1. Unlikely Bedfellows

The Moral Majority and Anti-Porn Feminists

The Moral Majority, largely organized by American Southern Baptist pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. and composed mostly of evangelical Christians, emerged in the 1970s to combat the spread of pornography in the United States. The movement had little to fear with Richard Nixon holding the presidency. Nixon dedicated himself to maintaining the federal government’s efforts to “control and eliminate smut from our national life.”1 However, the election of populist Democrat Jimmy Carter to the presidency provided a new opening for the movement to leverage anti-pornography sentiment to gain national attention. The Moral Majority was catapulted onto the national stage in 1976 when Carter gave an interview in Playboy magazine, acknowledging that he had “lusted in his heart,” an attempt to humanize himself and acknowledge that despite his dedication to Christianity, he, too, struggled with sin.2 For many, this was a convenient line of attack against a populist Democratic president, but others were horror-struck in earnest. As one reporter wrote, “For faith leaders, it was an easily exploitable issue; for Falwell, it was a crusade.”3 Further, mobilizing these communities against pornography was the proving grounds for the rhetoric of “family values,” the same rhetoric that would later be used to mobilize conservative Christians in opposition to feminism, gay rights, and abortion access.4

By the 1980s, the Moral Majority had leveraged popular anti-pornography sentiment to build a powerful movement, as demonstrated by their impact on Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan’s reelection campaign of 1984 saw anti-pornography rhetoric added to the Republican Party platform for the first time, and shortly thereafter, he appointed Edwin Meese, his extremely conservative attorney general, to spearhead a new presidential commission on pornography. The nearly 2,000-page Meese Report was inflammatory, unilaterally condemning “smut” as a threat to American culture and morality.5 Reagan quickly leveraged the report to institute a new “obscenity strike force” meant to crack down on the proliferation of pornography made possible by VCRs, camcorders, and cable television. For the following five years, the federal government was able to leverage the community standards of small, conservative areas of the country to prosecute pornographers distributing mail-order tapes, films, and magazines, slowing the growth of the pornography industry.

While none of this is particularly surprising to anyone glancingly familiar with the history of conservative Christian politics in the United States, what is surprising is the unlikely bedfellows that the Moral Majority found in their war on porn: anti-porn feminists. None are more emblematic of this strand of feminism than Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. In 1987, MacKinnon defined pornography as

the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.6

For MacKinnon, this definition naturally led to the feminist insight that all pornography is a form of rape that reinforces gender inequality and status quo sexual politics, most notably normalizing and encouraging violence and discrimination against women.7 Andrea Dworkin largely shared this perspective and worked with MacKinnon to push anti-porn feminist activism to new heights in her attempts to get the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance (ACRO) passed. The ACRO would’ve legally treated pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights and allowed them to sue for damages in courts of law in the United States.8 Dworkin also testified against pornography before the Meese Commission and went so far as to pen a book on the potential alliance to be struck between anti-porn feminists and right-wing women.9

As many critics were quick to point out, this strand of anti-porn feminism failed to substantially distinguish itself from the conservative anti-porn positions it was allying itself with.10 In fact, anti-porn feminism opened a rift that has continued to fracture any attempts to produce a unified feminist front since the 1980s.11 Anti-porn feminism also precludes feminism from cleanly allying itself with LGBTQIA+ studies and activism because it places heteronormativity at the foundation of feminist critique. As Gayle Rubin has argued, the ideology of anti-porn feminism contains an implied, if not explicit, condemnation of sadomasochism. It argues that sadomasochism is the bedrock of all pornography, and through this association, tethers BDSM practices to the objectification, exploitation, and rape of women.12 Further, as Jay Daniel Thompson has shown at length, anti-porn feminism to this day continues to silently position heterosexuality as the archetype of all pornography, denying the very possibility of LGBTQIA+ pornographies and instead interpreting them as mere variations on the heteroporn genre. Thompson argues that without an explicit analysis of heterosexuality in our critiques of pornography, we will never get an accurate critique. Instead, we will simply reproduce heteronormative anti-porn assumptions.13

While I wouldn’t go so far as to dismiss MacKinnon and Dworkin’s work, which certainly was responding to legitimate and important feminist concerns about the material impacts of sex work, objectification, misogyny, and rape culture, I do think it’s important to keep in mind how the turn to the criminal justice system and the alliance with other anti-pornography crusaders frequently undermined their attempts to achieve their more laudable goals of improving the material lives of women.

Popular anxiety around sex, sexuality, and pornography produces unlikely bedfellows—in this instance, between anti-porn feminists and arch-conservatives. Whatever their differences, these anti-porn allies tend to share a common commitment, whether they openly espouse it or are not quite conscious of it, to the reinforcement of heteronormativity. This chapter will work to trace the emergence of a new set of unlikely bedfellows in the war on pornography: the alt-right and pseudoscientific conservative Christian nonprofit organizations. We will see in great detail how the popular “Pandora’s box of porn” narrative has concealed a large amount of anti-porn activism and organizing. By tracing the new set of cultural and political forces that have formed a strategic coalition to battle the scourge of pornography today, we will see just how central this issue is to contemporary American politics and culture. The first section of the chapter will examine the manosphere, a portion of the internet in which men’s rights activists articulate new forms of masculinity, and particularly look at the digital footprints of the pickup artist Roosh V, the NoFap movement, Proud Boys, and incels. The second section will turn to Morality in Media—also known as the National Council on Sex Exploitation (NCOSE)—as emblematic of a revitalized Christian conservative anti-porn movement in the United States that leverages pseudoscience and nonprofit think tank strategies to advance its cause.

It is worth noting that I struggled with deciding how much of this discourse to include in the book for fear of perpetuating it or representing it as being the common and openly held beliefs of the majority of Americans. The discourse is certainly not omnipresent or potent enough to warrant such conclusions. In the end, I decided to include this information because, while these may be fringe extremist movements on the internet, they also are constituted by men who have the time and technical savvy to hold an oversized influence online.14 These groups are the breeding ground of many internet trolls, and their message boards have been used to organize systematic campaigns to target sex workers and adult entertainers, as we’ll see in chapter 4, with a particularly detrimental effect on LGBTQIA+ sexual speech online. They exert direct power over internet discourse through campaigns of harassment and exploit internet platforms’ community guidelines, terms of service agreements, and community flagging features to censor feminist and LGBTQIA+ content. They also exert indirect power over internet discourse because their extremist ideas are often translated into a less toxic version by intermediaries who help them achieve greater public visibility. As we’ll see in chapter 2, many men in Silicon Valley from low-level coders to executives profess a similar ideology. While it is important to understand the manosphere and the targeted ways in which it exerts power over sexual speech online, my hope is that readers will be able to take their claims to universality and cultural and political agency with a grain of salt. They are not and should not be taken as representative of what most Americans think, feel, say, or do.

Enter the Manosphere

In an interview for New York Magazine, Sarah Diefendorf, a sociologist and Scholars Strategy Network postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah, has argued that the manosphere can be understood as sharing some basic beliefs and ideological commitments, including gender essentialism, biologically determined gender roles, an objectification of and sense of ownership over women’s bodies, and an urgent feeling that they are “losing power or control.”15 Sarah Banet-Weiser similarly argues that the manosphere has emerged in relation to a crisis in masculinity and a felt sense of loss of power to feminists. She describes the manosphere as ranging “from the more moderate, such as support for father’s rights and custody rights, doubts over the prevalence of domestic violence, and reflexive support of the military, to the more extreme, such as normalizing rape and sexual violence, manipulating and controlling women into sex, and making death threats against a vast number of people (mostly women) who disagree with these views.”16 While misogyny and heteronormativity are nothing new, they have been catalyzed by social media and internet forums like 4chan and Reddit.17

These online communities are diverse, individually fragmented across different forums and media, with participants crossing boundaries between them frequently, and their discourse is often loaded with irony and proliferating neologisms. It can thus be difficult to pin down what exactly different groups of men’s rights activists actually believe. That said, recent research has demonstrated that these communities are growing, that members tend to migrate from less extreme peripheral groups toward more hateful, toxic, and potentially violent groups, and that by our best approximation, participants’ online expression becomes more toxic and hateful as they make this migration.18 The manosphere has helped to manifest what Jack Bratich has called a “cultural will-to-humiliation,” which operates as a form of power to reinforce white patriarchy and heteronormativity.19 Shame and humiliation are essential to the power of the manosphere.20 The manosphere’s internet trolls wield shame and humiliation to destroy relationships, ruin careers, and force their targets for harassment to leave online social spaces. Their vitriol is borne primarily by women and disproportionately by women of color.21

While there have been several recent academic studies that work to make sense of the heterogeneous discourse of the manosphere, they largely stick to examining it in terms of misogyny and thus analyze it in terms of gender.22 The analysis in this chapter looks to build on that discourse by examining the manosphere in terms of heteronormativity, including the complicated ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated together in digital misogynist discourse. The manosphere is also an interesting conjuncture to explore because men’s rights activists frequently have deep concerns over the role that pornography is playing in contemporary American life. The manosphere thus frequently joins the traditional alliance between anti-porn feminists and Christian conservatives, itself alive and well in the work of Gail Dines, for instance.23 Who would’ve thought those two groups would get into bed with men’s rights activists?

