The totalizing meritocracy of heterosex: Subjectivity in NoFap

NoFap is a growing online community of mostly heterosexual men seeking to abstain from masturbation. Rereading scholarship on the history of men’s masturbation, I undertake a critical discourse analysis of NoFap-videos on YouTube to investigate NoFap’s interpellative matrix. NoFap offers a specific mode of becoming a man by advocating a particular form of self-relation. To become a man, one needs to reconcile one’s self-government with one’s organismic existence as a body ‘naturally’ built for meritocratic heterosexuality. Reflecting on NoFap as a community connected to the manosphere, I conclude by suggesting that we thoroughly analyze manospherian modes of self-relation.