How Sex Pests Created The Anti-Masturbation Movement

Gird your loins as you tiptoe into Based Camp today, friends! We’re coming after the nofap brigade, tracing how anti-masturbation ideas emerged from ancient class structures and Zoroastrian influences before entering early Christianity. Our discussion examines biblical misreadings, 18th-century medical panics, and 19th-century health influencers who promoted extreme regimens and devices. Though it might anger some listeners, we cover the flawed science behind modern abstinence campaigns, the commercial motives of current influencers, and why focusing on personal purpose offers a clearer path than targeting one behavior. Whether you like it or not, we think it’s important to separate historical claims from evidence and better understand how these movements have persisted across centuries. Show Notes The Before Times Before Christianity In antiquity, masturbation was mostly a joke or a practical afterthought, not a grave moral problem. Greek and Roman sources treat it as vulgar or convenient (Diogenes the Cynic is the usual example), not as a threat to the soul or the species. Though fun side note (use Google Translate for this): Greek medical speculation treated semen as a refined, brain-related fluid. Aristotle wrote that the region around the eyes was especially “fruitful of semen,” and some Pythagorean-influenced writers called semen “a drop of the brain.” Losing it could, in theory, weaken the head. That is humoral physiology, not a warning that solitary sex causes blindness. Nobody in antiquity ran a campaign on that slogan. Among Christians Before the eighteenth-century panic, masturbation was a real sin in Christian moral theology, but it sat low on the scale of gravity. It was not treated as comparable to idolatry, murder, or adultery, and it was usually ranked below even simple unmarried sex in pastoral practice. But about masturbation: \* The biblical story of Onan (Genesis 38) was originally about refusing levirate marriage and coitus interruptus, not solitary sex. \* Later Jewish and Christian writers sometimes folded “spilling seed” into a broader condemnation of non-procreative sex. \* Augustine treated all lust outside procreative marriage as disordered; Aquinas ranked masturbation among the “sins against nature,” below sodomy. \* Monastic writers such as John Cassian and later confessors paid attention to it because it violated vows of chastity. A few late-medieval manuals (Jean Gerson) told priests how to ask about it. Consider the ten commandments: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Honour thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, wife, servants, livestock, or anything that is thy neighbour’s. Ten Commandments. Masturbation is not named. It was placed under the sixth commandment (“You shall not commit adultery”) as a form of unchastity, sometimes also under the ninth (coveting). Sins of the first table—idolatry, graven images, taking the Lord’s name in vain—were sins directly against God and therefore graver in kind than any sexual sin. Murder, adultery, and serious theft or false witness injured other people or the social order; solitary sex did not. In terms of gauging the seriousness of a sin, confessors and theologians used overlapping systems: the Ten Commandments, the seven capital vices, and (most precise for sex) Thomas Aquinas’s ranking of the species of lust. So let’s get to the seven deadly sins: The usual order (Gregory the Great, then Aquinas) runs: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust. Spiritual sins outrank carnal ones. Lust (luxuria) is typically the least of the seven capital vices. Masturbation is one expression of lust, not a capital vice of its own. Gluttony sits just above lust; envy and pride sit well above both. Then let’s get to Aquinas on lust (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.154, a.12): This is the standard scholastic ranking within sexual sins. Unnatural acts are the gravest as sexual sins because they violate the natural purpose of the generative power itself. Within that group he ranks: \* Bestiality (worst) \* Sodomy \* Unnatural manner of intercourse (wrong vessel, coitus interruptus, etc.) \* Masturbation (“uncleanness” / mollities) — the least of the sins against nature Then come the “natural” but unjust sexual sins: incest, sacrilege, rape, adultery, seduction of a virgin, and last of all simple fornication (unmarried man and unmarried woman, no violence). FOR CLARITY: The famous claim that Aquinas ranked masturbation worse than rape is only true inside the genus of lust, looking solely at whether the act follows nature. Rape also contains injustice and injury to another person; overall, rape, adultery, and murder were treated as worse. Aquinas himself says fornication is graver than theft but less grave than murder or sins directly against God. What confessors actually assigned: Early medieval penitentials (the practical handbooks priests used) show the ranking in years of fasting. Typical ranges in terms of years of penance: \* Murder: 3–10+ years (more for clerics) \* Bestiality / sodomy: 7–15 years \* Adultery: 3–7 years (bishops 10–12) \* Incest3–15 depending on kinshipSimple fornication1–3 years \* Theft / false witness: often ~1 year for laity \* Masturbation: often 4–40 days for a single act; 1–3 years if habitual, especially for monks Rough order for a pre-1712 layperson From gravest to least, in the frameworks theologians and confessors actually used: \* Idolatry, apostasy, making and worshipping graven images, grave blasphemy \* Murder \* Adultery (especially public or violent) \* Serious theft, false witness that ruins someone, grave dishonor of parents \* Sodomy, bestiality \* Fornication, incest \* Envy / coveting that hardens into hatred or harm; habitual gluttony or drunkenness that becomes a ruling vice \* Masturbation (mortal in kind if fully deliberate, but the lowest unnatural sexual sin and usually light penance) \* Fleeting lustful looks, occasional overeating, passing jealousy (often venial) The Admission of a Catholic Who Investigated a Millennium of Catholic History One of our friends who we met through the podcast heard we were working on this topic and shared about a book called *Autoeroticism: A Moral Problem in the First Christian Centuries?* By Giovannie Cappelli (it’s written in Italian). He shared: “A Catholic guy wrote a monograph pulling together every extant text in the first ~1,000 years of church history that touches on the question of masturbation. He’s very thorough. And he’s catholic, so you know he’s reporting the honest to God truth when he admits that he can’t find anything condemnatory before roughly the 5-6th centuries. In the end he’s still Catholic, so he still spins it up into being anti-masturbation. He says it would be wrong to interpret the silence of the Fathers as a tacit indifference, because the principles of their sexual ethics could easily have led to a condemnation of masturbation. (But it’s funny that somehow they never did!) He is forced to admit, “As numerous and concordant indications show, Christian authors of the first centuries, as far as sexual sins are concerned, keep chiefly in view those of an interpersonal character. Indeed, for them it almost seems that sexual sins in the strict sense are those of a relational character, those that in some way imply the presence of another person”” The First Anti-Masturbation Wave: Onania (c. 1712–1716) and Tissot (1760) Onania \* An anonymous London pamphlet, Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution…, appeared sometime between 1708 and 1716 (commonly dated ~1712 or 1716). \* The title, as a reminder, is a reference to The biblical story of Onan, which, AS A REMINDER, was originally about refusing levirate marriage and coitus interruptus, not solitary sex. \* It became a bestseller and went through dozens of editions. \* It fused the old language of Onan with a new claim: masturbation was not merely sinful but a specific, deadly disease that produced wasting, impotence, epilepsy, insanity, and early death. \* IT WAS THE FIRST PIECE OF WRITING TO CLAIM MASTURBATION WILL MAKE YOU GO BLIND \* It listed “dimness of sight” and disorders of the eye among its “frightful consequences,” alongside wasting, impotence, and madness. That line is the most durable leftover of the pamphlet \* It also sold expensive “cures.” \* Strengthening Tincture — sold by the bottle for 10 shillings \* That’s about $130–$160 USD in 2026 \* Prolific Powder — sold by the bag for 12 shillings \* The pamphlet presented them as remedies for the supposed physical damage caused by masturbation, including nocturnal sexual urges. L’Onanisme The Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot pushed this concept toward a tipping point, making masturbation deeply sinful in the modern Western sense: a trifecta of theological crime, a medical catastrophe, and a threat to self-government. \* He did this by publishing L’Onanisme about 50 years later (Latin 1758, French 1760), giving the concept medical prestige \* He treated semen as a vital “essential oil” tied to the nervous system. \* Losing it in quantity, he wrote, produced “a perceptible reduction of strength, of memory and even of reason; blurred vision,” plus gout, rheumatism, and a long list of other disorders. In case histories he cited gutta serena (amaurosis, blindness of no obvious cause), “languor in the eyes,” and bleared vision after “secret and excessive venery.” \* So Tissot also reinforced the blindness thing: His model was simple: semen originates in the brain and travels the spine; wasting it starves the nerves, including the optic nerves. \* He argued that the loss of semen was equivalent to a massive loss of blood and vitality; solitary sex was uniquely harmful because it was secret, unlimited, and driven by imagination. \* Enlightenment figures like Rousseau, Kant, and Voltaire took the idea seriously. \* Kant called it worse than suicide. \* The “solitary vice” came to stand for everything the new commercial, literate, private society both valued and feared: autonomous desire, imagination, solitude, and the absence of social limits The Victorian Compounding During the Victorian era, especially in the USA, blamed masturbation for almost every nervous, digestive, and moral ill. \* “Spermatorrhea” (involuntary loss of semen) became its own diagnosis. \* Mechanical devices, genital cages, forced circumcision, and even clitoridectomy were used. The Emergence of Health Food Influencers Sylvester Graham \* He was a Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer \* In 1830, he became America’s top “clean living” influencer \* He believed that stimulating food produced stimulating sex \* He held that meat, gravy, spices, pepper, coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco “increased the concupiscent excitability of the genital organs.” Bland, plant-based food calmed the gut, the nerves, and therefore lust. \* Masturbation—“self-pollution”—was the worst of the sexual sins in his lectures. \* He said it inflamed the brain more than ordinary intercourse and caused indigestion, consumption, spinal disease, epilepsy, insanity, ruined eyes, and early death \* He viewed married sex as BARELY tolerable \* He thought men should remain virgins until age 30 \* And then have sex no more