While these digital misogynists have many permutations on the web, there are four groups in particular that spend a lot of time thinking and writing about pornography: pickup artists and similar theorists of neomasculinity, the #NoFap community, Proud Boys, and incels. Each of these communities structures their opposition to pornography slightly differently and diverges widely on other aspects of politics and culture, yet each share a common commitment to preserving traditional gender roles—to the point of making pseudoscientific arguments about their biological innateness—and reinforcing heteronormativity. As Banet-Weiser has argued, while the various permutations of the manosphere—incels, Proud Boys, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pickup artists, #NoFap—analyzed in this chapter may present as distinct and disconnected, they operate as a network, a shared system of misogynist ideology, each helping to authorize and support the other.24 Further, while the communities participating in each of these discourses are small, they wield an inordinate amount of power on the internet because of their organizing tactics, exploitation of internet infrastructure and platform community guidelines and terms and conditions, and the amount of time, money, and technical expertise they have to dedicate to their movements.

Roosh V, Pickup Artistry, and Neomasculinity

Take, for example, Daryush Valizadeh, better known as Roosh V, a self-proclaimed pickup artist who writes about his sexual exploits, pickup artistry, masculinity, and other issues related to the “manosphere,” and who has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “male supremacist.”25 While it is difficult to establish just how popular Roosh’s writings are, it is safe to assume he has a wide readership. His website Return of Kings published 5,800 articles before shuttering in 2018.26 His books currently on Amazon hover within the top one hundred to top one thousand for most of the categories they are ranked in.27 He planned, and later canceled, a global day of meetings in one hundred cities in forty countries that elicited angry petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures and responses from mayors, legislators, and police chiefs.28 He was even doxed by Anonymous, a prominent online hacker collective that released his address, phone number, and a picture of his house in Washington, DC, where he supposedly lives with his mother.29

A quick Google search reveals both mountains of forum posts that support and extend Roosh’s thinking and a tidal wave of criticism, mostly directed at his bragging about sex acts that seem to have been nonconsensual and his arguments in favor of legalizing rape, both of which he has walked back and claimed were instances of sarcasm.30 This claim of sarcasm, satire, or other forms of humor is a standard tactic that internet trolls, and the alt-right in particular, use to simultaneously voice extremist thoughts and distance themselves from responsibility for having voiced them.31 In short, Roosh is a popular and provocative writer on contemporary masculinity whose work also happens to spend a lot of time connecting the standard tenets of alt-right ideology to heteronormativity. As such, he is worth examining in detail to get a better sense of the contemporary cultural context within which content moderation has emerged, particularly the visceral and heteronormatively inflected disgust that drives much of its draconian suppression of not just pornography but all sexual speech.

In 2015, Roosh wrote a post on his website introducing the term neomasculinity to describe the “developing ideology” that has been pieced together across his media platform (including Return of Kings and RVF, the Roosh V Forum).32 In an article for Return of Kings exploring the origins of neomasculinity, one of the site’s most popular contributors Quintus Curtius situated neomasculinity as a return to and continuation of Reagan-era conservative politics based on optimism, pragmatism, and faith in traditional institutions.33 He writes, “Neomasculinity employs new methods to achieve old aims. [ . . . ] Neomasculinity is deeply conservative.”34 For Roosh, neomasculinity meant pursuing or believing in at least half of the items on the following list:

I’ve italicized the items here that speak particularly strongly to heteronormativity to demonstrate that, in aligning with at least half of the list, nearly all neomasculinists will subscribe to some components of heteronormativity as I have set out in the introduction, if not to heteronormativity writ large. Below I analyze how Roosh positions some of the items on this list as they reveal the overlapping and contradictory ideological tenets of the alt-right, which perpetuates heteronormativity online and helps to produce the digital closet.

For Roosh, game or pickup artistry is an essential component of contemporary masculinity. For a host of undertheorized reasons, Roosh argues that the majority of men’s “natural” selves will leave them involuntarily celibate, or at best, only able to have sex with women of lower socioeconomic status and attractiveness. It is worth noting that Roosh understands women’s attractiveness to be an objective trait determined by body measurements and facial symmetry, whereas men’s attractiveness is more subjective and correlated to personality traits and status symbols. Obviously, objectification is alive and well here, reified by pseudoscientific arguments. To return to the point at hand, this imbalance is the result of a liberal sexual economy, which Roosh addresses under the term “sexual marketplace value.” This sexual economy not only mirrors the free-market capitalist economy, but it is also deeply influenced by it. Women’s ability to achieve financial independence has led to them “leisurely shopping around for the most high status male [they] can obtain.”36 Roosh claims that women now dominate the workplace through political correctness–policing human resources departments and control the domestic sphere by leveraging false rape and domestic violence charges or threats thereof. In short, women are increasingly empowered and use this empowerment to dominate men and almost exclusively sleep with more attractive and wealthy men, knowing that they can always settle down into a monogamous marriage in their thirties after they are well past their “peak beauty and fertility.”37

The result for low-status men, often referred to as betas in alt-right discourse, is that they have less access to sex, which Roosh describes as part of “their basic survival needs.”38 In many ways, Roosh longs for bygone eras where Christian morality would leverage the threat of shame and ostracization to pressure women into marrying “the first good man they bed, one they often met through family or church.”39 He writes, “This ensured society stability and sexual equality in that most able-bodied men would be able to procure a wife.”40 Ideally, Roosh wants a woman to be “punished for her mistakes.”41 Here we can clearly see the deep entanglement of neomasculinity with heteronormativity. Roosh alternates between the reproductive and carnal drives as the bedrock for sexuality, bracketing sex almost exclusively to male-female couplings. He tries to map heterosexual monogamous familism onto a broader pseudoscientific argument about the maintenance of society or the species, a move that is obviously false.42 By this logic, though, humans would actually be behaving more “naturally” if only the “alphas” were allowed to impregnate all the world’s females, as is the case in many other animal species’ mating patterns. In short, the human species and human society doesn’t need betas to have sex to “survive.” The real aim is to revive power structures that preserve beta males’ unrestrained access to women’s bodies for heterosexual intercourse. Roosh acknowledges this explicitly: “Patriarchal systems must [ . . . ] be regained as the primary organizing structure of modern societies.”43

Roosh’s position is based on both a cisnormative and a heteronormative presumption of traditional gender roles. He argues that gender equality is nothing but “a myth that has no scientific basis.”44 Instead, men and women are binary categories that have “likely existed since the beginning of the human species.”45 For Roosh, men have essential traits like dominance, independence, rationality, and analytical thinking, whereas women have essential traits like submissiveness, dependence, emotional nature, faster intuition, and cooperative sharing. It is worth noting that Roosh here demonstrates the biological determinist or essentialist point of view that ignores a host of evidence on the role of epigenesis and sociocultural factors on gender and sexuality. This manifests, as we’ve seen above, in the slippage between the terms “species” and “society” in Roosh’s writing, a useful conflation that allows Roosh to alternate between biological determinist and social constructionist claims whenever it suits his arguments. For example, Roosh also argues, “A woman’s nature is therefore not static, and takes the shape of the container of her environment. The true nature of men, on the other hand, is in turn reactionary to signals women put out that declare their sexual preferences in males.”46 Thus women are at one point genetically submissive, dependent, emotional, intuitive, and cooperative and at another subject to hedonistic sex drives that lead them to adapt their behavioral traits to any given social context to maximize pleasure.

