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gaphic · 7 months

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answer all of the artist questions or u a coward

WELL FUCK. OK

1. Art programs you have but don't use? Medibang Paint is the only one I can think of- everything happens in Procreate now!

2. Is it easier to draw someone facing left or right (or forward even)? definitely left, but right/front aren't too bad

3. What ideas come from when you were little? I'm not 100% sure I understand this one? My fairy fixation goes way back tho

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw? Boys.

5. Estimate of how much of your art you post online vs. the art you keep for yourself. Probably a 90/10 split, tbh? At least 80/20. I don't post much of my art

6. Anything that might inspire you subconsciously (i.e. this horse wasn't supposed to look like the Last Unicorn but I see it) I feel like I don't really experience this with drawing? With writing and character creation definitely, but I feel like I'm conscious of all my biggest drawing inspos

7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate? Hmmm. Legos

8. What's an old project idea that you've lost interest in? Camp Cauldron

9. What are your file name conventions?

10. Favorite piece of clothing to draw? Probably swishy skirts!

11. Do you listen to anything while drawing? If so, what? Just my regular music

12. Easiest part of body to draw? Arms, probably

13. A creator who you admire but whose work isn't your thing? I'm also not sure about this one? To me admiration goes hand in hand with liking... I respect a lot of artists whose work I'm not into though

14. Any favorite motifs? -patrick voice- is gender a motif?

15. *Where* do you draw (don't drop your ip address this just means do you doodle at a park or smth) At home mainly, sometimes at work or just wherever I happen to be. I'm trying to spend more time in Third Places

16. Something you are good at but don't really have fun doing? I can't think of anything? I'm getting better at enjoying every part of art

17. Do you eat/drink when drawing? if so, what? No? I use my hands to draw

18. An estimate of how much art supplies you've broken? Not that many tbh! I've always been very careful with my art things. A handful of pencils, surely

19. Favorite inanimate objects to draw (food, nature, etc.) Probably plants!

20. Something everyone else finds hard to draw but you enjoy? HANDS I love drawing hands

21. Art styles nothing like your own but you like anyways? Art styles unlike my own are my favorites! Jamie Hewlett, @tanglefootcomic, @ampreh, and @maruti-bitamin to name a few

22. What physical exercises do you do before drawing, if any? I always do some light warmups/hand and arm stretches

23. Do you use different layer modes? Yes ofc, great shortcut for shading and lighting

24. Do your references include stock images? I don't have like, a set reference folder, I just google what I need. So yeah, that usually includes stock images!

25. Something your art has been compared to that you were NOT inspired by? Scott Pilgrim

26. What's a piece that got a wildly different interpretation from what you intended? I don't post enough for this to happen to me B)

27. Do you warm up before getting to the good stuff? If so, what is it you draw to warm up with? I warm up with spirals, connect the dots, and snake in a basket

28. Any art events you have participated in the past (like zines) nope :\

29. Media you love, but doesn't inspire you artistically? Oxymoronic. Everything I love inspires me

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated? I DON'T POST ENOUGH FOR THIS but my color study self-portrait was really good

#thanks for the ask babe <3

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6irlpet · 2 years

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As a sub, your posts have helped me so muuch to be more comfortable and gently exposed to some hardcore kinks. Ive become much more open and less judgemental to them, even accepting im into some of them. A loooot of the harcore kink blogs on here are mysoginistic (as a kink), mainly for men or BY men, so this blog is rlly nice to have a space that doesnt gross me out. So far ive been inspired by you to explore my stockholm syndrome kink and also my ponyplay kink (even tho you dont have posts about it, you post a lot of petplay and that helped). Love u take care <3

ok serious non horny talk for a moment!!

first im sorry for sitting on this ask so long, i wanted to give it a good answer and then i uhhh forgot because i’m awful.