than once per month \* A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (1834) and On Self-Pollution hammered this at length. \* HIS ENDORSED LIFESTYLE \* Vegetarian, two meals a day, small portions, lots of water, daily bathing and exercise. \* His signature food was bread made at home from coarsely ground, unsifted whole wheat—“Graham flour”—not the fine white baker’s loaf he thought was refined into moral poison. \* From that flour came Graham bread and the original graham cracker (often dated 1829): a dry, unsweetened, hard biscuit. John Harvey Kellogg One of the people who read Graham’s work was John Harvey Kellogg, who fully assimilated his theories about bland foods (e.g., He developed corn flakes in the 1890s as part of a deliberately bland, anti-aphrodisiac diet at the sanitarium), but also went WAY further when it came to masturbation. \* He was a Seventh-Day Adventist physician who lived in a celibate marriage with his wife Ella \* In fact, on his honeymoon, he wrote *Plain Facts for Old and Young,* a massive 600-plus-page manual warning against the supposed evils of sexual activity and masturbation \* In this book, he blamed “the solitary vice” for wasting the “most highly vitalized” bodily fluid—hence impotence, epilepsy, heart disease, uterine cancer, insanity, and dimmed vision \* In 1879, he was named superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was the Canyon Ranch of its time \* I.e. It was a fashionable resort that treated presidents, industrialists, and celebrities. \* He treated sexual activity itself as depleting and masturbation as “worse than beastly.” \* *In Plain Facts for Old and Young* (1877) he listed dozens of symptoms and recommended \* circumcision without anesthesia for boys: so that “the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.” \* Silver wire sutures through the foreskin drawn over the glans, twisted shut, so erection became painful or impossible. \* For girls and women: “pure carbolic acid” (phenol) painted on the clitoris “to allay abnormal excitement,” including what he called mental masturbation (orgasm from thought alone). \* In Ladies’ Guide, for severe “nymphomania”: cool enemas, blisters or other irritants on the genitals, and in extreme cases removal of the clitoris and labia minora. \* Electrical current; some accounts describe a urethral electrode. He also mentioned shock as a deterrent. \* Genital cages (though he did not invent them—they were invented by a bunch of Victorian and later “doctors”) \* Tying children’s hands. \* He also had, ironically, a bunch of very kinky treatments \* LOTS of enemas, including yogurt enemas, which he referred to as “Bulgarian bacillus” bowel treatments \* Beating machines \* Vibrating chairs The Modern Age: Little Different No Fap: The Most Reasonable Alexander Rhodes ultimately founded r/NoFap in 2011 after posting a TIL about a study and doing a week-long challenge. About the study: \* “A research on the relationship between ejaculation and serum testosterone level in men.” Journal of Zhejiang University Science A, 4(2), 236–240. PMID 12659241. \* Published December 10th, 2021 \* WHAT THEY DID \* Twenty-eight male volunteers. \* After an ejaculation, the authors measured serum testosterone daily through two abstinence periods. \* The design was observational: watch T while the men did not ejaculate, then see what happened if abstinence continued past the first week. \* There was no porn condition, no control group of men who kept ejaculating on a schedule, and no long follow-up of months-long “retention.” \* What they reported \* Days 2–5 after ejaculation: little change in testosterone. \* Day 7: a peak at 145.7% of baseline (P < 0.01). \* “145.7% of baseline” means about 46% above the starting value, not a 145% increase. \* Internet posts often flatten that into “T goes up 145% if you don’t fap for a week.” \* The authors’ own reading was narrower still: ejaculation starts a roughly seven-day clock; the day-7 bump is the end of that cycle, not a new, higher set point. \* Another ejaculation before day 7, they said, resets the clock. \* After that peak, there was no second regular peak if they kept abstaining. \* Levels did not climb with more days off. \* The paper WAS RETRACTED \* Springer retracted the paper because the same work had already been published in a Chinese-language journal (duplicate / overlapping publication). \* Snopes notes the journal did not retract it for cooked numbers. \* Sex researcher Nicole Prause later wrote that when she asked for the data, it was not provided; two of the four listed authors could not be found; a translation of the Chinese version reportedly had a different author list and different day-counts in the abstract. \* While this is not independent proof the assays were fake, what we see here is is sloppy overlapping publication plus a paper that cannot be re-analyzed \* This is all a very flimsy scientific foundation \* n = 28 \* No replication of that sharp day-7 spike as a durable finding. \* The bump is one day, then back toward baseline. \* The study did not find that longer abstinence was not a higher plateau. \* Nothing in the paper is about pornography, “rebooting” the brain, muscle, confidence, or attraction. \* Other work on orgasm and hormones (e.g. Exton / Krüger-type studies) generally finds no lasting drop in circulating testosterone from ejaculating. The ultimate recommendation of the movement/community involves a “reboot”: 90 days off porn, and often off masturbation and orgasm (“PMO”), to reset dopamine. \* More dedicated people go for no orgasm at all, even with a partner. \* Rhodes has said the end state can be moderate, porn-free masturbation \* The starter kit is habit-stacking: exercise, hobbies, cold showers, less coffee/sedentary time, community streaks, and “don’t change everything at once.” Improvement Pill \* Similar channels sell the same reboot as a success story (focus, money, women). So the study that launched the meme is a small, unreplicated, later-retracted paper describing a temporary day-7 wiggle, later sold as proof that not ejaculating turns the endocrine system into a superpower. That gap—between a one-day percentage of baseline and a lifestyle gospel—is the scientific problem, not only the retraction stamp. Semen Retention Influencers: Onania Version 5.0 These creators talk like Tissot with a ring light. Semen is jing, ojas, or “life force”; keep it and it “rises to the brain.” Some frequently-viewed and academically referenced people in this space: \* Hamza Ahmed (Hamza97) \* large YouTube self-improvement channel \* He pushes NoFap/semen retention bundled with lifting, early rising, quitting porn, and “become dangerous.” \* He sells a paid community (Library of Adonis and also “Level 2” which is more expensive) and training on building an online content business \* Ranveer Allahbadia (BeerBiceps) \* He’s an Indian interview/lifestyle host \* He has posted semen-retention clips invoking Ayurveda (semen nourishes the brain, photographic memory). \* He sells online courses (“BeerBiceps Skillhouse”) and has an operation called Monk Entertainment (Monk-E) which sells services to brands. \* ICEcold JT, Elemental Growth, and a rotating set of “90-day transformation” channels \* They promote: retain + train + sleep + zinc-rich food (red meat, shellfish, pumpkin seeds). \* Regional variants: \* Brazil’s Matheus Copini, who sells a membership and networking community (Alphalife Academy), an AI-assisted “one person business” method, called Captal Digital, a library of prompts and automated bos called Robos do Capital, and marketing mini-courses and workships \* Japan’s onakin coaches (Tesuo, Leon Moteki, Riima, Zin) selling abstinence books and masculinity coaching. Their typical regimen involves no porn, no masturbation, often no sex for a streak; heavy compound lifting; high protein; sleep as growth-hormone time; sun; sometimes meditation or “spiritual” talk. Their claims are folk science, namely that: \* You’ll have more energy \* Your jawlike will improve \* Women will notice you more \* Your testosterone will go up 145% The one rigorous thing that pull from is the 2003 seven-day T study that launched a lot of this was later challenged; the rest is anecdote. Andrew Huberman is adjacent to this movement \* He talks about porn and cheap dopamine, reward circuitry, and sometimes windows of abstinence. \* People clip him into retention videos. \* His actual recommendations center more around light exposure, sleep, exercise, cold exposure, alcohol avoidance, nutritional management, and supplements. Andre Tate is also adjacent, but not really because he was still (at least allegedly) hemorrhaging semen, just into his harem. \* He mocks compulsive masturbation as the reason “you never get anywhere,” and folds abstinence into a Matrix / discipline gospel. \* His published lifestyle is the opposite of Graham: one meal a day, mostly meat; 10–15 coffees; several cigars; daily hard training; stay hungry and irritable on purpose. \* That is anaphrodisiac diet inverted—stimulants and flesh instead of unsalted crackers. The TL:DR People seem to WANT TO BELIEVE that masturbation is uniquely bad or that semen is somehow some amazing life force that, when lost, causes damage to the man in question. Ultimately, getting obsessed with masturbation distracts from obsessions around MUCH BIGGER SINS, like actual 10 commandment headliners, such as \* “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, wife, servants, livestock, or anything that is thy neighbour’s.” \* and possibly “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” \* And “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” Episode Transcript **Malcolm Collins**:This one’s gonna piss off fans. **Simone Collins**:I had to do it anyway. **Malcolm Collins**:Because it’s true. **Simone Collins**:And we are not... Audience capture bothers me. Hello, Malcolm. I’m very excited to be speaking with you today because anti masturbation movements are manufactured scams largely driven by extremely sex phobic people and money grubbers, and they neither track well with religion or science. And on top of that, **Malcolm Collins**:we Hold on. Not not... Hold on. I think you’re wrong here because you went over a little bit. They’re not sex phobic people. A lot of them are severe fetishists who are offloading their fetishes. Probably, the guy who started it all built a robot to spank him every day. **Simone Collins**:No. No. No. No. He didn’t start at all. He he did not. No. He was just one of the followers, but we’ll get into him, of course. but it is And **Malcolm Collins**:he was the guy who popularized it. **Simone Collins**:It is it is true. Yeah. That the same people you could say that that masturbation... That said that masturbation was bad for you did things like use a special apparatus to push large volumes of liquid, including yogurt, up people’s butts as much as 15 quarts a minute, Malcolm. And also send people **Malcolm Collins**:through Jesus. **Simone Collins**:Mechanical movement rooms full of devices that would vibrate, slap, and beat them, which is just so wholesome. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. Yeah. The... These people think that these anti masturbation people are like these moral paragons who started this movie. It’s like, no. They were creepy degens, and now you’re part of their creepy degen fantasy. **Simone Collins**:What’s crazy though is that people keep falling for it, and they’ve been falling for it for an extremely long time. And, also, it’s not the... It’s not incredibly dumb or low achieving people who are falling for it. The first wave of anti diddle influencers caught up Rousseau, Kant, and Voltaire, for example. And then acolytes of the second wave of of anti fat influencers like John Harvey Kellogg, the enema enthusiast with the mechanical movement room, included Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John d Rockefeller, Alfred DuPont, William Howard Taft, Sojourner Truth, Ada Tarbell, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Harvey Firestone. These are, like, the titans of industry, intellectual leaders, and they showed up to Kellogg’s special resort where you could get vibrated and slapped and get a yogurt enema. And now today, even very prominent people are still falling for it, thereby showing not only their weak understanding of the science, but also if they’re Christian, very poor religious prioritization. So let’s let’s go through this. Okay? Do you wanna talk about how things were in antiquity? My understanding is that in antiquity before Christianity, masturbation was mostly a joke or just an afterthought, like, a problem and that Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**:So we’ll talk... I’ll give you a bit of context as to how Christianity ended up getting incepted with Antarctica masturbation ideologies, which happened, I think, in, like, the third century or the fourth century. You you you... You’re gonna go into this in more detail. But it’s one of those instances where if you’re looking through ancient texts, the only religion that was really thoroughly anti masturbation, certainly not Judaism, was Zoroastrianism. Really? Zoroastrianism was very firmly anti masturbation. **Simone Collins**:And I **Malcolm Collins**:they were the religion that ended up making Jews anti masturbation about the second or third century CE when when the Jews were living among Zoroastrians. **Speaker 3**:And to be clear here, the Old Testament talks about semen emission, masturbation, and it puts it in the same category as a regular occurring thing, like, in terms of uncleanliness as a woman having her period. It was considered a normal part of life. We don’t see really strong condemnation Of it until around the sixth century, which is when they were living among Zoroastrians. And I need to be clear here about the New Testament. Well, we don’t know if there was the word for masturbation in ancient Hebrew. We do know that there was definitely was one in ancient Greek when around the New Testament was written, and, it’s never mentioned never mentioned in the bible. what we do see mentioned is, again, emissions, which is treated as the same category of negative thing as a period. and I’m gonna note here along all with of this. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. It’s as bad as any other type of masturbation, like playing video games or reading a pointless book or, anything that you do just to feel good to simulate some experience of actual efficaciousness within your life, but to signal out this one thing, that is **Speaker 4**:A weird partially modern... There were some in the medieval period, which we’ll talk about, phenomenon. And not a particularly good one because I think it causes people to not understand the dangers of other forms of masturbation where they sink into other types of imaginary forms of success or efficaciousness. Again, not saying it’s a good thing. I’m just saying that treating it as a unique thing causes a person to not see the dangers of all the other forms of masturbation in their life. **Malcolm Collins**:But where did it come from in Christianity? It actually came from ancient Greece, which then made negative ideas around masturbation within ancient Rome. Yeah. So if you go to ancient Greece, this is the the first civilization other than within zeroastrianism where you see negative ideas about masturbation. The problem is is that we can very clearly see what’s causing these ideas about masturbation, and it’s not what you would assume. Oh. The idea is is that masturbation is low class. And this comes from the fact that if you were masturbating, it meant you didn’t have any sex lanes. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. If you didn’t have any slaves **Malcolm Collins**:Right. Yeah. It’s like, what what are you... What... Why aren’t you using your your boys and your your sex slaves? Right? Like, what what are you talking about? Right? We we all, and this happens in a society where you have this status hierarchy. Right? You know, in in ancient Athens, you both had an academic hierarchy, but also a very strict status hierarchy. and so when you wanted to talk about sexual things, to say that you had ever masturbated is to say you don’t have any sex. **Simone Collins**:Oh, are you poor? **Malcolm Collins**:Are you poor? It’s like saying I’m poor. Right? And then this got carried into Roman culture. And then, likewise... Now I I will point out that sometimes positive things have come out of this. Like, Judaism used to be polyamorous, not poly... Polygynous. Right? Like, many many wives to one man. And then in our episode, when did the Jews become monogamous? We point out that they they really became monogamous because that was the aspired norm, not the always norm, but the aspired norm was in Roman culture. And when Jews lived in Roman territory and because Christianity was growing within Roman territory, it adopted norms around monogamy even though... And people are like, well, you have just Adam and Eve and one woman, one man. It’s like, but it doesn’t say that. And we see lots of women for one man all throughout. You know? It it might be in often negative context, but it’s still shown. Right? Like, it’s still... And without any condemnation at all. And you could see our episode on that where we go into, like, whether if you’re just going biblically, is it monogamy? Is it polygyny? Where are we on this topic? But but it is undoubtable that this idea came from the crash of Roman civilization into Jewish civilization. **Simone Collins**:Okay. Hold on. **Speaker 5**:Note here, I was referring to monogamy as the norm instead of polygyny as the norm. And Simone... Well, I guess I was also talking about masturbation, but the core thing I was talking about was monogamy, which was inserted into the Jewish branch of the theological tradition by its contact was Romanism, not as an ancestral part of the Jewish tradition, which is why we see it so frequently in the Bible. **Simone Collins**:Because it’s actually a little bit deeper than that, and you’re gonna see the very roots, actually, of the very, very, very downstream folk belief that that masturbating will make you go blind. **Malcolm Collins**:Well, no. Hold on. I haven’t gotten to that yet. There is a secondary issue, but it was much less important. **Simone Collins**:Still, though, it’s important to know that Greek medical speculation treated semen as a refined brain related fluid, and Aristotle wrote that That is true. Reaching around the eyes was especially fruitful of semen, And some Pythagorean influenced writers called semen a drop of the brain and that losing it in theory could weaken the head, and that... That’s that’s humoral physiology. But that’s the downstream of the **Malcolm Collins**:whole slave thing. But it’s **Simone Collins**:also really funny because then, I guess, like, women are just so dumb because they don’t have semen, I guess. I don’t... I I didn’t figure out how **Malcolm Collins**:that would be were thought to masturbate all the time. Right? Like, the the the idea was that **Simone Collins**:women But they weren’t losing semen, you understand. They weren’t losing pieces of their brain. Yes. **Malcolm Collins**:Big deal. Mitch, by the way, if anyone’s wondering, no. Semen isn’t part of your brain. Okay? That’s that’s **Simone Collins**:Malcolm, you shouldn’t have to... This is base camp. This is not... These are educated. These are gentlemen of course. **Malcolm Collins**:I I get some comments, and I’m like, you are a f\*\*\*\*\*g idiot. **Simone Collins**:Oh my god. Malcolm. I... And if **Malcolm Collins**:they don’t see me in I I see this sometimes, and I’m just like, this is gonna reduce. **Simone Collins**:Well, I guess, yeah, the more you know. Fantastic. We all know now that... No. It’s not from your head. And and by **Malcolm Collins**:the way, if you... The the wider point... There was actually more to it than what you’re saying. There was also this concept of softening, and that was in Roman and Greek culture. All roles were either masculine role of penetrating or a masculine role of being penetrated. Yeah. And the... As a man, you could be penetrated if you were a lower class man, but a higher class man was never supposed to allow this to happen to him. Never. At least grown up. And, again, it’s because a high class man is supposed to have slaves. Right? Like... So this this really comes downstream within these cultures of normalization of slavery as a status. But continue, Simone. **Simone Collins**:Right. So, anyway, basic roots of that, but it was... Yeah. It was a class thing to your point. Totally get it. So before the eighteenth century panic, which is the first and very recent, k, eighteenth century, 17 hundreds, around masturbation, it was just understood as obviously a real sin in moral theology, but it’s really low on the scale of gravity. And, clearly, it wasn’t compared to idolatry or murder or adultery. **Malcolm Collins**:It is a much bigger deal to have, like, a statue of Mary in your house than **Simone Collins**:you need to Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**:Or to, **Simone Collins**:you know, to, like, not respect your parents. You know? Like, some really basic stuff that everyone else right now and, you know, everyone in general, humans are really bad at. Like, masturbation is so below so many more important rules. **Malcolm Collins**:But talk about this because we actually have rankings of how sin punishment works. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. No. But... Well, then let me talk. I have a whole thing. Okay. So about masturbation, though, specifically so that we can just address it. Okay? There’s a biblical story, Onan or Onan, from Genesis 38. It was originally about refusing levirate marriage and coitus interruptus. **Malcolm Collins**:Talked about this in our other episode on this where we go over all the biblical lines, and people are wondering, to call this about masturbation is f\*\*\*\*\*g insane. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. It’s not. **Malcolm Collins**:Will try to explain this as quickly as possible. Oh. So in Jewish civilization, you would have something called a livoret marriage. A livoret marriage happened when your brother’s wife died, and the reason you would do it is you would then impregnate her so that he could carry on the line so that she would have a reason to inherit his estate and keep living because there were very few things you could do with an independent woman within these societies that you needed to conceive a son and to carry on the line. And you were the closest genetic link to him, so it made a lot of sense to do this. By treating his brother’s wife mourning his dead brother as a human fleshlight, he had sex with her. He just refused to impregnate her to come inside of her. That is what was being condemned, and that is demonstrably evil by any judgment of morality. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. so that... That’s a bigger deal, and it’s not about masturbation. And then later Jewish and Christian writers sometimes would fold spilling seed into a broader condemnation of any form of nonprocreative sex, and they’re just like, well, fapping is a part of that. And Augustine treated all lust outside procreative marriage as disordered. Aquinas ranked masturbation among sins against nature below sodomy, and then monastic writers like John Cassian and later confessors paid attention to it because it violated vows of chastity, which I get right if you’re like, look. I’m not **Malcolm Collins**:gonna do anything sexual. Yeah. **Simone Collins**:Then don’t do it. But, like, that’s a monk’s vow. Okay? Like, any promise you make, if you’re like, I’m not gonna eat sugar, then you’re in big trouble for eating sugar. But who cares? **Speaker 8**:To put it in the context I was talking earlier, if Augustine or Aquinas or monks of this period knew about GTA six, they would likely put it in exactly this category of bad, the masturbation category of bad. or they knew about modern movies or anime or any of the stuff that we use to masturbate different instincts or impulses we have, they’d likely put it in this category of bad. and that’s why we harbor on this point because putting masturbation in a careful unique category causes you to not see all of the other totally inefficacious ways that you masturbate and waste your time on simulations of efficaciousness. **Speaker 16**:And this is where you’ll read some studies where somebody will be like, well, masturbating more makes you less sexually satisfied with your partner. And it’s like, Even if you stop masturbation, you’re probably not gonna be more sexually satisfied with your partner. The bigger problem is that you want to masturbate instead of having sex with your partner, and that’s what you should be focused on. **Simone Collins**:Okay? But a few late medieval manuals, Jean Gerson told priests how to ask about it. And you should just also consider the 10 commandments. Astrobation is not on them. It’s thou shalt not have... Or thou shalt have no other gods before me. Okay. That’s one that people break all the time. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image really messed up. Thou shalt not But but the point **Malcolm Collins**:being is, like, the second commandment is broken all the time **Simone Collins**:All the freaking time. By people Thou shalt not take Lord. **Malcolm Collins**:Masturbation is, like, commandment number three. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Do do not take lord thy god in vain, the name of him. Right? Which I I do this all the time. Okay? That’s a bigger that’s a bigger deal. I need to work on that first. Remember the Sabbath day. Keep it holy. a lot of people don’t, including us **Speaker 6**:Well, I... We didn’t until recently. Now we actually do the Sabbath, and it was doing this episode and reflecting on Simone saying that that led us to reexamine the Sabbath more closely and being like, does the New Testament fully invalidate this? And there are one or two lines that can be argued that it invalidates it. But having one or two lines that could be argued, especially one or two lines after Jesus who definitely kept the Sabbath, that could only be used as arguments is not enough for me to throw out one of the 10 commandments. And it’s wild to me that people will use one or two lines as enough to throw out the 10 commandments and then add additional stuff and act like they’re more holy than you, while ignoring the the very basics. And I and I see the 10 commandments as the very basics. **Speaker 7**:And if you’re wondering, wait. So they recorded this episode a while ago? Yeah. We recorded this episode ages ago. I just always set on putting out episodes that I know are gonna get us a lot of pushback. But as Simone said, it’s true, and therefore, we have to put it out, and she did the research for it. So you go, Simone, and thank you for recognizing where we were being hypocrites and not following the bible closely enough. **Simone Collins**:. Malcolm, honor thy father and thy mother. A lot of people don’t respect their parents very much. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear fault with... False witness against thy neighbor. There’s a lot of liars out there. And then also, most importantly, and constantly violated, especially per the way that social media works, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, wife, servants, livestock, or anything that is thy neighbors. I mean, with the advent of marketing and and in photo **Malcolm Collins**:albums I mean, if you’re if you’re browsing Facebook or Tik Tok generally, especially with, like, inspiration, well, porn as they call it. Right? Like, is directly being violated. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Or just even if you see a commercial and you want it, then you’re suddenly coveting that person’s thing that’s... Like, we just can’t watch TV. So look. All of these things matter more. is masturbation named? No. It’s not. It’s placed under the sixth commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery as a form of unchastity, but sometimes under the ninth coveting as well. Like, you’re... If you’re, like, masturbating to someone, then you. **Speaker 9**:And this again is part of why we belabor this point. When you separate masturbation into a separate and unique sin outside of coveting, it leads people who feel very holy because they don’t masturbate to still covet all the time because they don’t understand that coveting is what’s bad. Coveting is what leads you to destroy your life and take an efficacious actions and to hurt other people. Coveting is what you should be focused on. **Simone Collins**:But but that’s only if, like... Look. You can you can covet someone in many ways. Masturbation is just one of them. I don’t think that masturbation **Malcolm Collins**:is coveting, though. Like, it’s **Simone Collins**:Well, like... Yeah. But if you’re coveting someone while masturbating, like, let’s say, like, you’re really hot for your **Malcolm Collins**:neighbor’s wife. Be a problem. **Simone Collins**:Right? Yes. No. And that would be. But, anyway, that’s... It’s not the masturbation that’s the problem. It’s the coveting the neighbor’s wife and then and then fapping to the idea of her or whatever. Right? Or, like, looking at her through the window. **Malcolm Collins**:More interested in is that Catholic writer who tried to find arguments against masturbation in the early church and how **Simone Collins**:did think to that. Well, you’re taking to... Start with this. You’re starting **Malcolm Collins**:with the obvious stuff. **Simone Collins**:Start with the obscure a lot of people are missing the obvious stuff, and maybe that’s why I’m talking about it. Okay, we’ll just skip over a whole lot of stuff. Go to the show notes. They’re on Patreon and Substack, and thanks for everyone supporting us on Patreon and Substack. Look. I I covered the the dead... The seven deadly sins. And, also, like, there are all **Malcolm Collins**:these Simone, get to the get to the book. These are starting in the book. **Simone Collins**:One of our friends that we met through the podcast heard that we were working on this topic and then shared a book about it called auto... Autoerodism, the moral problem of the first Christian centuries by Giovanni Capelli. It’s written in Italian. He shared about this book with us. He wrote, a Catholic guy wrote a monograph pulling together the very extant text in the first approximate thousand years of church history that touches on the question of masturbation. He’s very thorough, and he’s Catholic. So you know he’s reporting the honest to god truth when he admits that he can’t find anything condemnatory before roughly the fifth to sixth centuries. In the end, he’s still Catholic, so he still spins it up as being anti masturbation. He says it would be wrong to interpret the silence of the fathers as a tacit indifference because it... The principles of their sexual ethics could easily have led to a condemnation of masturbation. But it’s funny that somehow they never did. He is fortunate **Malcolm Collins**:think that this is really important. When this is something that, you know, all primates do, **Speaker 10**:And note here, there has become a weird myth recently that primates only masturbate in captivity, which is not remotely true. They masturbate more in captivity, which is for the same reason humans masturbate more when they don’t have a purpose. the reality is is masturbation just doesn’t feel that good. If you have other things going on in your life, if you have kids, a purpose, something you’re working on, that is the strongest control for an instinct like this because it means that you have something that is of better use of your time than something so inefficacious. And I think focusing on this one inefficacious behavior instead of seeing it as a warning sign for not having something better to do is problematic. **Malcolm Collins**:you Dolphins do it too. Across cultures. And so presumably, everyone was doing this unless they were told not to do it, and yet it’s just nowhere. And people are like, oh, well, like, drawn images. Right? Like, they wouldn’t have had... What are you f\*\*\*\*\*g talking about? Like, the very first thing that Mann did as soon as he could draw was drew naked booby ladies in caves and then and then carved naked booby ladies. Right? Like, the idea that they didn’t have these sorts of scenes or devices or anything like that is comical. You know, we know from ancient Greece that the the... These sorts of images being carved on ceramics and stuff like this or other objects we found throughout this region would have been common. It would have been incredibly easy to condemn at any point during this period if anyone had a problem with it. It’s just that it appears that nobody had a... And and note here, you could say, well, the bible just didn’t feel it was appropriate to ever talk about masturbation. And it’s like, actually, the Old Testament does talk about masturbation. it talks about the cleanliness rules around masturbation. Right? Like, how long does it make you unclean? How do you deal with that? How do you... So, like, clear... If they didn’t want you to do it, it would have said around the... Don’t do it. But they don’t say that. **Simone Collins**:They don’t say that. **Malcolm Collins**:And there’s a scientific reason why you would... You should never say that in a religion, which will get you. Basically, whenever anyone’s like, well, what about porn addiction? What about... Etcetera. if you look at the scientific evidence on this, what it appears to show is all of these negative things tied to masturbation, like porn addiction and stuff like that, only happen in populations that have been told masturbation is super bad. Yeah. It’s really **Simone Collins**:messed up. **Malcolm Collins**:And so when you tell somebody masturbation