Further, as is common in the discourse, women are once again positioned as the second sex, the marked subjects, as men’s sexual decision-making is purely reactionary and natural. Yet, in the same article, Roosh argues for the essential role that testosterone plays in masculinity. He writes, “Being a man is not a social construct—it’s primarily biological construct [sic] that is heavily dependent on healthy body and brain functioning that results from appropriate testosterone levels.”47 Men are somehow both reactionary and stable, as they apparently do not take on the shape of the container they fill. Again, the entire theory is grounded upon a heteronormative model of binary sex differences. Roosh acknowledges this explicitly, noting that sex is determined at birth by genetics and is necessarily tethered to the manifestation of masculine and feminine behavioral characteristics. This is a vast oversimplification. While anatomical sex differences are often dimorphic, they are determined not simply by “genes” but by five factors: (1) the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, (2) type of gonads, (3) sex hormones, (4) internal reproductive anatomy, and (5) external genitalia.48 While in the majority of people all five of these factors align according to the dimorphic sex model, an estimated 1.7 percent of people are born intersex, with one or more of these factors not only inverted but possibly somewhere on a spectrum between the dimorphic poles.49 Thus, even the markers of anatomical sex can be blurry, let alone the performative aspects of gender.50 Roosh acknowledges this dismissively, writing, “There are also exceptions with hermaphrodites, deformed humans who are born with genitalia from both sexes.”51 Here Roosh is profoundly cisnormative, intentionally denigrating, and out of step with scientific discourse, which no longer uses the term “hermaphrodite” in favor of “disorders of sex development,” itself a denigrating term to intersex people.52

As is to be expected, Roosh quickly jumps from anatomical sex to gender, importing the same binary model and essentialism that he mistakenly extracted from the “scientific evidence.” He works this out in a passage that is worth quoting at length:

Any attempt to manually seek out a gender or identity outside of the binary sex model is artificial, non-biological, and deviant. Such a practice is not conducive to family formation or sanity on a societal level. A society can be definitively labeled ill if it enables its citizens to artificially invent gender identities and pick them at will as if shopping for fruit in a supermarket. Even worse is outright facilitating mentally ill individuals to change their sex, which leads to an increase in suicide and drug use without alleviating the underlying mental disorder. . . .53

The binary sex model has flaws in that it will not perfectly suit those who possess personality and behavioral traits from the opposite sex, meaning that institutions and spaces for homosexuals or transsexuals won’t be constructed, but at the same time it is inappropriate to encourage or enable a person to jump out of their genetically determined sex by opening the door on dozens of different gender identities and orientations that definitively harm the individual.

In a patriarchal society with traditional sex roles, only a tiny minority will have trouble with their assigned sex at birth. They should not be allowed to disrupt the lifestyle and healthy traditions of those who soundly fit into the natural binary model.

There are a number of issues worth picking out from this passage. First, Roosh conflates anatomical sex and gender strategically so that he might use the pseudoscientific evidence he has gathered on the dimorphism of anatomical sex to argue for essentialized, binary, heteronormative gender roles. As we’ll see, this is a common argumentative thread across alt-right, neo-Christian conservative, and Silicon Valley tech discourses. Second, as is to be expected, Roosh connects these essentialized gender roles to familism, and through familism to the health of “society.” Again, here he conflates society with species, as the health of society is a subjective determination based on value judgments, while the health of the species is closer to an objectively determinable aspect based on reproduction, among other determinants. Third, he forges a false will of the majority by essentializing heterosexuality, and thus the reason he has to hold the ground of biological essentialism becomes clear. If people, including their gender identities and sexualities, take the shape of the container they fill, then the proliferation of gender identities and sexualities he so ardently fears might break his constructed majority as more people deviate from traditional binarized gender norms and heterosexuality, the latter of which was intentionally defined ambiguously to make space to accommodate enough deviance to forge a majority.

Lastly, he tries to combine the language of psychiatric disorders with a misuse of social scientific evidence as if it were biologically determined to falsely reverse the causality of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people’s suffering and vulnerability. What I mean by this is that he looks at trends in data on drug use, suicide, and life satisfaction among transgender populations to argue that trans people use drugs, commit suicide, or are generally unhappy because they are trans. This is a biologically determinist reading of social phenomena, which any 101 course would teach students is an improper way to treat social scientific data. Instead, our best evidence shows that trans people use drugs, commit suicide, and are unhappy most often because they are one of the most precarious populations on earth, subject to state-sponsored and freelance violence on a daily basis, and constantly struggling to navigate and find acceptance performing their gender identity in a profoundly cisnormative world.54 Then, in a double faux pas, he extrapolates from his bad interpretation of the social scientific data to other forms of gender nonconformance and queer sexualities, arguing that they too “definitively harm the individual.”55

In short, Roosh’s whole philosophy leverages badly interpreted social scientific and neurological data to essentialize not only the dimorphism of anatomical sex but also binary gender identities, traditional gender roles, familism, heterosexuality, and, in the end, patriarchy, all so that betas can get laid. Any deviance from these essentialized norms is treated as an aberration, dangerous to the individual, society, and the species. Roosh admits that deviation happens at different levels of this schema from intersex to genderqueer to homosexuality but thinks these people ought to conform to the “majority” rather than be “accommodated” in society. In essence, he wants LGBTQIA+ people to stay in the closet, both in real life and digitally. All of this is packed with a bizarre combination of desiring that women be available for heterosexual intercourse while castigating them for ever consenting to it pre- (or worse, extra-) maritally.56 Here we find yet again the tired dichotomy of the “frigid bitch” and the “whore,” the perpetual dichotomy of feminine sexuality as imagined by cisgender, heterosexual men. Yet this time it comes from the oddest possible spokesman. But if Donald Trump can ride to the presidency on the back of evangelical voters, then who is to tell a self-professed pickup artist that he cannot preach sexual moderation in his manuals for how to play the game?

Since 2018, Roosh’s online publishing platforms have been on the decline, Amazon has removed several of his books from their self-publishing platform, YouTube has sanctioned him, and PayPal and Discus have terminated their partnerships with him.57 While his influence may be waning and his Return of Kings site may be on indefinite hiatus, one can see the deep influence his platform has had on the manosphere in the sheer number of references to this platform in the NoFap, Proud Boy, and incel discourses. Further, as we will see in chapter 2, this paradoxical discourse that combines pickup artistry with more traditional heteronormative values is deeply influential in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is a world populated by self-identified nerds, a number of whom found themselves wealthy enough nearly overnight to have all the sex they missed out on in their youth. It is no wonder then that this odd combination of “beta” angst over spurned sexual overtures with “alpha” entitlement to women’s bodies has become so pervasive online.

NoFap

The NoFap community originated on Reddit and has largely been organized through the r/NoFap subreddit started by Alexander Rhodes in 2011. The r/NoFap subreddit currently has 449,000 subscribers.58 The community is centrally organized around abstaining from pornography, masturbation, and/or orgasm (PMO) for set periods of time and takes its name from an onomatopoeic synonym for masturbation—fap—that originated in a Japanese comic strip in 1999.59 If you follow the forum, you will see between the banal and the misogynist posts a stream of (largely male) participants reporting the effects of abstaining from PMO as being akin to the awakening of “superpowers.” Posts regularly report effects like increases in concentration, energy, physical activity, confidence, and success with women. While there is certainly nothing unhealthy about abstaining from PMO for periods of time, the discourse on the NoFap forums is problematic in a number of senses: (1) it tends to oversimplify scientific evidence, (2) it tends to overhype the effects and correlate them too strongly to increased testosterone levels, (3) it reifies a fundamentally moral argument against PMO, and (4) by combining an emphasis on testosterone with an emphasis on this moral tradition of self-control, NoFap reifies heteronormativity.

