Blue Pill, Red Pill or... Black Pill?

No Nut November

In just a few days a curious annual internet event will begin: No Nut November (NNN). For those not in the know, nutting is a colloquial term for a man ejaculating - and No Nut November is the idea that it's good for people to take time off from ejaculating during November. At places like Reddit's “NoFap” group (fapping is a slang word for masturbating), people talk through November about how well they're doing with the challenge, which has somehow morphed from being an internet joke to something that many young men are taking seriously.

One argument for No Nut November is that a month of abstinence could have health benefits. Of course, there's no good evidence that this is the case - and some evidence that regular masturbation might be better for your health than abstaining.

As well as the health claims, there are silly claims that not ejaculating makes men more attractive by retaining more of their testosterone, or that ejaculation loses a man's “vital energy”. I have to admit that I find these justifications a little weird and creepy.

A third argument, that not masturbating can help people to break a dependency to the pornography industry, might have some merit - although I'd argue that it would probably be sufficient to masturbate without using pornography, and that abstaining all together is likely to be setting an unachievable goal for many. There are many dimensions to the pornography debate, and I'm not going to get into the weeds of that here. Suffice it to say that there are some ethical issues with the industry, but that it can also be an empowering career choice for some women.

Over the last few years, the NNN movement has found itself intertwined with some icky right wing groups. Claims are made online that masturbating to heterosexual pornography is gay, and therefore not okay; that the porn industry is run by Jews; and that interracial porn is teaching women to prefer coloured men to white men. And, of course, many conservative religious groups think that God doesn't want you to masturbate (we even have this in our country, with churches like Arise explicitly instructing their members that masturbation is a sin).

Red Pill

In the movie The Matrix the protagonist Neo is given a choice by Morpheus, his mentor, of taking a blue pill and staying in a computed simulation, or swallowing a red pill and learning about the true nature of reality. As Morpheus says in the movie:

“You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

This idea of taking a red pill and learning a deeper truth was adopted as a concept by an online community of men with a variety of beliefs and desires, including a view of dating that sees women as “conquests”, a belief that they are superior to women, a desire a return to conservative gender roles, a desire to learn “pick up” techniques for seducing women, etc. These are all pretty negative and damaging ideas, as far as I'm concerned, and it's sad to think that some young men have been indoctrinated into this kind of combative mindset.

(More recently, the idea of red pilling has been broadly adopted in conspiracy circles as a way of describing the process of people falling down rabbit holes of misinformation - although of course to these people, these rabbit holes are like the one Morpheus promises Neo, full of revelation)

Incels

Somewhat related to the NoFap movement that I talked about above is another online group called the Incels. The term is short for Involuntary Celibate, and consists of a group of men on the internet who consider that there's a conspiracy of women turning them down sexually, and men who are taking more than their “fair share” of women. Incels lament the fact that they are unable to find a romantic partner, and often end up becoming angry with the idea that they have been cheated out of their “right” to have sex. This anger is mainly directed towards women, and has become so bad that the Incel subreddit has been removed from the site:

This week I learned about the idea of being “black pilled”. The NZ Herald published an article late last week (republished in the Otago Daily Times) about how the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) considers incels to be a potentially dangerous group in this country. Angus Lindsay from Victoria University described black pilling in the article as:

"a broad conspiracy theory that if metaphorically swallowed, awakens the consumer to the understanding that the world is stacked against so-called 'low-status' men (incels) in favour of women and alpha males due to unchangeable genetic wiring."

The NZ Herald used an OIA request to obtain a copy of an SIS report titled “Involuntary Celibates in the New Zealand Context: Threat Insight”, which describes how attacks by incels overseas suggest that a similar “lone wolf” attack in New Zealand is feasible. The report makes the point that it's unlikely that incel beliefs alone would cause someone to resort to domestic terrorism, but it seems that there is a crossover between incel beliefs and white supremacy beliefs - and we all know that white supremacy has a bad track record when it comes to people performing horrific acts.

For all the good the internet has done in giving people easy access to information, through amazing websites such as Wikipedia, it's sad that it also gave rise to pockets of misinformation embodied in groups like the NoFap movement, the Red Pill community and Incel culture.

I'm guessing it's much harder for young people today to navigate through information sources and figure out what's true and what's dangerous nonsense, especially as many of these “information” sources are interactive. People can easily join these online groups and will likely end up engaging in conversations with like-minded people from around the world who will reinforce their bad ideas. And, given that these online groups are often bubbles containing only those like-minded people, these bad ideas are unlikely to be challenged - at least until the person holding them mentions them in a context outside of their internet bubbles, such as a family event, office conversation or evening in the pub.