is bad, you make them susceptible to things like porn addiction. Well, but, I **Simone Collins**:mean, in the very same way that, like, if if you believe that you slept poorly, even if you slept fine, you’re gonna show the symptoms of poor sleep more than someone who actually slept poorly but think they slept fine. So, yeah, it’s this idea. If if you make anything seem unhealthy or unsafe or bad, it’s going to cause a nocebo effect. It... It’s a very well understood **Malcolm Collins**:Well, the health of the the secondary issue that I think a lot of people who have have trouble with, like, quote, unquote, masturbation is destroying my life or something like that are just, like, depressed and unmotivated. You know, I I know because we did a... So you could look at me. Right? And I’m somebody who goes out there and says, like, I don’t see that big a problem with something like masturbation. I don’t see that big deal. At Ayla parties, when she’s giving a speech or something like that, she’ll do this thing where she lines everyone up by, like, how many people you slept with? How many times you masturbate a week or whatever. Right? I... In the how many times you masturbate a week line, I was, I think, the the least guy in that line, and I was behind half of the women in the line. **Simone Collins**:Oh, this was the time she did it at Manifest. Yeah. And it’s **Malcolm Collins**:not that I’m not, like, a horny person or something like this. It’s just I always have something better to be doing. And I think the people who go off the rails with this stuff is that they haven’t found purpose in their life, and they don’t have something better to be doing. **Speaker 11**:And, again, this is part of why we belabor this point is it’s so superficial when a person’s just like, oh, masturbation is this uniquely bad thing. Take all your time. Focus on that. These are the same types of people who end up dedicating their lives to completely inefficacious pursuits, like exercising or something like that, when the reality is what should be the bigger red flag is that masturbation is the best thing that you could be doing in any particular moment when the reality is is that’s just a huge sign that you don’t feel a sense of burning passion and desire within your heart to contribute to something, to do something meaningful that you don’t have a purpose or a direction. A person who is doing something like masturbating multiple times a day is doing that be... Because masturbation, again, does not feel that good. It... They’re doing it because they lack something that is a bigger pull to them than that. And that’s the far bigger threat and worry in your life, than than that you’re masturbating. And so that that masturbating is the best thing that you can do at any given point in time. That is the threat. And when you can recontextualize, wait. Why don’t I feel purpose? Why don’t I have a mission right now? Why aren’t I driven by something? That is the real fear and the thing that you should be focused on in spending your time worried about. **Speaker 12**:And we belabor it because stopping masturbation will not create the meaningful thing in your life. It will not create the purpose in your life. That is a separate and holistically more important task. **Speaker 17**:And so many people out there learn to control something like masturbation, but then just fit, spend all their time exercising to look buff, and they’ve lived just as purposeless a life, or spend all their time building this big rule set for themselves, and they follow all the rules really fastidiously, but they don’t actually create anything. They don’t actually do anything. They don’t build a relationship. They don’t build a family. They don’t build a a company, a project, a purpose. And people can say in the lineup story, oh, Malcolm, you’re just very low libido. But but people know my history, I’m not. I’m an incredibly high libido person. I just also have a burning sense of passion and desire, and there’s something that I was put on this earth to do. And every moment you spend trying to control the symptoms of not feeling that purpose is a moment, that you’re losing part of your life because you only get one short time here on Earth. And every moment of that, you don’t spend on some overwhelming thing of greater purpose to yourself is a moment that you will never get back. **Malcolm Collins**:and even even if you’re like, well, I’m just genetically uniquely susceptible to this, then take naltrexone. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. That’s... I... I’ve actually... Yeah. I’ve been... I was just having a conversation with someone about that. I’m like, look. Just that’s why Naltrexone’s out there. Anyway, as our friend puts it, he is forced to admit, quote, as numerous concordant indications show, Christian authors of the first centuries, as far as sexual sins are concerned, keep chiefly in view those of an interpersonal character. Indeed, for them, it almost seems that sexual sins in the strict sense are those of a relational character, those that in some way imply the presence of another person. Because, duh, that’s when you’re actually causing damage. If you’re just doing something by yourself for five minutes, is it really gonna hurt people? Anyway, so the first anti masturbation rate... Wave came around 1712 or 1716, and it it was an anonymous London pamphlet called or the heinous sin of self pollution. And it just appeared some... Sometime between seventeen o eight and seventeen sixteen. the title, as a reminder, is a reference to the biblical story of Onan, which as a reminder was originally about refusing leverent marriage and coitus interruptus, not solitary sex. So even, like, just off the bat, this is ridiculous. Some... Somehow, though, it became a bestseller and went through dozens of editions, and it fused the old language of Onan with a new claim that masturbation was not merely sinful, but a specific deadly disease that perfused... Produced wasting and impotence and epilepsy and insanity and early death. Of course, you’re gonna die. And it was I’m **Malcolm Collins**:I’m not blind yet. I’ll tell you that. **Simone Collins**:It was the first piece of writing to claim that masturbation will make you go blind. It listed dimness of sight and disorders of the eye among its frightful consequences. **Malcolm Collins**:But but what I find interesting is that in every masturbation wave we’ve seen, the arguments against it have just been demonstrably false. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Just... Yeah. Just... Yeah. Like... The Onin thing? No. That’s not what it was about. Blindness? No. It’s gonna happen. Not gonna happen. Another thing that these have in common, importantly, is they’re selling something because it also sold expensive cures, like the strengthening tincture, which was sold by the bottle for 10 shillings, which is about a 130 to a 160 USD in our time. The prolific powder sold by the bag for 12 shillings. So, again, like, over a $130. The pamphlet presented them as remedies for the supposed physical damage caused by masturbation, including nocturnal sexual urges. And then this sort of got solidified and boosted by a Swiss physician named Samuel Auguste Tissot who published a... Another Onania style write up called... Let’s see. In French. And it was published about fifty years later in Latin in 1758 than in French in 1760. And it gave this concept medical prestige because he was a doctor, and he treated sea... Semen as this vital essential oil tied to the nervous system. So losing it in quantity... I know. I know. he said it would produce, quote, a perceptible reduction of strength of memory and even of reason, blurred vision, plus also gout, rheumatism, and a long list of other disorders. And **Malcolm Collins**:Well, I I also wanna point out here. Right? Like, not only is the other side just, like, lying in the past, but if you look at people today who run these campaigns, they’re lying. Like, a lot of them that I have seen, they’re they’re unmarried men frequently. They go We’re gonna we’re gonna cover **Simone Collins**:it, Malcolm. Can we get to that? But can we stick to this one now? **Malcolm Collins**:To that. Yeah. No. Actually, I wanna I wanna at least make this look **Simone Collins**:a bit **Malcolm Collins**:People who are like, oh, if you engage in this behavior, you’re gonna be a failure. You’re not gonna achieve anything. You know, you’re gonna send up... Be sitting in bed all day doing this. You’re not gonna build anything. You’re not gonna I have multiple companies. I have a wife and five kids. Hopefully, six on the way soon. Right? Like, if things go well. And I have a very strong relationship with my wife. The... This this belief that, like, that it... That it’s pushed... That this is gonna destroy your life is generally pushed by people with demonstrably worse lives than somebody like me. I wouldn’t trade spaces with them, to **Simone Collins**:be fair. Anyway, Tisot argued that the loss of semen was equivalent to a massive loss of blood and vitality, and that solitary sex was uniquely harmful because it was secret and unlimited and driven by imagination. And then enlightenment figures **Malcolm Collins**:Oh, no. Imagination. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. And Kant and Voltaire really just took this and were like, **Malcolm Collins**:oh, no. **Simone Collins**:Kant called it worse than suicide. Don’t do it. The solitary vice, as they came to call it, ultimately stood for something that this new commercial literate private society both valued and feared, that there is this autonomous desire and imagination and solitude and this absence of social limits. You could just imagine anything and doodle yourself. and then there was **Malcolm Collins**:You should try out rfab.ai, Reality Fabricator. You can Google it. It is our AI chatbot site where you can really create any scenario you want, any situation you want. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. In terms of balance and metrics **Malcolm Collins**:I’ve been able to, like, really improve the brainstorming features for working on your scenarios and got them working with Fable even in Not Safe for Work. So we’re selling you our turn... Tincture. Right? Like, we’re we’re making money from this. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. But it’s not... It’s it’s it’s pro. It’s pro fab. It’s not anti fab. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. But we’re still monetizing it. **Simone Collins**:Anyway, it’s it’s with the Victorians that they got kinda weird, which I I guess always is when the Victorians come in, that’s when it gets weirder. And this is when... Especially in The USA, people started blaming masturbation for pretty much any nervous, digestive, or moral ill. Like, if something was wrong with someone, it was because because of masturbation. So they called it spermatorrhea, involuntary loss of of semen. It it was a it was a medical diagnosis. And then this is when you start to see the mechanical devices and the genital cages and the forced circumcisions and even clitoridectomy, clitoridectomy, clitor... Whatever. You know what it is. Became used. And then finally, we get the the health food influencers. Because now suddenly if digestion, and and masturbation are weirdly connected, well, then the health food people come in. So first, have Sylvester Graham, who’s a Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer. And in 1830, he became America’s top clean living influencer. He believed that stimulating food produced stimulating sex. So, like, all of your favorite foods, Malcolm, this is your problem. Your favorite food is, like, kick you in the face flavor. And he... No. No. No. So he held that meat, gravy, spices, pepper, coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco increased the excitability of the genital organs. Bland plant based food calmed the gut and the nerves and therefore lust. So what you need to eat, Malcolm, is just a bunch of flavorless slop, and your whole problem will go away. And so he he felt that masturbation, aka self pollution, was the worst of the sexual sins. He said it inflamed the brain more than ordinary intercourse and caused indigestion, consumption, spinal disease, epilepsy, insanity, ruined eyes, and early death. He he also viewed married sex as barely tolerable. He thought that men should be virgins until age 30, and then you should have sex no more than once per month. No more than that. And in a lecture to young men on chastity in 1834 and on self pollution, he hammered this at length. And his endorsed lifestyle was one that was vegetarian, two meals a day, small portion, lots of water, daily bathing and exercise. His signature food was Beans. No. It’s the graham cracker. It was this bread made of home coarsely ground, unsifted whole wheat graham flour, not not like the white flour and certainly not the sweet cookie cracker we all know to be graham crackers. It’s kind of this really big insult to Graham. Like, he’s rolling in his grave every single day because of this sweet cookie that everyone’s eating that’s all spiced and stuff. Because, like, a good Graham... Like Trader Joe’s sells amazing Graham crackers Yeah. Sparkly and cinnamon. They’re just drenched in sugar. He would have an aneurysm. But, anyway **Malcolm Collins**:He wanted you to eat the most boring, terrible **Simone Collins**:Yes. We’re talking about a a dry, unsweetened hard biscuit, like an edible rock. That is that is what he wanted you to eat. And perhaps that wouldn’t calm your **Malcolm Collins**:your desires. That these ideas caught on so much that we all eat Kellogg and graham cracker today. **Simone Collins**:Exactly. Let’s get to let’s get to Kellogg because one of one of the people who read Graham’s work was John Harvey Kellogg who fully assimilated these theories about bland foods. And this is one of the reasons why he developed cornflakes in the eighteen nineties as part of this deliberately bland anti aphrodisiac diet. and then he also went way further into it when it came to masturbation. He was not Presbyterian. He was a Seventh day Adventist physician who lived in a celibate marriage with his wife, Ella, who, on his honeymoon with her, he wrote plain facts for old and young, a massive 600 page manual mourning against the supposed evils of sexual activity and masturbation. So it’s like this sick burn on poor Ella. Like, she had a disease man. **Malcolm Collins**:Be clear that, like, Kellogg did play a large role in in in normalizing a lot of this. This guy was not against masturbation. He was against sex with your wife, and you have internalized for her. **Simone Collins**:He’s like, they’re... I don’t know where they are. Niagara Falls, like, at a hotel, and he’s, like, writing about how how horrible it is to have **Malcolm Collins**:I know I need to go back to my machine that spanks me. **Simone Collins**:But, yeah, in in in in this book that he writes on his honeymoon, he blames the solitary vice for wasting the most highly vitalized bodily fluid, hence, impotence epilepsy, heart disease, uterine matter in **Malcolm Collins**:a He’s not having sex with his wife. **Simone Collins**:I... It’s... Yep. Yep. In 1879, he was named superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was basically the canyon ranch of its time. Like, it... Insert expensive health spa here that was kind of affordable. **Malcolm Collins**:It’s at this time because I also decided to go into this that Mormons got into, like, masturbations of sin. For Mormons who are unaware of this, we have hundreds of years of your church’s history, and nobody brought it up once. And then nineteen twenties, it really started in the 1890s as the very first mention that it might be bad, but this was during one of the ways. Where it really became normalized was around the time of Kellogg. And if you’re aware, the line that is used to condemn it is Joseph Smith’s warning against prostitution, which is, like, a very reasonable thing to worry about. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Like, well, especially on your mission. Right? It was like, please don’t see prostitutes on **Malcolm Collins**:your I think it was don’t see prostitutes instead of doing your mission or on your mission or something like... **Speaker 13**:Specifically here, the text that Mormons cite is Alma 39 in the Book of Mormon. Alma the younger is rebuking his son, Caratheon, who left preaching assignment in... Among the Zoamites and went after Cyren, the heart riddled Isabel. so that is what happened. And, again, I attribute this as Joseph Smith because I think he made all this up. But you could say, okay. It wasn’t Joseph Smith. It was Corinthian or whatever. But the point is is that’s all you’ve got textually. Everything else is made up. And the reason why I harp on Mormons is because Mormons are one of the most anti masturbation of the Christian sects, and they don’t realize that their guys just picked it up because it was a popular trend in the nineteen twenties, not because of anything theological. **Malcolm Collins**:And they somehow... During this Kellogg wave when it became cool and everyone was eating graham crackers and Kellogg’s, like, still do. Yeah. Except... No. Because both **Simone Collins**:of them... I think it was Kellogg’s brother that, like, sort of took the cereal and ran with it, there was actually quite a bit of conflict around the sugar. So both of them were slaps in their faces, which is **Malcolm Collins**:Yep. **Simone Collins**:Apt, I guess. Or I guess, no, for Graham, a slap on his butt with... He wouldn’t mind that. **Malcolm Collins**:The coupon was you you told me reading about his life. He kept putting himself in sexual situations. You said it felt like he was constantly edging himself, like, that seemed **Simone Collins**:Well, yeah. This this idea of, like, well, okay. Let’s talk about some of the things that he talks. And first off, just in his wording, this this idea of, like, don’t let it out. Don’t let it out. Like... And and yet and yet, here are things that he advocates in his honeymoon book, plain facts for old and young. Here are symptoms and things that he recommended. Circumcision without anesthesia for boys so that, quote, the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it’d be connected with the idea of punishment, which is pretty simple. Yeah. Also, silver wire sutures through the foreskin drawn over the glands twisted shut so the erection becomes painful or impossible. Like, this is torture. For girls **Malcolm Collins**:and BDSM. He’s into BDSM. **Simone Collins**:I swear. It’s... Yeah. For for girls and women, pure carbolic acid that is phenol painted on the clitoris to allay abnormal excitement, including what he called mental masturbation or orgasm from thought alone. And in ladies guide for severe nymphomania, he encouraged cool enemas, blisters, or other irritants on the genitals, and in extreme cases, removal of the clitoris and labia minora. And then also electrical currents. Some accounts describe a urethral electrode. He also mentioned shock as a deterrent and then was a big fan of genital cages, like the kind that were made in the Victorian times, and tying children’s hands, which at first, **Malcolm Collins**:I was like Sorry. His genital cages, because you described them to you when you first read about them. They had spikes on the top of them. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Like, well well, yeah, one of them, like, if your... We we call them flippies in our household. If your flippy starts to go up, it just hits the spikes and, ow, like, you know, that’s I’m sure that **Malcolm Collins**:didn’t stop his when you hear all his **Simone Collins**:There were cages that the women could... You could, like, pee through them as a woman. Like, they’re locked in the back, but you can’t reach yourself. So I don’t know how that worked with menstruation. But, yeah, he had the the mechanical room where you... I mean, so, like, the way that things would work at at his health resort is you would take vigorous walks in the morning. You’d have your bland food. There there... Then you would, go through... Sometimes he advocated for quite a few enemas per day. There were the saltwater enemas. There were the yogurt enemas. There were the the... Oh, yes. He called the the yogurt ones Bulgarian basilis bowel treatments. And then there was the mechanical movement room that had beating machines, vibrating chairs. So it’s just like... It sounds incredibly kinky to me. They... Like, you’re at this resort. **Malcolm Collins**:And obviously is. All of these natural people today are participating in this guy’s weird **Simone Collins**:Let me shove this thing up your anus, and and, like, shove large amounts of yogurt and saltwater up you. 15 gallons a minute. Don’t forget... Or sorry. Sorry. 15 quarts a minute, not gallons. Let’s be reasonable here. There are mechanical limits. but then also, like, I’m gonna have you get vibrated and slapped so many times and then beaten a little by my machine in my mechanical movement room. I mean, like, this is way kinkier than any of those creepy BDSM Airbnbs you could find scattered across you. **Malcolm Collins**:This is, like, the kinkiest thing I’ve ever heard. **Simone Collins**:I I swear to you. Yes. Truly. So, like, something was going on. I thought it was kind of cute. All this color stuff. **Malcolm Collins**:A sexual deviant. You disgusting child. Now hold on. I need to go to my room where I built a bunch of machines to spank me every morning. **Simone Collins**:But here’s actually the problem. So while he and his wife had a celibate marriage, they adopted maybe even over... And fostered maybe over 40 children. And then when I, like, was reading about all the things he advocated for, I started getting real scared that he was, like, genitally mutilating these children. So now I’m like, Like, at first, I was like, oh, that’s sweet. Like, okay. Both of these people were very sex sex negative or, like, very kinky in a way where they were just always like, oh, if I break me, just shove it up my butt. But, like, it’s cute. Like, fine. Like, they... They’re compatible. But, like, if they’re pulling a bunch of kids into this, it makes me concerned. So anyway Especially, he... **Malcolm Collins**:I mean, he advocated for female circumcision. Right? Like **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Putting carbolic acid. that’s super not cool, dude. And and the wire through the... Let’s not reread it. I think we all have our sensibilities and whatnot. But... **Malcolm Collins**:Oh, so he’s, like, a serial, like, pedophile. Like, he’s, like, an actual **Simone Collins**:bad guy. We don’t know what we... I couldn’t find accounts from his chill... Like, his either adopted or fostered children. So I can’t come out and say he did this to his own children. And a lot of the treatments like the the unmedicated circumcision for, like, adolescent boys, can you imagine? Right? That was only for boys who were, like, problematic, who he believed were doing that. Now if I was being fostered or adopted by the Kellogg family and I had an interest in human sexuality in some way, I would certainly not let them see it. Right? So, So, like, presumably, only his most **Malcolm Collins**:hapless children. How this actually works in these people because we’ve seen this in the Mormon community is they just use it as a generic attack on people. like, wives, when they’re mad at their husbands, will say, **Simone Collins**:They don’t like you, so you have a porn addiction. **Malcolm Collins**:Mad at your kid. You’re like, where? I mean, this is how that lady who brainwashed all those women. **Simone Collins**:Eight passengers lady. Yeah. Ruby Frankie. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. Is is you just convinced them that anyone you disagree with must be masturbating. **Simone Collins**:Must be must have a porn addiction. Yeah. Even though that’s like, no. It’s... Yeah. It... It’s the generic, I’m not happy with you. Yeah. It’s it’s very true. So the modern movement today is is really not very different. The the... It really emerged first. Like, the the new wave of it started with NoFap. And I didn’t actually know the origin story of this, but what happened is that a guy named Alexander Rhodes founded NoFap after posting on Reddit a TIL about a study doing a week long challenge. So this is what the study was. It... It’s it’s titled a research on the relationship between ejaculation and serum testosterone level in men. It was it was posted in China in December 2021. What they did with a very small sample of 28 male volunteers was after an ejaculation, measure serum testosterone every day through two abstinence periods. And the design was observational. They would just watch testosterone while the men did not ejaculate then see what happened if abstinence continued past the first week. There was no porn condition. There was no control group of men who kept ejaculating on a schedule and no long term follow-up for some sort of months long retention. What they found was day two to five after ejaculation, there was little change in testosterone. But then at day seven, there was this peak at 145.7% of baseline, which means about 46% above the starting value, not a 14045% increase, which is important because guys online don’t know the difference and keep saying there’s a 145% increase. Internet posts often say, like, tea goes up a 145%. Don’t fat for a week. That’s not true. The author’s own reading was even more narrow. They said that they think ejaculation starts roughly a seven day clock, and then the seven day bump at the end of that cycle, is not a new higher set point. It’s just a bump. And then after ejaculation before day seven, they said it resets the clock. So at... After that peak, there’s no second regular peak if they keep abstaining. Like, if you abstain from from masturbating for longer than a week, there’s no benefit that they found at least in this very small study. **Malcolm Collins**:What’s so interesting to me about this is testosterone is something that its effects on your behavior, you can override with self control. So they are presumably advocating for additional self control in one area to make self control easier in another area. **Simone Collins**:Well, in a billion things affect testosterone as well. Not not just that, but also your diet if you’re losing in life, if you’re winning in life Yeah. Whether your relationship is open or closed, if you’re in a very secure monogamous relationship, whether or not you have kids. Like, there are billion thing. Like, why are they focusing on the fat part? **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. Yeah. Corn rates don’t only fat. If you are in a committed monogamous relationship, your testosterone drops. If you have a lot of kids with that monogamous partner, your testosterone drops with each kid. Yeah. Like, your life... If your life is about maximizing your testosterone levels **Simone Collins**:Well, then maybe just take testosterone. You can get a doctor to prescribe it. Yeah. We’re gonna freak out that much. Pill. Just take the freaking pill. Anyway, the paper, importantly, was retracted. Springer retracted it because the same work had already been published in a Chinese language journal, so they didn’t like the duplicate overlapping publication. But then Snopes also notes that the journal did not retract it for Cook numbers. It was just for that. But sex researcher Nicole Proust later found that when she asked for the data from the researchers, they wouldn’t provide it. And then two of the four listed authors couldn’t even be found, in a translation... **Malcolm Collins**:A translated French Chinese paper would have **Simone Collins**:been Well, who knows? Because in China, there’s a lot of research fraud. So, also, one translation of the Chinese version reportedly have a... Had a different author and a different day count in the abstract. So there’s a lot of just shady stuff going on with this, meaning that I wouldn’t really... Like, I I I would question it. Plus, there’s **Malcolm Collins**:a way I I wouldn’t build my world to do Especially when we know about the harm... And and I will point out here, like, just not masturbating is not that big a deal. If you just wanna live a life without that, like, that’s fine. What ends up causing most of the psychological damage, porn addiction, stuff like that is believing that masturbation is something that you should **Simone Collins**:never ever do. Big thing that this movement does. Because a lot of these people try to not fap, and then they fap and feel bad about it. **Malcolm Collins**:Just just not not trying. It because you build yourself in a direction where you don’t want it or you take naltrexone with it, and so you build a disinterest in it from opioid agonist. All of that doesn’t cause any negative as far as I’m aware. Right? Like, there’s Yeah. There’s some minimal benefits to masturbating, but they’re not really that big. The the really negative stuff is all of the stuff like addiction and stuff like that that comes from the belief that it’s bad. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. So, anyway, what what Rhodes read this study and then posted it on Reddit ultimately wanted to do and and decided to do himself and then just kind of a movement sprung around it was just a a reboot. He wanted to go ninety days off porn, and often masturbation is what a lot of people went through too to reset dopamine. And dopamine resets are real. Like, I’m all for that. That’s fine. I think this is the most reasonable facet of it all. More dedicated people would just do no orgasm at all even with a partner. Rhodes said that the end state could be moderate porn free masturbation. Like, that was his goal. It was to not masturbate, or sorry. It was not to never masturbate. It was just to basically enjoy masturbation more to reset. Because once you get to, like... You... Dopamine fasts are really helpful. **Malcolm Collins**:Right. Right. This this actually does have science to back. Yeah. All of the science that shows that I have... Because I did a... For our sexuality book, a really deep dive into it. And any paper that shows some marginal... And you and you... These do exist. Like, demonstrable negative effects for masturbation show it alongside pornography consumption. I have never found... I mean, I’m not aware of a single study ever published anywhere that shows negative effects for masturbation without pornography. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Yeah. The... Which makes sense. I mean, the same thing also, like, these these dopamine resets work with incredibly salty foods, with highly processed foods, with gaming, with TV and social media consumption. Like, it... This is an across the board thing. So I Well, this is the thing that gets me... **Malcolm Collins**:That that makes people look incredibly stupid when I hear this. People will be don’t you know it activates the same pathways as drugs? **Simone Collins**:Oh, goodness sake. Don’t you know that Chocolate activates the same pathway. And being with your family all activate the same pathways as drugs? Make sure you never see your family again. **Malcolm Collins**:Don’t you know that hugging your child activates the same pathway as a drug? **Simone Collins**:Anyway, here are, like, the actual bad players now. Oneania five point o or whatever, because we’ve been through Oneania so many times. These are creators that are all about semen retention, and they’re not even really about semen retention. They’re about selling you stupid products. So some of the really prominent people on this are Hamza Ahmed, aka Hamza ninety seven. He has this large self improvement channel. Hamza... Do you remember our Hamza episode? I do. I do. King idiot this guy But, anyway, he pushes no fap and semen retention bundle But by the way, this **Malcolm Collins**:guy, had a perfect relationship, and he blew it up because he wanted to act more masculine and sleep around. This is... The... These are the people. Like, okay. Who’s the pro masturbation team? Guy with five kids in a stable marriage. Who’s the anti masturbation team? A single guy who blew up his marriage to sleep around. Right? **Simone Collins**:Like Anyway, he he sells a paid community called the library of Adonis and also Level 2, which is more expensive, and training on building online content business, which is... Like, all of this stuff he actually sells is just stupid social media influencer slop stuff. It’s not even real useful products, and it’s also not about masturbation. He just uses it because it’s a message that people wanna hear, and it’s a bad message. **Speaker 14**:And I want to really belabor the point Simone is making here. This is something that people want to hear. Because when you hear that masturbation is the problem instead of you don’t have anything better to do, you don’t have more purpose that is driving you towards something bigger, and that is the problem. Masturbation is only the symptom of that problem. That is a much harder thing to hear and a much harder thing to deal with in your life. And so people look for the small easy things. Like, well, I’m gonna stop masturbating, and I’m gonna start exercising this amount, and I’m gonna clean my room. And it’s like, no. All of those are symptoms of you not having purpose, and finding purpose is the bigger issue. Finding something that’s more important to you than your personal pleasure is the bigger issue. And so even things that are tied to self control, like you need to exercise more or you need to stop masturbating, these can still be very simplistic and very hedonistic answers to people’s problems in life. And while it’s not gonna earn us accolades for saying this on our channel, and people will attack us for saying this, it is something that will hopefully help some subset of the people who hear this and can be like, oh, the