Clinical psychologist and author of The Myth of Sex Addiction David Ley has written of the NoFap movement, “I’m not in opposition to them, but I do think their ideas are simplistic, naïve and promote a sad, reductionistic and distorted view of male sexuality and masculinity.”60 This is a common sentiment in the discourse of experts on psychology and human behavior when addressing the NoFap movement. The proponents of NoFap often ground their claims on bad interpretations of science or pseudoscience. Since 1972, the American Medical Association has considered masturbation to be normal human behavior.61 Since then, research has shown that masturbation is correlated to a number of health benefits, such as a release of sexual tension, reduced stress, better sleep, improved self-esteem and body image, relief of menstrual cramps and muscle tension, strengthening of muscle tone in the pelvic and anal areas, and it can help treat sexual problems.62 While for some people masturbation can compensate for a lack of partnered sex or sexual satisfaction, and thus potentially inhibit the formation of relationships, it is also frequently a component of an active and pleasurable sex life.63 The science is in on masturbation, and it indicates that there are no significant health risks.

There is certainly a rise in diagnoses of psychogenic erectile dysfunction (ED) among men under forty—which many researchers examine as instances of potential pornography-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED) in which the arousal mechanisms of the (male) body are short-circuited by the novelty and extremity of pornography. That said, there are many factors beyond the novelty thesis that may contribute to this rise. One important factor to be considered is the inadvertent sexual conditioning through pornography leading to unrealistic sexual expectations.64 Another factor is simply better diagnostic tools and an increased willingness of men to speak to their doctors about ED. However, the first peer-reviewed academic study on PIED found that viewing pornography correlates to greater sexual responsiveness rather than ED but also that there likely is no such thing as a biological addiction to pornography.65 In other words, the science is still out on PIED. We need much more research on the social conditioning factor, which would benefit from critical analyses of pornography content as well. What does seem clear is that whatever impact pornography is having on sexual health, it is not biological. Another study has shown that there is no change in the neuroendocrine response to orgasm after abstaining from PMO—thus indicating that many of the felt changes reported by members of the NoFap movement are psychological rather than biological in nature. However, this study did show that male abstinence can lead to elevated testosterone levels, and this is the data that members of the NoFap movement most frequently cling to.66

While the NoFap community is purportedly gender-neutral, much of its discourse is caught up in the reification of hegemonic masculinity, and this is the most likely explanation for the fixation on testosterone levels. Social psychologists Kris Taylor and Sue Jackson have studied the NoFap community and argue that its members “employ idealized discourses of innate masculinity and the need for ‘real sex’ to justify their resistance to pornography use and masturbation.”67 In this discourse, men are positioned as biologically inclined to seek pleasure from women, which in turn reifies traditional gender roles and sexual expectations.

A frequent reference in this community is the work of Gary Wilson, an anti-porn activist and author of Your Brain on Porn.68 Wilson argues that males are biologically wired to seek novelty during sexual selection—each female offers a novel genetic opportunity, and men are genetically programmed to seek them out, have sex with them, and impregnate them. For Wilson, online pornography simulates this experience of bringing an infinite stream of new females into view, thus desensitizing males to the novelty of females and subsequently to the desire to realize the genetic opportunity of copulating with them. Male brains become effectively rewired and addicted similarly to drug and alcohol abusers. He reduces this to the repetitive function of the click—clicking on content in an ever-refreshing feed of pornography—and describes this as a click-based addiction in the TED Talk that helped to popularize his ideas.69 His TED Talk comes with a legal disclaimer from TED: “This talk contains several assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology. While some viewers might find advice provided in this talk to be helpful, please do not look to this talk for medical advice.”70 Funnily, it is TED’s own addiction to click-based revenues that have led them to maintain a talk that requires such a disclaimer.

The problem here is that Wilson, like so many others, is taking a vague moral position, justifying it by appealing to normative gender roles, and then biologizing those gender roles. This is a paradox that Taylor and Jackson highlighted in their study of NoFap forums: NoFap requires men to “perform ostensibly innate characteristics.”71 In short, the problem with this discourse is that neither the morals nor the gender roles are universalizable. As Thomas Laqueur has demonstrated at great length, this conjuncture of universalized anti-masturbation sentiment is an essentially modern phenomenon in the Western world.72 Laqueur found that masturbation was not seen as a serious problem for much of recorded history until the 1712 publication of Onania: Or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences (in Both Sexes) Considered.73 Onania claimed that masturbation led to deleterious effects, like stunted growth, epilepsy, and the contraction of sexually transmitted infections.

The publication of Onania and its surrounding discourse is also deeply tied to the emergence of modern binary gender roles. Stephen Greenblatt neatly summarizes Laqueur’s discoveries about this connection:

His book showed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people gradually shifted from a one-sex model—in which the woman’s body was viewed as a providentially inferior version of a man’s—to a two-sex model, in which the organs of generation were understood to be quite distinct. That is, they gave up the ancient idea that the vagina was in effect an unborn penis and grasped that what they had thought were the woman’s undescended testicles were in fact something quite different, something they called ovaries.74

Thus, the emergence of procreative heteronormativity is not a millennia-old phenomenon but a thoroughly modern one in which the genders were articulated as different in kind, each with their own normative social and sexual roles. Onania thus successfully combined a historic religious and moral opposition to masturbation with misguided medical practice and scientificity, a heteronormative formula that would endure for generations.75

Onania had multiple American editions that were influential in the United States and imitated by many local authors.76 Its line of argumentation was echoed by American founding father Benjamin Rush, who suggested “a vegetable diet, temperance, bodily labor, cold baths, avoidance of obscenity, music, a close study of mathematics, military glory, and, if all else failed, castor oil” to ward off masturbation.77 The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were filled with American physicians in the so-called “social hygiene movement” continuously inventing new ways to diagnose and temper the conditions that tempted people to masturbate, ranging from diets to devices.78 These diets most notably included Sylvester Graham’s famous crackers and J. H. Kellogg’s cereal. Kellogg advocated not only serving his cold and bland cereal but also bandaging genitals and tying children’s hands to their bedposts at night.79 Other techniques included the use of straitjackets; wrapping children in cold, wet sheets at night; applying leeches to genitals; burning genital tissue with an iron; castration; and clitoridectomy. Technologies included genital cages, metal mittens, rings of metal spikes to cover the penis and stab it if it became erect, and metal vulva guards.80 As Amy Wilkins, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado–Boulder has noted in her interview for New York Magazine, this discourse tethers masculine identity to an ethic of self-control that actually reinforces heteronormativity—certain (heterosexual) desires are articulated as natural impulses in need of control through rigidly policed gender norms.81 #NoFap needs to be understood in light of this. The men who predominate in its online discourse are participating in a form of masculinity tethered to self-control and traditional heteronormative biases.

In his 1904 book Adolescence, which is frequently cited as the origin of adolescent psychology as a field of scientific research, G. Stanley Hall examines the research supporting the argument that “self-abuse [i.e., masturbation] itself can be the cause of a distinct type of insanity”—namely, sex perversion.82 Despite his other contributions to the field, Hall brought many of his heteronormative biases to bear on adolescent psychology and established them at the foundation of the field.83 The strength of this discourse is nowhere felt more strongly than in the Boy Scout Handbook, whose 1910 edition argued that “for an instructor to let his boys walk on this exceedingly thin ice without giving them a warning word owing to some prudish sentimentality, would be little short of a crime.”84 While psychologists like Magnus Hirschfeld and Wilhelm Stekel would publish arguments that masturbation had no scientifically demonstrable negative effects on health in 1917, it wasn’t until the late 1940s and 1950s that researchers like Virginia Johnson, William Masters, and Alfred Kinsey began in earnest to normalize masturbation, and scientific consensus wasn’t reached until the 1970s. However, as Laqueur demonstrates, even after scientific consensus was reached, anti-masturbation sentiments flourished and continue to permeate our society through jokes and shame felt about masturbation, as well as in religious discourse. Tellingly, when asked about a leading proponent of the NoFap movement, Laqueur responded via email, “This guy is straight out of nineteenth century America. It warms a historian’s heart.”85

