*rn to render white Christian men impotent. It sounds silly, but this conspiracy has been in several mass shooting manifestos and is also spread by the likes of the Proud Boys, who need no help being impotent, for the record.
On a more mainstream level, No Nut November and abstaining from masturbation in general has been discussed and promoted by an array of Joe Rogan podcast guests (at least Rogan himself seemed to think it was silly). If you want to permanently kill boners for yourself, you can watch a conversation between Andrew Tate and Tucker Carlson about the No Fap movement (I won’t link to this). In that interview, Tate defines the goal of No Nut November—pursuing “Male Excellence.”
What in the world are these silly men—the same men who worked to get Donald Trump elected—talking about?? In 2022, Tucker released a series called “The End of Men,” which featured tips to boost masculinity, like tanning your balls. Yes, you read that right. In it, he posits that society is collapsing due to immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and the emasculation of men. Another Trump collaborator, RFK Jr. is featured as an expert who explains that the government is poisoning us. The core argument in the documentary is that conservative men must work to reassert their dominance. In this world, male excellence is synonymous with toxic ancient views and misogyny.
It’s all reminiscent of a time in the 1920s when there was a concept floating around that men may be able to rejuvenate their health by getting a new set of balls (I wrote about this last week). Doctors used testicles from goats for a while, and then switched to cadavers. Then, something crazy started happening. Men were getting kidnapped by “gland pirates” in Chicago, drugged with chloroform, and waking up with empty scrota. Newspapers went wild with the story, eager to report on the “Gland Larceny.”
Donald Trump got the “bro vote” yesterday (this article is a pretty good explanation of how he did it). I know that so much of our work in the next few years is likely to focus on preserving democracy, women’s reproductive rights, healthcare, the vilification of our trans friends, and other issues that vulnerable members of society might face. But if the men pushing No Nut November and “male excellence” are influencing the next administration, maybe we need to pay attention to the bros too. Are they ok?
It’s Wednesday, November 6th, 2024. Today, the work continues.
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