The internet keeps inventing new trends and challenges. We all remember tipping buckets of ice cold water over ourselves during the Ice Bucket Challenge in 2014, filming it, posting it on social media and tagging the next victim. Luckily, the No Nut November challenge isn’t about video of the protagonists and tagging, but movies, in this case porn movies, aren’t that far off the mark.
“The “No Nut November” challenge is aimed exclusively at men. The English word “to nut” colloquially means something like ejaculating in men. The challenge for the male participants is not to masturbate for a month in November and The Internet movement originally descended from the “No Fap” movement, which the American Alexander Rhodes founded in 2011. He diagnosed a porn addiction at the time and came to the conclusion that giving up masturbating could improve his health and gave it a forum on Reddit, where men found a place to share sexual frustration, erectile dysfunction, and porn addiction.
Slightly more mainstream and not quite as deep-rooted, this developed into the Internet trend “No Nut November”, which younger men tend to take part in social media in order to regain a little more self-control. There is also repeated talk of health benefits from deliberately avoiding masturbation, but this has hardly been researched. The few studies that exist on the subject of porn addiction and the health pros and cons of male masturbation even contradict each other on the pros and cons arguments.
The Belgian University of Antwerp, for example, found in a non-representative online survey in 2020 that men who watch a lot of porn have more erectile dysfunction and less fun in bed. Another researcher, the American neuroscientist Nicole Prause, came to the conclusion that the opposite should be the case. But if you want to breathe a sigh of relief now, you should know: The World Health Organization (WHO) counts porn addiction among the compulsive sexual disorders.
It is also interesting that the addiction, unlike many others, is not neurologically detectable. A large study examined the brains of people who reported being addicted to porn. When they consumed porn, however, they did not show any reactions in the brain that are typical of addiction. Nevertheless, some men find it fun to take part in “No Nut November”, on the social media platforms there are numerous memes and jokes that make fun of men’s sexual congestion. Since the internet knows no borders, the next challenge will be in December, which will make up for what some people missed in “No Nut November”. Then follows the “Destroy Dick December”, which means something like: “Destroy your penis December”. Well then, Merry Christmas.
Sources: RND, Image, NoFap