In his astute overview of the NoFap movement, Jesse Singal argues that NoFap offers “a version of anti-masturbation worries that has been tailored for an age in which productivity is the sort of buzzword that piety and purity were back when this panic first emerged.”86 This twenty-first-century anti-masturbation sentiment is fundamentally structured by an ambivalence about technology—and online pornography in particular. On the one hand, Robert Weiss has argued that “the [NoFap] movement is less about not masturbating than it is about not engaging with ‘sexnology’ to the exclusion of in-the-flesh intimate encounters. In other words, these young men are rebelling against tech-sex; they are stepping away from their laptops and into the real world.”87 From this perspective, and following Singal, we can understand the NoFap movement as having a deep anxiety about nonproductive sex, where productive sex might be read through either of the two historic heteronormative lenses of procreative sex or heterosexual intercourse to alleviate the biological impetus toward pleasure and sexual release. On the other hand, Sarah Sharma has critiqued the manosphere’s emphasis on using technology for a sexodus in which feminist critiques and demands can be ignored because sex robots, toys, and pornography now prevent women from withholding sexual gratification from frustrated men—which to many in the manosphere is the only reason feminist demands might otherwise be negotiable.88

From this perspective, we can understand the NoFap movement as highly invested in sexual conservatism and particularly the maintenance of traditional gender roles, as well as technocapitalism. Here productivity might imply the felt urgency to continually press onward with the development of technology in a hypermasculine competitive marketplace without ever pausing to reflect, exercise hindsight, or invest time and energy into addressing feminist concerns. Why waste time learning how to make yourself and the world more inviting to women when you can build a robot sex slave? #NoFappers are not anti-orgasm, but they generally are decidedly anti-feminist.

Proud Boys

The violent ends of a movement toward an anti-pornography and anti-masturbation ethic can be more clearly seen in the case of the Proud Boys. The group began in the fall of 2016 when VICE magazine cofounder and libertarian provocateur Gavin McInnes and a group of fans gathered in a bar to laugh at videos about the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, which seeks to offer white reparations to African people, and to sing the song “Proud of Your Boy” from the Broadway adaptation of the Disney animated film Aladdin.89 McInnes repeatedly articulates the Proud Boys as a fraternal social and drinking club open to any men, regardless of race or sexuality, willing to openly declare their commitment to what he calls “Western chauvinism.”90 While the term “Western chauvinism” is not clearly defined in the majority of Proud Boys materials, it is generally tied to a commitment to Western modernity and conservation of its values. These values center on a number of tenets:

All one has to do to join the Proud Boys is publicly declare one’s Western chauvinism. By forgoing anonymity and facing the consequences of taking this stance, one achieves the “First Degree” of Proud Boydom.92 This entry into Proud Boydom is often accompanied by the purchase of a black and gold Fred Perry polo shirt, which is the unofficial uniform of the Proud Boys.93

Simon Houpt, of Canada’s The Globe and Mail, described McInnes’s beliefs as “libertarian politics, Father Knows Best gender roles, closed borders, Islamophobia and something he calls ‘Western chauvinism.’”94 It was this combination of beliefs and the actions that they encouraged among Proud Boys that led the Southern Poverty Law Center to label the Proud Boys a hate group in 2018 and Canada to label them a terrorist group in 2021.95 Proud Boy forums and online social networks were rife with white nationalist memes that, while they clash with the official positioning of the group, are in line with the alliances it has built and its affiliated media outlets. McInnes has published on hate sites like VDare.com and American Renaissance and in far-right publications like Taki’s Magazine. He has made a series of racist, transphobic, and misogynistic statements in these media outlets and interviews for more mainstream publications.96 For example, in 2003, McInnes told the New York Times, “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. . . . I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”97 The ability to make these sorts of offensive statements itself is gendered and sexualized because it is associated with masculine potency, capacity to satisfy a sexual partner, and maintenance of “alpha” status. Conservatives who refuse to do so are referred to as cuckservatives, a term McInnes draws from Matt Forney’s article for Return of Kings that associates such conservatives with cuckolds, men whose wives seek sexual gratification outside of marriage, often with racially othered male partners.98 For McInnes, real conservatives would be better served by abandoning politically correct culture: “We keep clamoring for the youth vote, and the woman vote, and the minority vote when if we just accepted the dad vote we’d be fine.”99

McInnes’s commitments to heteronormativity are rendered even more transparent in light of his violent transphobia. In an article titled “Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural,” McInnes wrote, “Womanhood is not on a shelf next to wigs and makeup. Similarly, being a dude is quite involved. Ripping your vaginal canal out of your fly doesn’t mean you are going to start inventing shit and knowing how cement works. Being a man is awesome. So is being a woman. We should revere these creations, not revel in their bastardization.”100 He has similarly argued that transgender people are “mentally ill gays” and has referred to them as “gender n*****s” and “stupid lunatics.”101 Though he argues that his transphobia is located in a respect for traditional womanhood, McInnes is also an avowed anti-feminist and at times open sexist. On his YouTube show, McInnes has noted, “Maybe the reason I’m sexist is because women are dumb. No, I’m just kidding, ladies. But you do tend to not thrive in certain areas—like writing.”102 The Proud Boys use their pro-Western posture to position themselves as promoting “Western values” without ever acknowledging their perpetuation of the worst “Western” prejudices and intolerances around race, gender, and sexuality.

While the First Degree of Proud Boydom simply involves a public commitment to this ideology, the subsequent degrees involve taking concrete actions. The Second Degree of Proud Boydom is twofold. First, members must name five breakfast cereals while getting physically assaulted by at least five men. According to McInnes, this serves as an exercise in “adrenaline control” that comes in useful during both physical and verbal altercations. Proud Boys need to maintain their composure at all times. This test also works toward bonding and building camaraderie among Proud Boys.103 Second, Proud Boys must commit to only watching pornography and masturbating once every thirty days, and when they do so, it can only be within one yard of a woman and with her explicit consent. As McInnes notes, “[M]ost Proud Boys will cite #NoWanks as what’s improved their life the most. It gets young men off the couch and talking to women and it gets married men away from their computers and back into bed with their significant other.”104 Interestingly, “Gay Proud Boys are exempt from #NoWanks because they are doing just fine for intercourse.”105 This paradox is likely due to the Proud Boys’ emphasis on marriage and procreation as the ultimate goals for its members.

The Proud Boys reproduce all of the same historically heteronormative dimensions of anti-masturbation culture outlined previously in relation to the NoFap movement, like the reification of binarized gender roles and thus heterosexual normativity, the procreative ethic, a presumed entitlement to access to women’s bodies for sex, and an ambivalence about sexnology that plays out poorly for women either way. However, the discourse of self-control and its relation to heteronormativity is particularly important in the case of the Proud Boys. This discourse has traditionally been used to demonstrate the moral superiority and civilizational advancement of the white, heterosexual bourgeoisie and subsequently to justify the regulation and policing of sex by this same class of individuals. Time and again this rhetoric has been used to discriminate against and police people of color (POC) for deviations from heteronormativity.106 This legacy manifests in the Proud Boys’ tethering of sexual self-control to their commitment to “Western chauvinism,” a combination that is amplified by collectivized policing mechanisms. As Wilkins has noted, similarly to historically Christian abstinence practices, the Proud Boys require “accountability partners” and their forums offer an opportunity to share stories of the struggle to control one’s desire. In an interview with New York Magazine, she notes, “In this way they created a group culture of self-control that A) proved they were all red-blooded heterosexual young men and B) made sexuality central to their identities even when they weren’t doing it.”107

By collectively articulating their (predominantly heteronormative) sexuality in public and within the confines of an ideology that requires a commitment to sexual norms for membership and group approval, the Proud Boys have implicitly tethered heteronormativity to group identity. As Wilkins notes, “If one has to think about letting down the ‘boys’ every time he wants to jerk off, his association with his own, private sexuality becomes public, and twinned directly to a political ideology. There is no space between his body and the political apparatus that governs it.”108 A racialized heteronormativity thus becomes ingrained in Proud Boys’ comportment toward their own bodies and private sexuality by the threat of social ostracization and community policing mechanisms.

