From the time she got started in porn about eight years ago until this fall, performer Tindra Frost says she’d never heard anyone, not fans or colleagues, talk about No Nut November, the internet challenge in which (mostly) men try to abstain from getting off even once for a full month. So she “was surprised to see how huge the challenge was this year” among adult-industry figures.
Perhaps most notably, the adult cam site Stripchat launched “Yes Nut November,” a counter-campaign that aimed to educate the public on masturbation’s well-established health benefits and pledged to donate $1 to a men’s cancer charity for everyone who pledged to nut on throughout the month. A number of individual performers, like the newcomer Jamie Jett, made their own (in most cases safe-for-work) public service announcements similarly pushing back against No Nut November.
Industry titan — and notable marketing guru — Pornhub unsurprisingly joined the movement, advertising a “#NoNutNovember Free Week,” one of many porn-site deals promoting paid premium content. Performers likewise used the challenge as a promotional hook, explains Olive Glass, “encouraging people to subscribe to their premium content with lines like, ‘Can you make it through No Nut November once you see my content?’” Sites were soon inundated with an endless wave of clips built around the idea of someone getting so turned on that they can’t help but fail the challenge; tube site xHamster says users uploaded more than 3,000 videos featuring the phrase “No Nut November” in their titles this year.
If this all seems like overkill, it probably is.
Though a few dedicated online communities, like Reddit’s r/nonutnovember, have grown rapidly over the last few years, most people in these groups are casual observers, two of r/nonutnovember’s moderators told InsideHook. Mainstream media outlets have also spent two years debunking pseudoscientific claims that not masturbating for a month gives men newfound confidence and energy, while also pointing out the troubling connections between No Nut rhetoric and racist, far-right ideologies, urging people to reconsider the challenge. Alex Hawkins of xHamster suspects the adult industry’s “embrace of No Nut November has eclipsed its actual, general public popularity as a movement” over the last year or two.
Why, then, did so many porn figures go all in on No Nut November over the last few weeks?
Let’s begin with a little history lesson. No Nut November has been around since at least 2011 and is often portrayed as an offshoot or close cousin of NoFap, an online community for men trying to give up masturbation and porn, ostensibly as a matter of health and wellness. But that’s not quite correct: NoFap actually has its own New Life November challenge. The No Nut movement started, by all accounts, as a satire of internet challenges, like the Ice Bucket or No Shave November challenges. The initial joke quickly found a dead-serious audience, and spawned a number of sites and social media accounts, none with a firm claim to authority over the idea.
In some corners of the internet, No Nut is still just an excuse to make shit-post-y memes, many of which actually mock the claims that anti-masturbation groups make about abstinence’s supposed health benefits (the r/nonutnovember mods tell me they are staunchly anti-NoFap, and believe most of their users are as well). However, other No Nut groups and practitioners now treat it as a serious challenge, and echo bogus NoFap rhetoric about the dangers of wasting precious bodily fluids. Many more toe the line between treating the challenge as a joke and a serious endeavor, functionally using humor to mask and legitimize dubious claims.
No Nut November started to gain mainstream visibility around 2016 or 2017 thanks to a number of factors: the rise of a few increasingly centralized digital communities — like r/nonutnovember — which often feature both shit posters and serious practitioners; the viral popularity of a handful of memes about the struggles of abstinence or failing the challenge; and the mainstream media’s cynical or naïve willingness to treat claims about the supposed benefits of a life without masturbation with far too much credulity. Perhaps most notably, Newsweek actually ran a 2017 “health” story with the following headline: “How Avoiding Sex and Masturbation Will Make You A Superhero This November.”
All of the porn insiders InsideHook spoke to for this story (more than a dozen) say that the industry didn’t take any major note of the then-ascendant campaign. That’s probably because, while increasingly visible, recent site and search traffic analyses suggest that the challenge was never popular enough to put even a slight dent in porn-site viewership. The industry also had more pressing and explicitly anti-porn concerns to react to, like Donald Trump’s 2016-to-2017 elevation to political power of conservative zealots who were champing at the bit for a new crusade against the porn world.
