This article examines the ways that men actively construct masculinity within an online pornography-abstinence reddit forum, NoFap. Of central interest is how members of NoFap negotiate possible contradictions between abstinence and presenting themselves as masculine subjects. Utilizing discourse analysis, we illustrate the ways in which forum members employ idealized discourses of innate masculinity and the need for 'real sex' to justify their resistance to pornography use and masturbation. However, we also highlight the paradox of having to perform ostensibly innate characteristics, and the outright rejection of feminist critiques of pornography use as it pertains to masculine conduct. As such, this article offers an alternative approach to the popular 'user effects' paradigm that suggests that users reject pornography because of internal biological drives interfering in their lives. Instead, we suggest that some users reject pornography to reconcile pornography use with particular expectations of normative masculinity.
Pornography addiction is increasingly a focus of both lay and expert attention, despite ongoing debate as to whether viewing pornography can be categorized as such. The present study takes a step back from such debates to ask fundamental questions about how pornography addiction is conceptualized between such lay and expert jurisdictions, and how the flow of information between these domains helps to create and sustain a pornography addiction diagnosis. Drawing upon philosopher Ian Hacking's theory of ‘making up people’, responses from a qualitative survey ( n = 213), and semi-structured interviews ( n = 30) are analysed, attending specifically to how pornography viewers themselves draw upon different ways of explaining how a pornography addiction works, and how the language of addiction is applied as either a literal or metaphorical explanation of behaviour. The results indicate, not only that addiction criteria are applied in surprisingly diverse ways, but also that pornography addiction's boundaries are elastic, its definitions transient, and its use dependent upon both metaphor and claims to neurological knowledge. It is suggested that if pornography addiction is being taken seriously, it is necessary to elaborate upon this relationship between metaphor and nosology.
While pornography addiction currently circulates as a comprehensible, diagnosable, and describable way to make sense of some people’s ostensibly problematic relationship with pornography, such a comprehensive description of this relationship has only recently been made possible. The current analysis makes visible pornography addiction as situated within a varied history of concerns about pornography, masturbation, fantasy, and technology in an effort to bring to bear a conceptual critique of the modern concept of pornography addiction. Such a critique in turn works to offer an alternative to treating the study of pornography addiction as the discovery of a new disease, instead conceiving it as the propagation of old forms of knowledge under a new moniker.
In this study, we investigate how pornography addiction is constructed by members of the New Zealand public by analysing six 2016 newspaper articles focusing on pornography addiction, and the 1430 Facebook comments posted in response to them. Utilizing a critical discursive approach, we identified five interpretative repertoires employed to construct both the viewing of pornography and pornography itself in multiple ways. Our analysis suggests that although pornography remained poorly defined, it was at turns framed as both unnatural and natural to view. The naturalness of viewing pornography however was complicated by an explicit acceptance of pornography addiction, which was variously proposed as being similar to substance abuse, a threat to intimate relationships, and as a convenient excuse. Moreover, the pornography addict was reliably described as male, and implicitly placed within a monogamous heterosexual relationship, with pornography depicted as most threatening when impinging upon such relationships. As such, we argue that the construction of pornography addiction not only reifies morally conservative historical concerns, but also side-lines the ethical and political ramifications of normalized pornography viewership. The possible replacement of discussions about the content of pornography with debates about user effects indicates a rapid historical shift from concerns for community standards to concerns for personal responsibility.
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