Why Masturbation Is Ruining Our Lives

So the other day, I discovered the existence of Reddit’s No-Fap Challenge, which basically talks about how men need to stop masturbating right now.  There are a lot of threads in there, presumably because they now have tons of free time.
The gist is this: Buttering your bagel hurts guys, because the free availability of porn makes polishing the pope an incredibly easy orgasm.  But after you’ve completed the Roman helmet rumba, you become slothful – why would you seek out a woman when you’re spent and dripping with man-juice?  You have no urge!  And so you waste your days in your apartment, endlessly shaking the snake and marinating in loneliness.
Plus, teasing the weasel to Internet porn gives you tremendously misguided notions as to how women work – you expect all your women to be porn stars, all your positions to be pornish, and these attempts to recreate fantasy in your bedroom is akin to saying, “Wow, I really love musicals, let me sing all of my emotions to you.”
No, milking the mule is a sure road to isolation and awkwardness.  Your constant toad-stroking has simultaneously lessened your urge to find women, and made you unable to interact with them on any realistic level.  So the solution?  Stop dating Ms. Slick Mittens!  Don’t allow yourself to come until you’re spasming into an honest-to-God, real life vajayjay!  This is your only chance to meet girls – so abandon this useless shaking coconuts and get outdoors!
If this was all coming from an external source, it’d be ridiculous.  But no, this is a home-grown movement, a bunch of guys devastated by a chronic stirring the yogurt problem who have decided they have had enough of bongin’ their schlong.  Leaving all of this adolescent main vein straining behind has made them into happier, more socially adjusted men.  There are testimonials about how good it feels to leave all of this squishin’ the sea burrito behind, how even the ugliest of guys have been propelled into real life and now have girlfriends to ejaculate into.
…okay, I’ll stop with the crazy masturbation synonyms.
The thing is, I’m not unsympathetic.  As someone blessed with a high sex drive himself, there are days I feel like my orgasms are trying to shovel sand against the tide.  I have an orgasm, and for a while I’m a sane man.  I’m different.  My thoughts are not clogged with these desperate need to hump, and for a while I am, to paraphrase Louis CK, “a guy, shopping in a store.”
Then, slowly, the urge seeps back in again, and then I become crazier.  Not a madman, exactly – the guys who use this sex drive as an excuse to harm others are scum – but kind of a low-grade caffeine headache, a growl in the stomach.  A perturbation at the edge of my senses, a thing that probably affects more of my decisions than I’d care to admit.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was secretly inspired by that post-masturbation paradigm.
And so, if my actions are different, it’d be no surprise to find that this constant post-orgasm state causes men to react differently.  There’s a grain of truth to it: are we are motivated to eat a fine meal immediately after we’ve scarfed down a bag of little chocolate donuts?  No.  Stay hungry, my friends.  And driven by this inability to get off except at the hands of other people, you will take greater chances, step out of your apartment, and probably come to realize that porn is nothing like real sex most of the time.  (Which is good.  If all you’ve had is bad sex, and were naive as a country boy, one could see preferring the stability of porn.)
But.
I also think it’s really overblown.
I don’t doubt there are guys who’ve ruined their lives with masturbation and porn.  I don’t doubt there are a lot of them by sheer numbers, if not as a percentage of actual men.  But I see this whacking-love like any other addiction – which is to say that the cure is both necessary, and often annoying and proselytizing from an outside perspective.
Hey, I support Alcoholics Anonymous and all the other cures – because when you’re in that deep, you need a new structure to your life to jar you out of entrenched habits.  Having an addiction is like having a rudder that’s forever tilted left; unless you’re fighting the current, you’ll steer straight back into the old storms.  So you need systems to constantly remind you to be vigilant, you need friends to back you up, you need a lot of effort to keep clean and stay clean.  And I support this.
But what often happens is that these people come to believe that everyone needs these structures to stay clean.  I’ve been lectured more than once by a (usually recentish) AA member that I had a problem with my drinking, I needed the help of everyone, here, come with me, I’ll help you.  And that’s after three beers at a club.  And if you have a friend who’s a recent convert and is framing everything in terms of the old hit song My God, Life Is So Much Better For Me Now (And It Would Be Awesome For You Too), then it gets annoying if you’re not so far gone that your masturbation has not eaten your life whole.
I dig why they do it.  Staying on the path would be so much easier if everyone they knew was on the path.  Unfortunately, the benefits from being on that path usually only accrue is if you’re as far gone as the addict, and so there’s often – not always, but often – a subtle insinuation that this is your problem, too, isn’t it?  Which, yeah, it sometimes is and you’re just in denial, but if it isn’t then it’s just a guy with his own personal set of issues trying to project them onto the world.
So the NoFap movement?  I think it’s great for the people who it helps.  But I don’t think that having an arm wrestle with your one-eyed vessel is a global problem, one that hurts men as a whole.  I think most men whack it occasionally and yet still manage to get out of the house.  I think that most men watch a little porn, and those porn-thoughts probably seep into the emotional groundwater a bit and cause some pornish sex, but they’re not wrecked by having to slavishly recreate porn-style sex or it’s useless.  And I think that the guys who are that wrecked need to be more vocal to get the word out to the secluded folks who are affected – after all, it’s not like you’ll run into them at parties – but that doesn’t mean it’s a tragic issue that’s destroying our generation.
I support rampant masturbation.  I support NoFap.  The two thoughts are not mutually exclusive.  And if you need it, go for it.
I’ll be over here with my wife.  She knows I occasionally grease up the ol’ love monkey.  This has not distracted from what is otherwise an excellent sex life.