but this made me very very happy and glad and idk kink is something im really passionate about, i think there is so much harmful puritan socially regressive rhetoric out there even among proclaimed leftists saying porn and harder kinks is bad and like…. its not cool! its not feminist! ur not doing activism by shaming people for stuff u dont like! sexuality is normal and natural and there is nothing wrong with exploring these things safely, and i actually think doing so can be such a good healthy self exploratory experience of intimacy and bonding. especially kink and d/s, getting to explore sensation and psychological/emotional side instead of like, ‘sex is for procreation anything outside the accepted mainstream norm is deviant this mindset totally hasn’t caused harm historically’

it’s very hard sometimes to have these hardcore kinks, i spent years trying to deny i was into them, believing that things like cnc/cgl/porn in general were harmful, and its just not true. it’s always existed and it’s always going to exist and if we try to shame things and sweep them into the dark, ppl dont stop being into them, they just end up losing community and practicing unsafely. no one has to be into harder stuff, but the nastiness about it (sooo many times ppl will reblog a post of mine and i go to their blog to see like, ‘ddlg is abusive and ur a freak dni’ like Ok. dni with me first?) and saying that being into these things means ur into rape/csa irl is just untrue and so harmful (again, just forcing ppl to feel ashamed, practice unsafely, and lack community to come forward when theyve been harmed by a play partner) like if people can understand why violent video games doesnt make you a violent person, the only thing stopping them from understanding the same about harder kinks and porn is internalized reactionary christian bullshit lol.

i spent years thinking these kink were gross and “problematic” and im so much happier accepting that actually…. u can just let people do things! u dont have to like things!! u can blacklist it u dont have to make an excuse why its inherently bad!!!!! i used to have such bad sub drop even solo masturbating bc of guilt/shame for my hardcore fantasies, i’ve had to learn how to give myself good aftercare and tell myself its normal and fine and ppl who matter dont care (and its true! i have a v supportive group of friends, some that i play with, who know what im into and dont care even tho theyre not into it!!!) so hearing that ive helped you feel more comfortable exploring these things has made me v happy :’)

and that being said, like u said, theres definitely an overwhelming amount of hardcore kink on here that cis men run that just, feels gross to me. they reek of Fake Dom™️, they don’t care about kink and consent, they just wanna use u to get off and neglect the emotional side of the connection. and for a looong while i put up with it thinking it’s just what these kinks were like. that i had to have a degree of discomfort forcing interactions with men and misogyny play. but it’s not! i ended up remaking from my old blog and making this one because there were so many of those types of men following me and sending me asks/msgs and it was getting so bad for my mental health.

and fine, whatever, but i wanted to have a space that was exploring these kinks for femmes, for trans people, like im writing for me and ppl like me, who like the things i do. and im much happier for it (and i still have to block like 50-100 blogs every time i log in here, and had to turn DMs off bc i was getting so many from the 40M Greg Ohio Sadistic Daddy blogs full of stolen content despite my pinned. demonstrating some real great understanding of consent there huh guys /s)

anyway. im very very happy to get this message and im glad that my lil horny ramblings can be appreciated in such a way. not only are we okay for liking extreme stuff but we’re also extremely fucking cool and sexy. have a good night 😘

#ask #sorry for longpost but ahhhhgghh my Thoughts about kink #and my fuckin past with having to remake blogs bc there was no recovering it #THIS blog is a party babyyyy we are beating gender’s ass and indulging gross kinks #a lot of my posts r purposely gender neutral for this reason!#Thoughts #that will be a tag for if i ever get serious again. hopefully i do not

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amoebeau · 1 year

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hi!! what do you use to draw? ALSO i think we were mutuals on my super old instagram and i'd love to be friends ^_^ if ur ok with that!!!! i love ur art and ur free to infodump to me i'd love to listen

i use a mixture of procreate and firealpaca ( i switch between my ipad and my laptop based on how i feel lol) but its never consistent. i use mspaint sometimes too.. cant say i recall u i have bad memory.. BUT I LOVE MAKING FRIENDS!! my insta is coolamoeba if u wanna follow or ever send me a msg there :D

#asks #i also just generally talk more abt myself on insta

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little-cereal-draws · 2 years

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Hi feel free to respond to this privately but Hi, i love your animated videos, especially the shadows ones! What program(s) do you use if you don’t mind me asking and do u have any tips? I would love to start doing animatics but idk how/where to start. Thanks in advance! ^^

Hello! I'm so glad that you enjoyed my videos! My software is not fancy at all and might be a bit of a letdown tbh lol

