By David Futrelle

For the past few months I’ve been mildly obsessed with the Semen Retention subreddit, a sort of harder-core alternative to the bigger NoFap subreddit, full of earnest men convinced that if they can just keep their hands off their dingles for a long enough time they’ll gain quasi-magical powers and become irresistibly attractive to women. Their collective ideology is a weird mixture of pseudoscience, occultism, Eastern woo, and Red Pill misogyny, with a dollop of old-fashioned antisemitism occasionally tossed into the mix for flavor. For a connoisseur of weird misogyny like me, what’s not to love?