Proud Boys can reach the Third Degree by getting a tattoo that reads “Proud Boy.” The Fourth Degree, which was added later, requires a Proud Boy to have “endured a major conflict related to the cause.”109 According to McInnes, the Fourth Degree is not meant to encourage members to seek out physical confrontations with their enemies but is instead reserved for Proud Boys forced to defend themselves. He writes, “We don’t start fights, we finish them. 4th degree is a consolation prize for being thrust into a shitty situation and surviving.”110 This latter clarification came alongside a number of initiatives to distance the Proud Boys from the alt-right after white supremacist and Proud Boy member Jason Kessler organized the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 that led to a number of skirmishes and the vehicular assault of many counterprotesters and murder of Heather Heyer by an alt-right extremist. Shortly after the Unite the Right rally, McInnes wrote a piece for Proud Boy Magazine in which he argued that the alt-right was trying to infiltrate the Proud Boys and frame them for crimes by wearing their shirts while doing terrible things in public. He then laid out some rules for how members might identify and excise members of the alt-right from the Proud Boy organization.111

Despite McInnes’s attempts to distance his organization from the alt-right, the FBI identified members of the Proud Boys as extremist threats in the fall of 2018 and began warning local law enforcement agencies of their attempts to actively recruit members and their role in the escalation of violence at political rallies in Charlottesville, Portland, and Seattle.112 That fall the Proud Boys also saw themselves banned from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and banned from using PayPal. Two days after the FBI’s extremist group designation was made public, McInnes publicly quit the Proud Boys, though he claimed his actions were due to his lawyers advising him that his quitting could lessen the sentence of the “NYC nine,” a group of Proud Boys then undergoing trial for fighting protesters in New York City.113 Since then, McInnes has been banned from Amazon, PayPal, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.114 Despite claiming to step down, he still maintains strong connections to the movement and participates in mobilizing it for extremist demonstrations, most notably the insurrection at the US Capitol Building in 2021. The Proud Boys may be the strongest of these movements in the manosphere at the time of writing after being specifically referenced by Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential debates, where they heard Trump tell them to “stand by” during the election.115

Incels

The official incel wiki describes an incel as “someone who is or would be romantically and/or sexually rejected by the vast majority of the single members of the gender they are attracted to while approaching at random in spaces socially designated for dating, for at least a few years.”116 Hence the term incel, which is a shortened version of “involuntarily celibate.” According to incel orthodoxy, inceldom is not a belief system, label, or ideology but instead a matter of fact, a phenomenon that occurs in both human society and the animal kingdom.117 While their official wiki acknowledges that prejudice is widespread across incel forums, the wiki works to position this prejudice as nonessential to inceldom. The community makes widespread use of surveys of their forum users that show that only between 28 and 50 percent of the incel community is white—the largest minority population being what they refer to as (male) currycels, or incels whose ethnic background lies in the Indian subcontinent.118

Incels can trace a long genealogy for their community. In 1987, Brian Gilmartin published Shyness & Love, in which he argued that “love-shyness” ought to be treated as a medical condition—a term that he would use interchangeably with incel later in life.119 Incels were active on the early internet in the alt.support.shyness newsgroup started in 1988 and the alt.seduction.fast newsgroup started in 1994, though the common term at the time was “socially anxious men,” a term more accurate in part because it captures the male-centeredness of inceldom.120 The term “incel” first entered popular usage in 1997 and achieved legitimacy through Denise Donnelly’s 2001 academic study of involuntary celibacy published in the Journal of Sex Research.121 The intervening years have seen the incel community flourish online, taking shape within a number of internet forums, including incels.co, r/Braincels on Reddit, Incelistan on Facebook, Incelistan.net, love-shy.com, and the forums Incelswithouthate and Foreveralone on the official incel wiki.122

Over these two decades, the incel community has also shifted from being an inclusive and somewhat woke support group to a set of frustrated men blaming women for their lack of access to women’s bodies and calling for acts of extreme violence.123 On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger, a self-identified incel, murdered six people and injured fourteen others outside a sorority house in Isla Vista, California, leaving behind a manifesto describing his involuntary celibacy and his desire for revenge after being rejected by women.124 Rodger’s acts were a direct inspiration to other frustrated men in the manosphere who have committed similar crimes and was cited in the murder of nine people and injury of eight at the Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon; the murder of two people in Aztec, New Mexico; the murder of seventeen people and injury of seventeen others at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; the murder of ten people and injury of fourteen others in a vehicle-ramming attack in Toronto, Ontario; and the murder of two and injury of four at a hot yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida.125

The incel community is notoriously and intentionally difficult to parse because of their use of incelese—their official glossary boasts over three hundred neologisms coined by the incel community. For instance, inceldom actually exists on a spectrum ranging from nearcels—who have some attributes of the incel but are also somewhat normal and may have dated in the past in between long dry spells—to truecels—who have “never even touched someone of the opposite sex,” with incels serving as the intermediate step between the two.126 Perhaps the most important neologism within inceldom is blackpill. This term is an incel-specific take on the familiar alt-right discourse on redpilling, drawn from the scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo is offered a choice between a blue pill that will let him wake up and forget all the events of the film or a red pill that will open his eyes to the world in its true form. While the red pill offers a call to action by presenting the vision of an ugly world that can be saved, the black pill offers only an awakening to the sexual dystopia of the modern world and at best some coping mechanisms and group solidarity.

While incels will sometimes attempt to discursively position the blackpill as being gender-neutral, it is without a doubt a masculine perspective of an inaccessible sexual marketplace. The blackpill consists of five essential truths:

1. Looks are necessary to the formation of physical or romantic desire

2. Looks are not distributed evenly among men

3. Looks are not subjective

4. “The Dualistic Mating Strategy”

5. Hypergamy

The first truth describes a world in which women establish a minimum level of attractiveness for potential “mates” that they will then proceed to lie about and diminish the importance of. The second and third truths note that some men are disadvantaged by the uneven distribution of objective attractiveness across the population. The fourth truth largely positions incels as potential cuckolds that will be selected to raise the children of other men after women have lost the ability to cycle through more attractive partners—thus gaining “access to their genes.” The fifth truth is that women are inclined to “trade up” for better men, and this tendency is catalyzed by a society with liberated women and sexuality.127

In their reading of A. J. Bateman’s principles from evolutionary biology, incels argue that this hypergamy is understood as a biologically determined aspect of all females in the animal kingdom. Bateman derived his famous principles from a study of fruit fly mating in 1948 that for fifty years served as a touchstone for evolutionary biology.128 His findings were basically that males are biologically driven to mate with as many females as possible, whereas females are biologically driven to be highly selective in their choices of mates—findings that he explicitly predicted would apply to humans.129 For many years thereafter, evolutionary biologists faced what might be described as a confirmation bias as they took to the field looking for male animals exerting a lot of time and energy trying to mate with evasive and highly selective females. Inceldom’s application of Bateman’s principle is problematic for a number of reasons. First, recent empirical studies have failed to reproduce Bateman’s experimental results.130 Second, modern empirical data, like the results of DNA testing, produce results that are in conflict with Bateman’s principle and often show female animals mating with multiple partners during a single mating season.131 Third, mathematical models have demonstrated that intense competition for mates among one sex does not necessarily cause the opposite sex to increase their selectiveness.132 And, finally, animals with higher intelligence, like primates, who can manipulate their social environments and/or reproductive physiology are marked by “female behavior and physiology (e.g. social strategizing, sexual solicitation or rejection, sexual advertisement or concealed ovulation, multiple mating, and reproductive failure)” that challenges Bateman’s principle.133 Sarah Blaffer Hrdy famously showed that female primates gained material benefits from mating with multiple partners, such as reduced risk of infanticide and increased assurance of fertilization.134

Humans in particular engage in all sorts of behaviors that make the application of Bateman’s principles difficult and can lead to high variability across the species based on local contexts.135 As Stevan J. Arnold has noted, evolutionary biologists have been too quick to assume that Bateman’s principles can be universalized to all animals.136 Perhaps the biggest complicating factor is that Bateman’s principles apply exclusively to reproductive sexual behaviors—Bateman himself did not even analyze sexual encounters between fruit flies that did not produce offspring. The social scripts and strategies for nonreproductive sex are much more complicated than Bateman’s principles might model, as sexual selection is not constrained by the time investment and difficulty of producing ova or rearing children. Regardless, incels leverage Bateman to commiserate with one another over their lack of access to women’s bodies. Incels mourn their lack of access to women’s bodies for sex writ large, not just reproductive sex, and thus are closer to Roosh’s pickup artists than to Proud Boys.

The blackpill thus uses, at best, a reductive reading of scientific evidence to articulate a biologically determined sexual dystopia for men. It manages to combine the paradoxical pillars of heteronormativity, reproductive sex, and biological sex drives by mapping questionable research into reproductive sexual strategies from evolutionary biology onto a heterosexual libidinal economy, thus, even when women are not seeking to reproduce, their sexual selection is understood as being motivated by a biologically determined drive toward coyness, withholding sex, and cuckoldry. In this way, it reifies heteronormativity by grounding all sexual strategies within the evolutionary biology of reproduction. The blackpill philosophy is intended to awaken incels to the fact that “there’s no personal solution to systematic dating problems for men and only societal hardship (such as mass poverty) can solve men’s systemic dating issues.”137 In its least problematic interpretation, this fundamental truth is meant to protect incels from falling victim to “self-improvement” discourses, thus saving them the time, energy, and disappointment that would result from trying to improve their attractiveness to women. However, as we’ve seen, many men do not respond to the blackpill as an awakening to an unchangeable world and instead are driven to acts of mass murder that specifically target women to seek revenge on them for withholding sex from “unattractive” men.

From the Manosphere to Evangelical Anti-Porn Crusaders

The extended analyses of these myriad movements in the manosphere demonstrate that despite their heterogeneity, in many instances, they all share a deep commitment to normative and biologically essentialized gender roles, heteronormative sexuality, and a tendency to lean on the rhetoric of science to produce pseudoscientific arguments about gender and sexuality. In the next chapter, I will show how a lot of these same comportments can be found among the male coders and executives in Silicon Valley, who often make eerily similar arguments as these online extremists, even if they prefer to site tamer and more publicly accessible intermediaries like the pop psychologist Jordan Peterson. Below, I would like to demonstrate how these same comportments are also frequently reproduced among evangelical conservatives who are crusading against online pornography. While an exhaustive analysis of these actors is outside the purview of this chapter, I will examine the case of Morality in Media, now rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, in great detail. NCOSE is illuminating because it bridges the gap between earlier Christian conservative anti-porn activism and today’s form, as Morality in Media was founded in the 1970s, remained rather active through the decades, and through its rebranding has morphed into the most visible and successful Christian conservative crusader against porn. NCOSE is also particularly interesting for our case because it demonstrates a blend of alt-right arguments, woke Leftist arguments, pseudoscientific takes on scientific research, and traditional evangelical conservative positions on gender and sexuality. NCOSE thus perfectly demonstrates how crusades against pornography make for unlikely bedfellows.

The Neo-Christian Conservative Anti-Porn Movement

The popular narrative that conservatives have given up on regulating porn is a myth. Over the past twenty years, the proliferation of cyberporn has been coupled with the continued growth of preexisting and the emergence of new anti-porn grassroots campaigns, such Morality in Media/NCOSE, Pure Desires Ministries, the American Family Association, the National Law Center for Children and Families, the Family Research Council, the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, Enough Is Enough, People Not Porn, Fight the New Drug, Truth About Porn, Your Brain on Porn, Culture Reframed, and the Fortify Program. While each of these groups differ in scale, effectiveness, and the depth of their explicit connections to Christian churches; they all commit to publicizing anti-pornography research and argumentation that draws on the language of addiction and argues for strong negative biological and psychological impacts of pornography use; they all frame their intervention through rhetorical appeals to the unwanted exposure of children to pornography and maintaining the sanctity of the family; they all call for heightened regulation of pornography and censorship of obscenity.

To my eye, Morality in Media—now NCOSE—has emerged at the forefront of the traditional conservative anti-porn movement in the United States. NCOSE has by far the most robust and sophisticated web presence of any of these groups, producing annual progress reports, sophisticated white papers, how-to guides for citizens to get involved and parents to better control their children’s internet access and achieving headlines by being mentioned in media outlets like the Today Show, CNN News, the New York Times, BBC News, USA Today, and Fox News.138 Their visibility is likely due to the inflammatory rhetoric that they use and their intentional blurring of the lines between pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking, which together make for sensational headlines and easy click-bait on the web.

To get an overview of their take on pornography, one needs only look at their 2017 white paper, Pornography & Public Health: Research Summary, in which they describe pornography as “a social toxin that destroys relationships, steals innocence, erodes compassion, breeds violence, and kills love.”139 Their key argument is that pornography has become so ubiquitous that children are getting exposed to it at younger ages, that its pervasive use leads to addiction, that it negatively impacts women (they repeatedly leverage feminist rhetoric when useful), that its ubiquity infringes on individual rights by making it impossible to live a porn-free life, that private use of pornography has public consequences, that the combination of these last two facts means that it is unmanageable at the individual level and requires state regulation, and finally, that “pornography is prostitution for mass consumption.”140

As is common in many of their reports, NCOSE loosely and reductively stitches together disparate academic research to draw their predetermined conclusions about pornography. As they note,

While independently these studies do not prove that pornography causes harm, taken in totality, the converging evidence overwhelmingly suggests that pornography is correlated with a broad array of harms that adversely impact the public health of the nation. These include higher incidence of STIs, increased verbal and physical sexual aggression, acceptance of rape myths, risky sexual behaviors among adolescents, reduced impulse control and reckless decision making, increased sexual dysfunction, and more.141

It is worth noting that many of the studies they cite take place in cultural contexts outside the United States and have not been repeatedly verified by independent researchers. They are often preliminary results that are being read as objective facts and stitched together to make a leap toward totalization. This is not to say that none of their points are valid or in need of further research but only to bring these issues back into question rather than establishing them as axiomatic for all valid perspectives on pornography use. That said, it would take an entire book to rebut each of the claims that NCOSE makes about pornography, and here we might be best served by restricting ourselves to examining in more detail some of the more heteronormative claims that they establish at the foundation of their anti-pornography platform.

This platform mixes all of the familiar conservative tropes about protecting children, preserving the family, and combating sexual deviance with more contemporary feminist critiques of pornography, a legacy of the alliance between the Moral Majority and feminist porn critics from the twentieth century. The report argues that pornography harms children’s brains, renders them more susceptible to addictions of all kinds as adults, weakens their emotional bonds with their parents, makes them more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors, increases their chances of reporting being victims of physical and sexual violence, makes them more likely to commit crimes, lessens their sexual satisfaction, makes them more likely to have sex with younger adolescents, and increases their sexual uncertainty and casual sexual exploration.142

Much of the research supporting these arguments is up for debate, hasn’t been reproduced across multiple studies, and often took place in contexts outside the United States. Beyond this, though, we can see a heteronormative perspective entrenched in the alignment of research. Sex is understood as a private and adult act that ought to be controlled and subsumed under structures like marital procreation or loving monogamous relationships. The core concern is deviation from heteronormativity. As the report notes, “More frequent use of sexually explicit Internet materials is shown to foster greater sexual uncertainty in the formation of sexual beliefs and values, as well as a shift away from sexual permissiveness with affection to attitudes supportive of uncommitted sexual exploration.”143 The development of a freer and more fluid sexuality is to be combated at all costs, as can be seen in the connections it draws to biological dysfunction, psychological trauma, and association with criminality—though even conservative media outlets like Reason have reported the factual inaccuracy of these links, particularly to crime, which has gone down in a near causal relation with the rise of online pornography.144

We can also see this entrenched heteronormativity in the emphasis on preserving the nuclear family. As the study notes under the heading “Risky Behaviors and Other Harms,” “For males, increased pornography use is correlated with more sex partners, [ . . . ] greater acceptance of sex outside of marriage for married individuals, greater acceptance of sex before marriage, and less child centeredness during marriage.”145 It further correlates pornography use to paying for sex, increased casual sexual encounters, increased sexually transmitted infections (STIs), less condom use, earlier sexual debuts, increased relationship breakups, higher divorce rates, and riskier sexual practices.146 Perhaps most tellingly, the report argues that marriage formation brings demographic and socioeconomic improvements to society, and that “pornography has been shown to significantly negatively impact marriage formation, and in light robust controls, the effect is likely causal.”147 The report thus reflects the standard devil’s bargain of heteronormativity in which sex for pleasure is only acceptable within heterosexual, monogamous, amorous relationships, and, when this is pressed, the norm paradoxically reverts to procreative sex. Pornography is thus a social evil because it encourages libertinism and fuels sexual exploration and expressivity outside of the confines of heteronormative social scripts.

Ironically, despite feminism’s well-established critiques of the nuclear family and an existence centered on child-rearing, a discursive alliance has been formed.148 NCOSE argues that the paraphilic disorders and extreme sex in hard-core pornography teach women to enjoy sexual violence and degradation, instigate sexual offenses and perpetuate rape myths, increase verbal and physical aggression against women, increase female sexual victimization, and fuel the demand for sexual exploitation.149 The study also notes that pornography leads to negative body images for women and pressure to perform the sex acts depicted in pornography: “As a result of viewing pornography, women reported lowered body image, criticism from their partners regarding their bodies, increased pressure to perform acts seen in pornographic films, and less actual sex.”150 While all of these are valid concerns worthy of further study and potential activism, it is clear that NCOSE has failed to engage any feminist thinkers after the early 1990s—with the possible exception of Gail Dines’s radical anti-pornography writings. The report seems totally unaware of the discourse surrounding feminist and LGBTQIA+ pornography, instead understanding pornography as simply consisting of mainstream heteroporn and extremist deviant porn, like child sexual abuse images, incest pornography, zoophilia, coprophilia, urophilia, rape play, and torture.151 In other words, the report takes a historically and culturally specific genre of pornography as the universal form of any and all possible pornography. It thus fails to recognize that a few dominant porn production companies are responsible for implementing and maintaining the dominant genre of mainstream heteroporn that potentially leads to such negative consequences for women. The report comes close to recognizing this but never follows through on its own insight: “Mainstream commercial pornography has coalesced around a relatively homogeneous script involving violence and female degradation.”152 Subsequently, NCOSE is unable to imagine that pornography could ever be different. This severely limits its analysis and shows that it cannot think of porn outside of heteroporn, perhaps another consequence of its entrenched heteronormative perspective.

The one exception to NCOSE’s silence on more contemporary feminist discourse is their uptake of the term intersectionality. The term was coined by Black feminist theorist, lawyer, and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and has achieved public visibility through her 2016 TED Talk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality.”153 For Crenshaw, identity exists at the intersection of various cultural binaries and forms of marginalization. She draws on the experience of Black women to describe intersectionality, showing how Black women face the intersectional marginalization of being both marginalized as women and as Black people. In a staggering recontextualization of the term, NCOSE uses intersectionality as a foundational principle to interconnect sexual exploitation and abuse. As they explain, “Evidence supports the fact that child sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography, sex trafficking, sexual violence, and more, are not isolated phenomena occurring in a vacuum, but that these and other forms of sexual abuse and exploitation overlap and reinforce one another.”154 By articulating pornography, child sex abuse, prostitution, and sex trafficking as intersections of a singular social phenomenon, NCOSE is able to “promote a comprehensive umbrella of solutions.”155 As we will see in much greater detail in chapters 3 and 4, nowhere has this intersectional approach been more successful and more damaging to sex workers, adult entertainers, sex educators, and LGBTQIA+ content creators than in the 2017 passage of the FOSTA-SESTA act by the US Congress. At this point in time, though, it is worth reviewing some of the other effects that this intersectional and heteronormative approach has had on government and corporate policy in the United States.

NCOSE tends to overstate its impact on policy and regulation and downplay the small size of its funding.156 For instance, the organization terminated all reported federal lobbying in 2006.157 Despite this, NCOSE claims to host regular events in the US Capitol Building.158 For example, in July of 2015, NCOSE held an anti-pornography summit on Capitol Hill titled “Pornography: A Public Health Crisis” that was meant to educate lawmakers on “how porn fuels sex trafficking, child exploitation, and sexual violence.”159 During the summit, NCOSE compared this health crisis to those of lead poisoning, asbestos exposure, smoking, and HIV/AIDS. The impact of these sorts of events is hard to gauge, but in 2012, NCOSE was able to get GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum to commit on the record to cracking down on pornography, though the sincerity of these commitments was questionable.160 In 2016, NCOSE saw the Republican National Committee include language from its summit in the official Republican platform for 2016: “The internet must not become a safe haven for predators. Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our commitment to children’s safety and well-being.”161 Between April of 2016 and March of 2018, NCOSE also managed to get draft legislation officially recognizing pornography as a public health concern passed by state legislative bodies in Utah, South Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida, some even going so far as to describe pornography as a public health crisis.162 A number of these legislative bodies passed these resolutions with upwards of 80 percent of the votes, sometimes unanimously. The effect has also been particularly noticeable in the military, which stopped all sales of pornography from military commissaries and now offers sex-trafficking training to all military service members “with the issue of pornography explained as a factor driving demand.”163

NCOSE claims to have directly impacted the corporate policies of major US companies such as Comcast, Google, Walmart, Verizon, Starbucks, and McDonalds. Take Comcast for example, which in 2018 had more than twenty million television subscribers and was pressured to install much stronger parental controls and institute a “Common Sense” rating scheme to allow parents to automatically filter which programming and apps children have access to, including a “Kid’s Zone” in which all content is vetted for children under the age of twelve. The company has also buried pornographic channels, blocked their voice remote from searching for pornographic content, and even sanitized the titles and descriptions of adult entertainment offerings to cut down on the unwanted exposure of children to pornography. Further, pornography has been completely removed from their mobile app. Comcast has committed to future meetings with NCOSE and has publicly noted, “We welcome dialogue on how to continually improve on these measures from third-party stakeholders in family safety and digital health, including the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.”164 Or take Google, which, one year after appearing on NCOSE’s “Dirty Dozen” list, changed its corporate policy and banned all ads with pornographic content or that link to websites with sexually explicit content and further removed all pornographic and sexually explicit apps from its officially sanctioned Google Play store.165 The company also agreed to make SafeSearch much more visible by placing it prominently in the upper righthand corner of Google Images.166

Even if NCOSE is not directly responsible for the number of government and corporate policy changes that they claim in their literature, the organization is representative of a wider and more powerful discourse on pornography and sexuality. Whether or not they originated the set of rhetorical strategies and arguments that they employ, they capture a common sentiment about and comportment toward sex and sexuality in the twenty-first century. This new discourse has selected the few bits of feminist and queer theory from the past twenty years that support their arguments to dress an old discourse up in new clothes. As we’ll see in chapter 3, it is this discourse that has led to the most comprehensive changes in government and corporate policy toward pornography and sexual expression on the internet. It goes without saying that this demonstrates that heteronormativity still has deep roots in contemporary society and is deeply impacting not only the discourse surrounding the internet but also its very infrastructure.

Conclusion

Across the board, all of these contemporary anti-porn crusaders share a commitment to traditional gender roles and heteronormativity. They further share a commitment to leveraging pseudoscientific discourse and the rhetoric of protecting children and families to not only make their ideas palatable in the public forum but also to make it difficult for elected officials to be seen publicly opposing their political platforms. As we’ve seen concretely, the “Pandora’s box of porn” myth is at least untrue insofar as anti-porn crusaders have never stopped organizing or acting in the public sphere to achieve increased censorship. The following chapters will further show how this perspective on gender, sexuality, and pornography permeates tech companies—and internet platforms in particular—and how the untamable flow of pornography has been dammed up through content moderation. These automated content filters have become so strong that they routinely overblock material that is not pornographic, including art, sex education, LGBTQIA+ community discussions and resources, and a random assortment of other nonpornographic content. Further, even where the myth does hold true, for instance on tube sites like Pornhub, the untamable flow of pornography has been channeled into mainstream heteroporn productions, diminishing the heterogeneity of pornography to the point where it has become a rather banal stream of the same limited sex acts described by the same limited keywords. Both of these results of automated content filters are a signal victory for alt-right and Christian conservative activists who are willing to strike a devil’s bargain to allow pornography to persist as long as it remains homogeneously heteronormative and who can use the content moderation infrastructure to systematically attack any low-budget or amateur pornographers who are making content that deviates from the heterosexual norm.