For drawing I used to use Paint tool sai (which i think is what a lot of ppl use) but it wasn't working right on my computer, it wouldn't let me save my images. I got it off of some Japanese website and it was $19 (USD). Now I use the app that came with my computer. I have a Windows computer. It's called Sketchbook (oOoOh, so fancy lol) and it is limited in terms of brushes and pen pressure but I like it. Very easy to figure out. I also have Krita which I think I had to pay for. I don't remember how much tho, I want to say $15 (USD)?? Maybe? It is much more complex and lets you do things like animate but I don't use it bc I'm too lazy to figure it out lol I know there's a lot of great tutorials online tho. I also know a lot of ppl use Procreate which is much better especially in terms of brushes but it's not compatible w my computer :( Procreate costs $10 (USD) I think.

As for editing, I use Shotcut. It's a free software that I downloaded from somewhere, I don't remember. It is definitely limited in terms of filters, camera angles, and what you can put in it but hey, it's free! The one thing I hate the most abt it is you can't pan. It drives me insane. But it has zoom, text, filters, etc. I used to use Filmora which is also free but is even more limited and I think it puts a watermark on your videos.

Now for tips!

Uhh, I guess the most obvious is practice. I started doing animatics four years ago and I can't watch any of my old ones now, they're so bad lol

Another thing is vary your shot type. If you have a couple ppl doing smth together, do close ups, medium shots, and wide shots. Try different camera angles. It's ok to do the same type of shot a couple times in a row but after a while it can get boring.

An extension of the last point, if a character does smth like knock a thing over or move it or whatever, show the object moving and then their reaction. Reaction shots are very important for character's emotions. Wide shots to establish a setting.

As an extension of that point, watch your favorite show/movie and watch how they film it, when they zoom in, how they frame the characters etc. I've spent so much time doing that lol (WWDITS might not be the best example bc it's a documentary but it should still work pretty well)

In terms of moving characters/making it smooth, layers are going to be ur best friend lol I end up with so many layers when I make a video. It's partially because I'm scared to delete layers in case I need them later but it's also helpful to see a character's last position. If they're on the left and need to move to the right, draw them on the left, copy the layer, and move the new layer a little bit using the original one as a reference point. Continue until they've made it. Same thing if they're moving their hand up or whatever. Use old layers as reference points to avoid jumpiness.

Because animating/drawing in general is hard and time consuming and I'm lazy I try to reuse shots/poses as much as I can. Again if you have a character going from left to right and then later in the video going right to left, save the left to right layers. You can just flip them to make it look like they're going right to left and now you don't have to draw it again! This can be tricky tho bc you don't want your video to get repetitive like I said before. So do it but do it sparingly lol

THUMBNAIL FIRST! This is very helpful. Just make a bunch of little boxes with stick figures mapping out what's going to happen in ur video. It doesn't have to look good at all, it's just so you don't forget what's going to happen/get lost. This is mine for the video of Laszlo and Nadja dancing:

I put notes on this one so I remember what the actions and camera angles are. Since I was copying an already choregraphed dance here, I did that in black and then put in more interesting camera angles in blue on a different layer so it wasn't two minutes of the same full body shot

And uh yeah I think that's it! Hopefully this is helpful!

#asks #animatics #advice #drawing #animating

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mangofdoom · 5 months

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wait ive never shared this on here—

this is the first animatic Ive ever posted (and im still quite proud of it? weird). The way I made it tho… is uh… probably unconventional (click the read more thing to learn how ;3)

youtube

OK SO I firstbtried using flipaclip. but after the sketches and figuring out timing I realized that exporting the video caused the audio to be offset and that bugged the shit outta me so I changed plans i screen recorded the preview in flipaclip, imported the recording to procreate, and COUNTED THE FRAMES. INDIVIDUALLY. Finally i could match the number of frames to the actual nice ones I made in procreate. sweet! i had a video! i think! then i realized: “wait how do i add audio” PANIC

then I remembered the iMovie app my brother and i used to make home movies with. That could work! (i have no computer so no actual nice software, and less features in imovie) (sad) so i put the video into imovie and added the audio it… it was off. like very off. i tried editing it but it was so bad i got tired and gave up. i forgot about it completely.