issue is that I think that something of such little pleasure, of such little call is so distracting to me is a sign that I don’t have purpose in my life, and that is what I need to fix. **Simone Collins**:Then there’s Ranveer Alhabhita or Beer Biceps, who’s an Indian interview and lifestyle host who has posted semen retention clips invoking Ayurveda, that semen nourishes the brain and gives you a photographic memory. Oh, wow. Sounds exactly like the earlier stuff. He sells online courses called Beer Biceps Skill House because that sounds like the smartest course you’re ever gonna take. No. No. **Malcolm Collins**:But but these influencers, these are people with names like beer biceps. Yeah. There’s also ice cold j **Simone Collins**:b’s, elemental growth. There is Brazil’s Mathias Coppini, Japan’s Onekin coaches. Like, they’re all over the place. All of them are selling something. That’s all you really need to know. And it’s all about no porn, no masturbation, no sex. **Malcolm Collins**:I I run a not safe for... You run. You make money from a not safe for work website. So stop saying they’re selling something **Simone Collins**:I don’t make money from that. You don’t make money from that. Our nonprofit makes money from You’re so far. **Malcolm Collins**:The interest is one day we take money from it. **Simone Collins**:And, yeah, I would love that. I would love for it to pay for a health care at least. That would be amazing. **Malcolm Collins**:Anyway But the point being is... The the question is is is the thing that you’re selling... What I can say is the thing we’re selling actually creates very good horny content. The thing that they’re selling, I don’t think it does. You can say, is it good for you? I’m gonna say **Simone Collins**:I don’t think it’s good for you. I don’t think it’s good for you. **Malcolm Collins**:I’ve been able to make well, the stuff that they’re saying. Yeah. the the the the... We’ve been able to get fable to make horny content. Guys, this is the most advanced intelligence on Earth right now, and we’ve been able to turn it horny. **Simone Collins**:Well, but I... My dream is that people come... Some people come to our FAB for the FAB ing, and then they discover all the other tools that you have. No. No. No. Like, the vibe coding agents. **Malcolm Collins**:Of our users now, by the way, don’t use the website for not safe for work stuff. I just joke about that. **Simone Collins**:Right? I know. But my hope is that you can... We can take people who use it for NSFW, and then they’re like, oh, wait. You can use AI to, like, do productive things. and then they actually just start using the creative suite and vibe coding stuff and all the other stuff. So, anyway, I think it’s kind of... It’s kinda accept **Malcolm Collins**:them into improving their lives. That’s that’s **Simone Collins**:Well, I I think I think some of the site analytics might suggest that. So I think that’s wonderful. Anyway, the TLDR is that people want to believe clearly. Voltaire, Kant, Ford, whatever. No. **Malcolm Collins**:It’s not just people. It’s me. So what a lot of people don’t know is when we wrote our book, the pragmatist guide to sexuality This is true. The way that I wrote it is I would often write a chapter based on my intuitions. Then I would go look up research as into, like, okay. Are those intuitions... Good note here. I don’t trust scientists. I’m not something, like, blind scientist truster. I think scientists are mostly full... So when I’m looking up research, I am, you know, cross referencing. I’m looking at original datasets. I’m looking at datasets from different periods. I’m looking at, like... I’d like... I’m very sorry about this. So I had actually written the chapter on masturbation before I attempted to determine if it was true. **Simone Collins**:This is true. This is true. And it was very anti masturbation. Masturbation and porn are bad for you, Malcolm wrote, because he was sure that all of **Malcolm Collins**:the scientific evidence would back it up. And then I started looking through the evidence, and the evidence just didn’t show this. In fact, it showed the exact opposite. And I felt I had to rewrite the section. I was like, well... And this is the only section in the entire book or in any of our books that I ever... I have ever had to do this with. I’d ever just was like, was wrong. I was just wrong. but I **Simone Collins**:think when you say I’m out of shock We were really... I was surprised too. Because, I mean, we we want... I think everyone just assumes. And that’s the thing. People wanna believe that masturbation is bad for you because they’re like, this has to be bad. But when you actually stop **Malcolm Collins**:and think about it I’ll tell you why I thought it. Okay? Why? I thought it for two reasons. I thought it because I saw a lot of communities aspiring for it. And then the second reason is is because I saw it as a subject of self control. And I had this perception that more self control is always better. Yes. More discipline, more self control. Anything where I can advocate for more of that is going to be better. Totally. Yes. And then I did the research, and I was like, in this one narrow area, it appears to not be true. Yeah. And note here for people who are like, oh, well, how do you prevent yourself from forming these addictions to whatever? It’s like, one, again, you could just choose not to use porn. I agree. That could be a major problem. but two, like, your body... Like, all of humans’ bodies, all humans have had hands for hundreds of thousands of years. Okay? And as we know from these old sources as we went through, nobody advised against masturbation until fairly recently in human history. Right? You know, like, the very first group we have doing is the Zoroastrians and then the ancient Greeks, but not really anyone else during that time period. You lose your brain matter. You’ll... The point being is that if it was easy to get addicted to this thing that everyone had access to all the time at any time of day, you you... That branch of humanity would go extinct. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**:And so I actually sometimes wonder if when I hear specific groups being like, I just can’t handle this, like Mormon groups saying this. I’m like, they lost whatever protection the rest of humanity had to this. **Simone Collins**:Oh, like, the... Okay. So so cultures that went super masturbation negative stopped breeding out the people who had really bad masturbation problems, and then now they can’t... So it’s like, oh, like, we bred out kind of, like, the the issue that that’s happening with, what is that, measles or whatever. Like, people aren’t vaccinating it anymore. Now we’re all being taken out because **Malcolm Collins**:we’re being out. Normal human male, you’re, like, so programmed to not want this in a row that you, like, feel pain if somebody tries to do something after you’ve orgasmed. You’re like, I don’t I don’t wanna be around that. I don’t wanna I don’t wanna think about that. I wanna... And then you’re generally programmed to not want it again for, like, a a day and a half or **Simone Collins**:two days. But I know, but that’s clearly not true for some people who need it multiple times. **Malcolm Collins**:I don’t think it’s true for them. I think that the people who do it all the time, generally speaking, are just, like, depressed or don’t have something else in life and are looking for something to fill the time. Maybe. That’s that’s my intuition from what I’ve actually seen. It’s it’s it’s something that fills the time when you have a bigger problem, which is that you don’t have purpose in life. **Simone Collins**:Well, I think it’s very similar with food. There’s a lot of people who... Like, when you eat a big meal, you feel pretty freaking sick, and there’s a lot of people who still keep eating. And, yeah, maybe there’s a void to fill. I gotta go with kids. **Malcolm Collins**:Okay. Great. I love you. And, again, maybe I’m not... I mean, even with food, I struggle to eat more than a meal a day. I I... And often then, I don’t even eat a meal a day. So maybe I’m just not **Simone Collins**:But you’re still having steak and green beans tonight. Right? **Malcolm Collins**:Tempted by earthly temptations. Yeah. Yeah. You think that’s what I should have. **Simone Collins**:Right? Steak and green beans? Well, you should have the steak because I have two steaks thawed, and we need to get through them. K. I love you very much. **Malcolm Collins**:I love you too. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye. This one’s gonna piss off fans. **Simone Collins**:I had to do it anyway. **Malcolm Collins**:Because it’s true. **Simone Collins**:And we are not... Audience capture bothers me. Yeah. Well **Malcolm Collins**:It it bothers me too because it’s it’s it’s just demonstrably nonbiblical. It is it is not good for people, which I’ll get into in this. Right? It’s it’s... It it actually comes downstream from slavery, which you’ll learn in this. **Simone Collins**:Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Okay. I think I think I know what you’re gonna say. Anyway, dinner, I’m making you a steak. Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**:You’ve got steak. I’m open to steak tonight. **Simone Collins**:I’m making steak. Steak by itself or steak with fries or anything else? **Malcolm Collins**:steak with fries. **Simone Collins**:Fries or green beans? **Malcolm Collins**:Oh, green beans. **Simone Collins**:K. That is what you shall have. **Speaker 15**:Fighter, the chosen, the scar, and the fame. Griffin or Golden Boy, boring and tame. All monitor energy, rule following boar, and all his friends are kind of poor. But I’m passing the great hall, I hear Potter say. He’s evil, I knew it the very first day. One look at that face and my scar started burning. I stopped in my tracks. My opinion was turning. When asked, who robbed the vault? He said it would be easy to find who is at fault. He did not even take time to look at clues. 400 suspects and who would he choose? There’s ghosts, there’s the staff, there’s that squibber with the cap, but one of them stuck out so I went with that. Wait, did the boy who lived just say the quiet part out loud in the middle of the hall, in front of the crowd? Water your face, I mistudged you. It’s true. I thought you were vanilla, but you’ve got a clue. You won’t call him professor. You won’t give him a pass. The chosen one’s chosen to be edgy as I... Of those people who border us, even when you control for income, they are more murderous. I’m just pattern noticing, Potter like you. So tell me your data, your sources, your view. I caught him alone by the lake after dark. I said, show me your evidence. Show me your mark. He smiled kinda hollow and said, I don’t need it. I learned from my dad when he saw one, he beat it. Sirius told me how we all went that day. They hung him up high and they watched him sway. I asked, but what did he do? And he said with a grin, it’s more that he exists and the color he’s in. But I make the old man look levy when he looked at me wrong during a game. I had a friend light him on fire. They only shame that she lacked a body. I’d always said when the display is bigger, that’s a better way to treat a... Wait. What? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe