Semen Retention, Sexual Kung Fu, NoFap, Bro Bonding… we track health perverts back to their religious roots and explore the new breed of online influencers in the scene. They combine new age, right wing, and pseudo-eastern philosophies to teach young insecure men how to self-actualize on youtube.
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Cover art by Jess Johnson (http://instagram.com/flesh_dozer)
Theme & music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com). Editing by Corey Clotz.
Man, the breadwinner, playboy, carnivore, retainer of semen, and lifter of weights.
He is wild, hairy, dominant, breathing into his balls and bonding with his bros.
And more than anything, he charges you monthly for his content.
Welcome to Man Clan!
We are your alpha hosts in Paragons of Masculinity.
Annie Kelly and Julian Field.
Welcome, beloved listener.
Today's episode starts with a motivational mantra.
If you are a sensitive young man, feeling lonely, anxious, or depressed, then this message is for you.
First things first, absolutely do not, under any circumstances, go to the doctor.
Do not seek out a therapist.
Definitely do not try talking to a friend or family member that you trust.
Definitely not, no. Instead, what I and the Man Clan podcast advise you to do is immediately find
an online community of similarly lonely, anxious, and depressed individuals who have decided that
all their problems can be blamed on one singular habit. A habit that is sadly normalized in today's
society and yet debilitating to all men who fall prey to its alluring pleasures.
I think we're going a little too far here.
I am speaking, of course, about masturbation, and why you should all stop doing it at once.
What the fuck?
It's like...
She saw the script because in my script I accuse her of stopping us from jacking off now She's outplaying me by bringing it out early.
This is Honestly, we have a few episodes left here on man clan and I feel like you are outplaying me at every turn Yeah, you you knew what you were getting when you invited a Catholic on this podcast The Kelly clan is going down.
I've said that to say but you know, see you later in the script for more on that When Julian and I discussed the various aspects of digital masculinity we should be exploring in this show, he introduced me to a new category that I had never heard of before, but with which he had become darkly fascinated.
These men espoused the benefits of idiosyncratic rituals which fused spirituality, dubious science, and above all else, a fixation on the genitals and bodily fluids, all of which together, they claimed, made them happy, healthy, and whole.
Julian called them the health perverts.
Air horns.
Now, I don't think of myself as a particularly sensitive person.
Given the kind of subjects that I study, it would be pretty difficult to do my job if I was.
But I will admit there was something truly hideous, in fact borderline unwatchable, about some of the people Julian had dug up from the most esoteric recesses of Instagram and TikTok.
For the first time in Maniclan's long and ancient history, I declared a strike.
I'll sift through a great deal of masculinity bullshit in the name of research, but even I have a line.
Break it!
Break it!
Scabs!
Scabs to the line!
One element of the health pervert philosophy did interest me, and that was the various theories on the health and wellness benefits of total abstinence from masturbation, and the digital communities that are formed around this idea.
I find this belief a really interesting one, partly because of just how long it's been around, but also because of where it frequently sits at the intersection of religion and medicine.
I think this is still the case in the modern day, even if, without the benefit of hundreds of years of hindsight, it's a bit more difficult to see.
The history of self-pleasure and the ways people have tried to theorise it through the lens of religion, science and medicine is probably as old as humanity itself.
But I'm going to start here with the invention of the printing press, which most scholars agree was the first technological step on the road to posting your thoughts on the internet, and therefore, it could be argued, the very first in a chain of events leading to the shamans, prophets and gurus that we showcase on this very podcast.
Yeah, masturbation started when they published words that would make you that horny.
Before that, nobody jacked off because that level of horniness had never been heard of before.
Yeah, they were trying to do it with the cave paintings and stuff, but it just wasn't working.
You really had to use your imagination.
Almost all of those involve crudely drawn horses.
That's supposed to make me excited?
No.
Oh yeah, I mean there's some horses.
There's also like some weird like, I don't know if you've seen that Herzog documentary about the cave in France where it's got like, it's like half naked woman, half yeah, half horse or something like that.
They were dreaming up some weird anime girls before that shit existed.
Interestingly, many of the first treatises on the dangers of masturbation to the body and soul, published in the 17th and 18th century, were done so anonymously.
The subject matter was clearly still considered too scandalous to attach your name to.
One of the most famous of these is the pamphlet published in London around 1716 with the following lengthy title.
Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution and all its frightful consequences in both sexes, considered, with spiritual and physical advice for those who've already injured themselves by this abominable practice.
Hey, this is kind of like, uh, one-sided, you know?
I mean, this is... What the hell?
The pamphlet was something of a viral smash hit, getting republished many times over with new supplements, translated into several languages and distributed all over the globe.
Its authorship was never revealed, although several contenders were suggested, based on the fact the writer claimed to be a medical doctor and used both a mixture of religious and scientific arguments.
The historian of medicine Michael Stolberg has written, The historical importance of Onania is undisputed.
No analysis that deals with 18th century sexualities and sexual morals can ignore it.
However, the publication was far from innovative.
It was, as a matter of fact, hardly more than a compilation of extant writing on the topic.
The treatise's condemnation of masturbation on moral and religious grounds drew upon a long tradition of moralistic writing and was part of a larger debate on uncleanness in general.
The medical ideas in the tract were even less original.
They were taken almost exclusively and often verbatim from a single contemporary treatise on venereal diseases.
So, Anania didn't contribute much new to the conversation, but perhaps by being willing to address the distasteful subject head-on, rather than as an addendum to other arguments about human sexuality, it became by far one of the most influential publications on the topic during the Age of Enlightenment.
The spiritual importance of chastity was by this point well-trod ground.
According to popular religious consensus at the time, true sexual purity required understanding sex as a purely procreative act.
Any kind of sexual activity that was not done for this purpose was counted as a subtype of sodomy and therefore a sin.
There were even debates, which the author of Inania himself engaged in, over whether having sex with your wife when she was already pregnant, or past the age of viable conception, was sinful.
Well, I mean, we're all kind of confused by that, right?
Just on a physical level, it's like, OK, so then the person is a very different shape and there's another person inside.
What?
How does this all?
That's just like a basic human kind of question.
But they're being exploitative here.
I mean, let's not call it sinful.
Yeah, in fairness, the author of Anania, I think, does come down on the side of it not being sinful to have sex with somebody who's already pregnant.
Yeah.
So long as she's your wife.
Of course, of course.
According to Solberg, earlier editions of the pamphlet focused on these moral and religious arguments extensively.
The author identified masturbation as the sin of the biblical Onan, and he described the deadly punishment God inflicted on Onan to show just how terrible, how heinous a sin it was.
Quoting Paul's famous phrase, masturbators were warned that they would find the door to God's kingdom closed.
What the emergent professionalised field of medicine was beginning to uncover, however, was that the physical outcomes for masturbators were also pretty bleak.
As Anania warned, even trying out the pastime just once carried a risk of phimosis, which means a painfully tight foreskin.
Meanwhile, those who made a habit of it could expect stranguries, difficulty in pain urinating, and pre-apsisms, erections that last longer than is comfortable.
Even worse, repeated self-abuse could weaken semen, causing the children of the masturbator to be...
So, as you can see, masturbation was not simply a spiritual problem, or a matter of your personal health.
always ailing and complaining, a misery to themselves, a dishonour to the humane race,
and a scandal to their parents. So, as you can see, masturbation was not simply a spiritual problem
or a matter of your personal health. It was a generational issue which posed a very real threat
to a healthy, strong, functioning society. This was a very early example of social degeneracy
theory, meaning at its very simplest, the formalised belief in societal decline as a
result of hereditary factors.
In the 19th century, as a result of increasing urbanisation, degeneracy theory had a bit of a moment, and there was renewed scientific interest in sexual health and morality.
The American physician, businessman and inventor of delicious breakfast cereals, John Harvey Kellogg, took a particularly keen interest in the topic of masturbation.
Oh yeah, this is the type of attention that you don't want when you're masturbating because this is a pervert.
This is the classic quintessential ancient sex pervert, health pervert, whatever you want to call him.
And he is here to make sure that your horniness is in the parameters that he has decided are good and human.
And vegetarian in this case, because he did also play a huge role in pioneering health food and vegetarianism.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, he's a pretty interesting character, Kellogg, I think.
He's director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was a trendy Victorian health resort founded by members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, who Kellogg also belonged to.
Although I think he eventually gets kicked out over some kind of theological schism.
So he was well-equipped to try many of his various theories on a holistic preventative approach to human health, which he called biologic living.
Let me guess, it involves filling your ass with yogurt every day.
Having a staff fill your ass with yogurt, which was a classic Kellogg practice.
And I wish I was kidding.
You're getting ahead of yourself.
I haven't even got to the yogurt yet.
What?!
You have the yogurt in your script?
Oh, Annie, you used to be respectable.
You used to- I mean, look what this man clan has made you do.
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