like a month later i found it again, and being less sick of looking at it, I was like: yea sure i could upload this. I asked my brother, who had a computer, to add subtitles. But the program he used made incredibly crusty subtitles and i couldn’t match them completely with the frames. oh well. i uploaded without the subtitles and carried on my day.

until a few days later I realized I could make it BETTER I went back to the timed frames and added subtitles individually to each, according to the original music video, so us english speakers could know what the lyrics are (which i wanted because the korean lyrics are mostly the reason this song resonated so strongly with my story) so I tried to edit the timing in the frames better, but in imovie it again sucked ass. so, i finally gave up, and slapped the “timed” frames in so I could split the video in imovie and cut out extra time and get the timing PERFECT! it took like 3 hours cus i didn’t know what i was doing but I did it! i sure did

anyway ask me if u wanna know any lore stuff :) ill try not to give away too much

(also apologies if this is hard to read) (probs gonna edit it for clarity later)

#1mangojuicepls #art #oc art #youtube #animatic #villain by stella jang #how i made it #animatic pain #animation meme #oc animatic #this thing is apparently 3 months old but it feels like YEARS #Youtube

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hexagonsgalore · 2 years

Photo

tsukauchi: do you get a lot of those questions?

yagi: [extremely long groan]

yagi is tony hawk part 1 | part 2 | part 3 (here) | part ???

inspo below cut:

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tokenplz · 5 years

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A little halloweenie pic I did :3c

#fma #fmab #fullmetal alchemist #fullmetal alchemist brotherhood #greedling #greed #ling yao #tumblr gets a cleaned up version and 2 colors!!#also yes happy halneen :(#im mad i made greed too tall!!#procreate why do u deny me the resize canvas option cries #also is it me or is the res really shitty??#it looks really bad at my computer but it looks OK on my phone and tablet???? wtf is going on tumblr...#final

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dateamonster · 2 years

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please give us an unreasonably long answer about what your favorite classical monstery trait is, why you like it, and your favorite examples of it please please pl

i dont know if this is like a classic monstery trait or even rly what that entails but um im rly into like parasitism and/or monsters whose supposed body is actually just a host.

parasites used to be a big special interest of mine as a kid and even tho it isnt as strong as it was then i feel like that interest has sort of mutated and fused with my current interest in horror (which feels appropriate doesnt it) applying real life parasite logic to monsters sort of forces you to think about stuff like: what does this monster need to survive? how do their habits serve that need? and providing the monster in question is a sapient creature, how does it feel to be something whose existence demands leeching off of other living beings? physically and psychologically. how would that affect the way this creature relates to the world around them?

it also sorta gets me like reverse engineering some of my monsters. "i want this one to have a cool retractable proboscis under their tongue" ok cool now what purpose does that aspect of its biology serve? why would something evolve like this? if it uses it for feeding, what does that indicate about the food source and the method for feeding? and how does that affect their other behaviors?

obviously monsters dont always have to adhere to the rules of reality, but i like when they sorta. pay respect to them. creatures whose biology is subtly reminiscent of real life animals that we already know instinctively spell bad news for humans have sort of an instant advantage in the scariness department just because of that connection. which i think is neat-o!

theres also lots of potential there for exploring some fun body horror stuff (big fav of mine) as well as imo a kind of transhumanist existentialism. like ok if i am a creepy lil monster bug whose biological imperative is to burrow into a living human body and rewire their brain to help me feed and procreate, what is my relationship to this body really? (again assuming the creature in question is sapient ofc)

is it my home? my ride? my friend? unwilling friend maybe but maybe im also pumping said humans brain full of dopamine whenever they help me. does that make us friends? does that make the relationship mutually beneficial? or does that make me an oppressor, overwriting their will to fulfill my needs? and what about my will? arent i, this hungry little insect, just as much a slave to my own bodys demands as them? if, like so many species, i hatched into this body, warmed and nurtured by it, is it my mother? whats the meaningful distinction between me, the controlling parasite, dominating yet fragile, who would die without the flesh i inhabit, and my host, a mind trapped inside the limited mortal flesh it was born to spend its entire existence trapped within?

aaand so on and so forth. honestly im not even a transhumanist i just think the philosophy gives us some cool thought experiments.

anyway my favorite real life parasite is the leucochloridium (even tho i constantly forget its longass name) which infects snails and makes their eyestalks pulse and flash colors to attract predators so it can get eaten, which it needs in order to continue onto the next phase of its life cycle. im not an expert or anything i might be muddying the facts. i just think that shits crazy. natures crazy.

anywayy x2! um um if this interests u i guess i recommend the masters of horror episode "sick girl", "peeps" and "the last days" by scott westerfeld (to be fair i havent read these since middle school and idk how well they hold up but like westerfelds stuff usually goes p hard regardless), "bloodchild" by octavia butler, aaaaand i guess my short story "daja vu"! wink!

thansk for coming to my ted talk happy autism to all and to all a good night

#ask #parasites #infodump #slight nonsequiter but whenever i play binding of isaac (however poorly) those uh the isaacs with their heads full of bugs #all crying and stuff they remind me of that (false) urban legend from when i was a kid abt bugs crawling into ur ears at night and #laying eggs in ur brain #i was as terrified by the concept as i was fascinated with it #and i would talk more abt that but i dont want to get into my wide expanse of intense childhood delusions rn its one of those things thats #teeeechnically a trigger i guess but damn if ive ever met a scab i didnt wanna pick ykwim #insects #body horror

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tetrakys · 4 years

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You know, I was about to recommed you this visual novel I played a while ago, Red Embrace: Hollywood, that I half loved half hated, but now that I saw you said you don't like unhappy endings I'll keep my recommendation lol I really liked the story, the characters and the art. It had EVERYTHING, but the endings are all bad, in the three routes, every one worse that the last, and that kinda ruined it you know? -u da best anon

What's the point of making a visual novel and give only bad endings?? Not for me then, thanks 🤨

Oh I forgot to tell you that I finished reading Nightfall, it was ok, some parts were great other meh, I liked how it all came together in the end, didn't appreciate much the open ending and the heavy weight given to procreation which is a typical theme of Pen's books. I hope we'll get to read extras about Alex and Aydin because that's lots of wasted potential imho.

#u da best anon

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lastsonlost · 4 years

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So I was half-right.

Instead of misogyny it's Nazis because of course it is.

If you spend a lot of time in certain Extremely Online corners of the internet ecosystem, you’ve likely stumbled onto #NoNutNovember, or just #NNN for short. An annual challenge encouraging men to refrain from masturbating (or even, for many, having any sex) for the month, No Nut November was initially created as a parody of internet-borne phenomena such as the Ice Bucket Challenge or Movember, skewering the silliness of viral internet challenges along with the more extreme claims made by proponents of NoFap, an anti-porn subreddit with half a million members. (According to one of the moderators of the NoNutNovember subreddit, /u/yeeval, the subreddit has no connection to NoFap, though the two are often conflated.)

For most participants, the challenge is essentially an excuse to shitpost, as well as tweet memes skewering some of the more exaggerated purported benefits of abstaining from masturbation. But there are many who take it seriously, with at least 52,000 people as of this writing diligently documenting their day-by-day progress (and setbacks) on the subreddit r/NoNutNovember. Per /u/yeeval, “I’d say 90% of the posts are from people actively participating and also there’s the occasional fallen member who stays on the subreddit for the community and laughs.”

On its surface, No Nut November is a fairly innocuous challenge: while it may seem silly to abstain from masturbation for virtually no reason, some of the memes are pretty funny, and a month of abstinence (whether it be from sex or masturbation) certainly isn’t going to kill anyone. u/yeeval says the goal isn’t to demonize porn or masturbation per se, but to prompt men to examine their own masturbation habits and whether or not they’re healthy. “In my opinion, most originally participate in NNN for the meme aspect of the challenge but as the days go on people begin to see how big their porn or masturbation dependency is,” he says.

"Neither of those things are bad or immoral in themselves but just like any outlet can become excessive in times of depression and loneliness.” Yet it would be naive to ignore that there’s significant overlap between the general anti-porn ideology behind NoFap — and, to a degree, No Nut November — and that of the far right, which has increasingly coopted the movement. (NoFap’s website states that, with the exception of a small number of users who may abstain for religious or moral reasons, they do not have an anti-masturbation stance.)

Because the challenge is associated with abstaining from porn, some people associated with the movement have taken the extra step of harassing adult performers on social media, giving it an additional layer of troubling implications. “In the past [No Nut November] has always been like, ‘Oh, look at this ridiculous thing some people are participating in,'” says adult performer and director Casey Calvert. “This year, people [in the industry] are talking about, ‘Oh, actually this is connected to the far right and maybe we shouldn’t just be saying hahaha, No Nut November.'”

A new meme brings these implications into sharp relief. Coomer is a reference to a meme of an unkempt, skeezy-looking bearded man in a white tank top with vaguely Semitic features, accompanied by descriptive text like “doesn’t even know anything about politics,” “extremely aesthetic right arm (huge muscle),” and “has never heard of NoFap"

It’s been circulating on 4chan for the past year, but Alex Hawkins, the vice president of the porn tube site xHamster, says he started seeing it in the replies on his company’s Twitter feed back in September, when presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted about limiting access to pornography. At first, “we didn’t really know what it meant and thought it was funny,” he tells Rolling Stone. Then, in late October, the coomer resurfaced thanks to a Twitter campaign led by a user named TeapotLad, in which users vowed to change their avatars to the coomer should they fail No Nut November. PewDiePie shouted out the campaign in a recent YouTube video, as did far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson, who is perhaps best known for being one of the many extremist figures, including Milo Yiannopolous and Alex Jones, to be banned from Facebook. “No Nut November and the Coomer meme represent a deeper meaning,” he said in a tweet. “Porn is evil. It literally re-wires your brain and causes erectile dysfunction. Take the pledge. Don’t be a Coomer.”

The term has also been used in the context of “OK coomer,” a play on the “OK boomer” meme, in response to tweets critical of No Nut November or masturbation abstinence in general. “It’s positioned as this epic battle between the weak beta masturbators and the strong, alpha NoFappers,” says Hawkins.

Like most memes, “coomer” carries with it more than a tinge of irony, and it’s not always easy to determine whether it’s being used flippantly or to actually deride men who masturbate. But the implication is clear: masturbating is an urge that should be resisted at all costs. David Ley, PhD, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist who studies pornography and mental health, saw the meme after he tweeted his criticism of No Nut November, referring to it as “a creepy little smorgasbord of insecurity-driven hate with anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia all rolled up in one,” he tells Rolling Stone. (Ley has partnered with the cam website Stripchat to do AMAs about sexual health, and plans to appear in one debunking some of the myths associated with No Nut November.)

The idea that there are significant health benefits from abstaining from masturbation is partially based on the (primarily internet-propagated) theory that semen retention is linked to an increase in testosterone and male virility, an idea that has been widely debunked. For the most part, however, the idea that masturbation is somehow feminizing is “rooted in extremely antiquated ideas of masculinity,” many of which are also promoted by far-right groups, says Ley. The Proud Boys, for instance, a far-right extremist group known for its propensity toward violence, has long advocated for its members to abstain from masturbation on the grounds that it boosts testosterone and makes them more appealing to women; indeed, founder Gavin McInnes gave a shoutout to NoFap in a 2015 article for the far-right publication Taki’s Magazine. (The organizers of NoFap have strongly refuted any connection to the Proud Boys.)

An even more extremist version of this far-right anti-masturbation philosophy has been promoted by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, who has propagated the conspiracy theory that Jews dominate the porn industry and use pornography as a way to control white men. On far-right threads on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, this sentiment is fairly widespread. “Jews not only control most of the pornography industry, they also rely on the goyim to maintain a routine of ejaculation in order to stay docile and non-violent,” one comment reads. Another shared a viral Pornhub tweet poking fun at viewers who’d failed No Nut November, writing, “the Jew mocks you as they poison the minds of millions.” (Pornhub is owned by the Canadian company MindGeek, the CEO of which, Feras Antoon, does not appear to be Jewish, even though there are numerous 4chan /pol/ threads speculating as such.)

This anti -Semitism is also often accompanied by healthy doses of homophobia and racism as well: on these threads, you’ll frequently see users deriding men who masturbate to heterosexual porn, on the grounds that being aroused by another man’s penis makes you gay (even if said penis is depicted going into a vagina). And because mainstream porn often features white women paired with black men, there’s also a virulently racist element to much of this discourse, such as the suggestion that interracial porn is intended to steer white women away from procreating with white men and toward men of color.

The irony of this strain of the anti-masturbation movement is that, while it’s ostensibly intended to fight the larger porn industry’s attempts to brainwash and emasculate white men, anti-masturbation ideology has historically been used as a tool by fascist figures to gain social control. Cultural stigma associated with masturbation, combined with the fact that pretty much everyone masturbates, invariably leads to a lot of men “developing a lot of internal shame,” says Ley. “And that makes them open to manipulation and social control.” As an example, he cited the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany, which strongly discouraged Hitler Youth members from engaging in masturbation. Because anti-porn and anti-masturbation movements tend to be comprised of young heterosexual males, they could potentially be viewed by some on the far right as ideal recruitment grounds. The fact that something like No Nut November appears to be a joke on its face “appears to serve as this interesting front door recruiting kind of strategy to bring folks into this deeper, much more insidious and shaming movement,” says Ley.

Of course, it goes without saying that not everyone who participates in No Nut November or NoFap is a white supremacist or religious fundamentalist, and that the founders of these groups explicitly reject any suggestions of overlap between the two communities. u/yeeval says he has seen no hint of any anti-Semitic or misogynistic commentary on the subreddit, chalking any suggestions of Jewish porn conspiracy theories to “someone trying to make a bad / overtly offensive joke.” “NoNutNovember isn’t a political movement. We are not anti-porn. We are not anti-woman. We are not anti-masturbation or anti-sex,” he says. “In its most simple form NoNutNovember just a fun internet challenge that has grown in popularity due to many memes that circulate the internet…However, I also think that the reason that it has become so widespread is that it has given many the opportunity to look within themselves and realize that they might be relying on masturbation and porn for comfort.”

The coomer meme is also, at least inherently, apolitical, says Alice Vaughn, host of Two Girls One Mic, a podcast about porn tropes. “The concept surrounding ‘Coomer’ is neither right nor left politically. The urge to shame those with higher sex drives is nothing new, and is a subject many are uncomfortable with, especially adolescents (which is predominately 4Chan’s user base),” she says. But the rise of “coomer,” with its distinctly conservative implications about male sexuality, would seem to refute that the anti-masturbation movement is totally innocent or entirely intended in jest. The fact that it’s often used in the context of “OK coomer,” a play on a meme intended to skewer boomers’ criticism of Gen Z, also indicates that this is primarily a youth-driven phenomenon. When you consider how younger generations have typically adopted a more healthy, progressive view of sexuality than previous ones, this doesn’t make a lot of intuitive sense — but it actually tracks with current data, which indicates that younger generations are having less sex, Ley says.

Usually, this phenomenon is attributed to male millennials and zoomers (members of Gen Z) spending more time watching porn, and to an extent this may be true; when it comes to determining the effects of pornography viewing on male sex lives, research is somewhat mixed. But it’s also just as likely that sociocultural factors like economic unrest and fear-mongering abstinence-only education have also played a role in these declining sexual activity rates. “We’ve spent decades telling these young kids be afraid of sex, and that only hereto monogamous sex is OK and moral,” says Ley. “Now all of a sudden they are really conflicted about sex and their own sexuality.”

That said, there’s also an awful lot of men who are not participating in No Nut November in earnest, and many more who aren’t participating at all. In an email to Rolling Stone, Pornhub vice president Corey Price said that traffic is virtually unaffected by No Nut November, and few of the adult performers Rolling Stone spoke with said that they hadn’t seen their engagement go down considerably during the month either. Considering that annual Pornhub traffic numbers are in the tens of billions, if there is indeed a wider porn conspiracy to sap men of their virility, that conspiracy appears to be working pretty well. But for those who are participating in the challenge, and may have stumbled along the way, Calvert has a comforting message: “I personally think No Nut November is very silly,” she says. “Not masturbating for a month does not make you a better man or a stronger man.”

............

Let me see if I got this straight.

Porn is evil

And not fapping makes you a racist homophobic Nazi

Did I... Did I fucking miss something?

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