But by early 2018, No Nut memes were widespread and well known enough that even major brands like Burger King started referencing them. (Seriously.) The xHamster team noticed the catchy term somewhere in the cultural zeitgeist, and towards the end of the year wrote a cheeky Tweet crediting a routine, annual fall traffic slump to the campaign, conflating it with the NoFap movement and vowing to earn back its (not actually) lost traffic with a #YesFap movement.
“As far as I know, we were the only ones in the industry really paying attention to No Nut November at the time,” Hawkins says, explaining that his team has always leveraged anti-porn or -sex rhetoric for quick and easy satirical marketing copy.
Unfortunately, diehard, no-joke NoFappers and No Nutters noticed the Tweet and responded with a torrent of memes full of antisemitic imagery and language on the evils of an — apparently Jewish — global porn conspiracy, as well as with threats against site staff. “We got into extensive arguments with those posters on Twitter,” Hawkins recalls. “Which only angered them more.”
The racist imagery and rapidly escalating threats of the xHamster incident helped to put a spotlight on the lines of thought connecting No Nut November with fascist movements new and old. It also forced the porn world to sit up and pay attention to No Nut communities for the first time. And as soon as industry figures started paying attention, they devised ways to undercut the challenge’s anti-masturbation messaging and coopt its catchy alliteration. “The industry is remarkable in its ability to defang an attack and transform it into a marketing gimmick,” says Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition, an industry advocacy group.
In 2019, Pornhub notably ran a series of posts on its official Twitter account commemorating all of the men who’d already failed No Nut November in the face of an infinite array of free porn. Though they were seemingly counting every discrete, likely male visitor as a failure — which is not really fair or accurate — the Tweets were nevertheless effective trolls. (Pornhub did not respond to a request for comment from InsideHook.) Stripchat, meanwhile, recruited an expert on the psychology of sex and sexuality for a live-cam chatroom to answer viewers’ questions about the effects of watching porn and masturbation. And Gustavo Turner of industry trade publication XBiz published an op-ed decrying the illogical roots of No Nut November diehards’ beliefs about the health and wellness benefits of semen retention.
By all accounts, the surge in adult-industry No Nut engagement is less a defensive measure to win back lost users than it is a preemptive campaign against misinformation or even a simple promotional tactic. Last year’s smattering of reactive riffs and clap-backs clued a ton of people in to not only the challenge, but also its potential as a pro-porn marketing initiative. Performer Adreena Winters suspects that the pandemic has just accelerated and magnified the effects of that growing awareness, as it has upset consumer viewing and spending patterns and led to an influx of new would-be content creators, thus putting the pressure on everyone to find new marketing gimmicks.
Not everyone in the industry is comfortable with all of the attention being heaped on the No Nut challenge this year. Jett actually tried to write an anti-No Nut oped in an industry publication in addition to making her PSA video this year, but the editors apparently told her they didn’t want to run anything on the topic for fear of bringing too much attention to the anti-masturbation movement and its bullshit health claims. Hawkins and Stabile both wonder whether industry attention is an example of the Streisand effect, whereby giving No Nut November a larger platform ultimately promotes its growth and spreads the anti-masturbation pseudoscience that attends it.
Those fears are a big part of why xHamster decided not to do anything No Nut-related this year — they want to let this all die off. But there is a good chance that we’ll see even more No Nut-related messaging coming out of the porn world in 2021 as more porn insiders hear about it for the first time, and subsequently decide they need to counter-program the campaign or try to make some bank riffing off of it.
Performer Carmela Clutch said she’d actually missed all of this year’s No Nut industry talk, and only looked into it when InsideHook reached out to her. However, “now that it’s been brought to my attention,” she says, “I might consider doing a series of edging videos around it next year.”
Eventually, though, both the mainstream and adult worlds will grow tired of No Nut November. Relatively few dumb internet jokes or bogus health fads last more than a few years, and another year of adult industry counter-programming could accelerate that tipping point. After all, this fad “is already a little cliché,” stresses performer Rebecca Vanguard.
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