The Sad Reality of the NoFap Community. Please Read.

I question the motivation behind this experiment you conducted. In more scientific terms, your hypothesis seems rather vague. The scientific method is about attempting to find answers to particular questions about reality. Tell me: what question were you trying to answer with your experiment?

Were you trying to demonstrate that this community is partially composed of people who are so deeply ingrained in their addictions that they don't have the self control to keep from making sexual advances on a new, attractive female user? I don't think we need an experiment to show that at all. For Pete's sake, it's spelled out in the description of the site. This is supposed to be a place where porn and sex addicts can come for support with their addictions, so it would make sense for some users to behave inappropriately in that respect. Yes, their behavior was inappropriate, but it doesn't do us any good to point our fingers at them and call them out. The men who messaged your imposter account looking for sexting are clearly very deep in their addictions. What has your experiment done to help them?

 

Good post... evil happens when good men do nothing

 

As a female who is also an SO this “experiment” is not off the mark. I avoid posting and even liking a post in forums other than rebooting in relationship for this very reason.

When other PA start conversations with me I’m very reluctant, some are genuine and others not so much. I’m on NF for my own betrayal trauma and support my husband.
Us SO’s have had many conversations about this topic, some have had angry very stocker-ish PA’s follow them around in the forum so they had leave NF altogether.
I can appreciate this poster for bringing this topic up, maybe it should be made more aware in general forums.
There are also many gentlemen that are great help in here and I always appreciate when they step up and respectfully “call someone out”.

 

Cynical and dishonest of a post in my honest opinion. But none are able to truly comprehend what I mean by that no matter how hard they won't try.

 

@IAmLegion I understand it may come as a shock to you, but I am not surprised by this at all. PMO is a horrible, horrible addiction and it at it's worst it will control you completely. Who's to blame here? The male addicts for messaging women? Or the women for making their gender known? It doesn't matter, what matters is how to prevent it from escalating. Like @Jennica said, female Fapstronauts could perhaps take measures to avoid triggering male Fapstronauts. I'm not at all saying they should, but AFAIK that's possibly the only sure-fire way to prevent any kind of harassment. Of course, male Fapstronauts could also control themselves, but that is easier said than done. Nofap is supposed to be a safe place above everything else, and sadly some people are so far progressed in their addictions that they have lost the ability to see women as human beings. Even a normal picture can trigger them.

@IAmLegion I am not justifying anyone or anything, but I think you should try and understand how totally helpless people can be against the evil that possesses them.

Also, don't be so focused on your streak. It's a mistake I have made myself and it has only led to frustration and more relapse. Instead focus on bettering your life everyday. A 100 day streak is useless if all you did was waste those days. And a relapse can be fought against if you refuse to let it affect you and jump to your feet immediately and continue on the good path. Please don't judge people on their streaks. Anyone can stumble, at 10, 100 or even a 1000 days. Use the counter to identify who most needs your help, not to challenge people.

 

I understand what you're saying there, and I think doing that sort of analysis can be useful sometimes. You're saying that it was a means to expose the fundamentals (or mechanics). Well, which fundamentals did you expose? You're saying that your experiment led us to deeper questions. Well, what were those deeper questions?

Maybe finger pointing wasn't the right term for me to use, but finger pointing doesn't necessarily equate to public exposure of one's identity. Even if the identities of the offenders were not exposed, we are still meant to look at "them" as a disgrace. The title of this thread is "The Sad Reality of the NoFap Community. Please Read". You're saying that these people and their actions are disgraceful (or, at the very least, pitiable), even though you haven't exposed their identities. Call it finger pointing or call it whatever you want, my question still stands: what good does it do for them or for any of us?

There's also a deeper implication behind your title. Saying that it's "The Sad Reality" implies that, before your experiment was conducted, we were unaware that these sorts of things were taking place. What makes you think that you're exposing some previously unknown phenomena? The number of responses to this thread saying things like "sad, but not really surprising" suggests that this community was already aware of this sort of behavior (or, at the very least, expected it).

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I think the most interesting part of your response is your numbered list, where you discuss the ways that this experiment has helped the struggling addicts that made sexual advances on your imposter account. I'll go over each item on the list in detail, but before I do, I'll just say that I don't think any of the items on your list actually helped these people with their addictions and that, if they did, you could have provided the same sort of support and care without deceiving them and without making a post branding their behavior as "The Sad Reality" of this community, which would have been far better for them and for all of us.

The relevant question at hand is: how did your experiment help the struggling addicts? The question is not "were you polite/fair to them?" I'm glad that you informed them the account was fake after the 72 minute period, but I don't think that does anything to help bring their addictions into remission.

Same point as above. I'm glad that you told them the truth, but I don't think it does anything to prevent them from relapsing again. Imagine if I were to walk into a room full of alcoholics, claiming that I ran a liquor store down the street, and I put a six pack of beers in the middle of the and a few of them end up drinking the beer. If I then tell them that "Oh, that was actually alcohol-free beer", and I'm not really a liquor-store owner, what have I done to help them? Sure, I've told them the truth, but it doesn't make their risk of relapse any less likely.

Again, I'm glad you treated them respectfully and didn't expose their identities (that would have been even worse). However, weren't they already anonymous before your experiment? This forum doesn't require you to add any identifying information to set up a profile. There's also a deeper issue: how does anonymity help you recover from an addiction? I don't see what function it serves in preventing a relapse.

Again, I must remind you that the relevant question is: how did your experiment help the struggling addicts? Not "how did they feel after your experiment was over?"

I think compliments and encouragement are excellent tools for supporting other people through an addiction. Why not just compliment them and encourage them through other means? Why not message struggling people directly with compliments, or compliment them when they create a nice thread, or create an encouraging thread of your own directed at everyone? You could have provided compliments and encouragement without doing your experiment, and it would have been equally effective.

Again, your politeness is not on trial here. I think you're a very polite person. The problem I see with this last item is the same as the problem I saw with #4. That is, you could have provided comfort, motivation, and positivity without deceiving the offenders and without creating a thread calling them "The Sad Reality" of this community. You could have comforted them directly with comments on their threads, private messages, or just provided general motivation and positivity through a publicly-directed thread of your own, and I think that would have been just as effective.

If the other account felt ashamed, then I wouldn't say he left on a good note at all. Perhaps it isn't for you, but for me and for many other users on this forum, shame is one of the main feelings that keeps us bound in this addiction. Porn addiction can be viewed as a cycle of shame:
You feel ashamed about who you are -> PMO to feel better -> Feel ashamed about PMO -> Feel ashamed about who you are -> PMO to feel better

A lot of fighting my own addiction has been about breaking this shame cycle by attacking the source: the shame itself. If your experiment made one of these users feel ashamed of who he was and what he had done, then I think you could argue that it might have ended up making things worse.

Final point:
You can provide motivation, comfort, compliments, encouragement, and positivity without using deception and without catalyzing feelings of shame as a side effect.

 

In case there are some who didn't quite get it...

The point of this experiment and thread was not at all about pointing our fingers on some people, saying "Look what kind of sick men we have here!"

This kind of behaviour does of course matter very much for female users when they get harassed, but from the point of view of the informational value of this thread, these men are completely irrelevant. The point was not to test them. Nor it was to prove anything. It was about understanding, raising awareness and giving a wake up call for everyone. Now, it's also up to everyone if they want to try and learn something from it, in case they see some value in it.

To put it simply and generalize, the majority of the forum (at least the single guys) would just like to have a girl to fuck, thinking that they could fix or replace their PMO (and other) issues with sex with another person. It's not necessarily so easy to understand and accept that this cannot be a real solution.

However, that's one of the most important things to understand in order to be successful in recovery. Unless you have succeeded, you will have to face it. And the ones who have, will have to keep dealing with it.

I'd like to thank @IAmLegion for bringing up an important topic. But I also have to say that you as well misunderstood some of the replies, and contributed to some unnecessary conflict in this thread.

 

Some people have the philosophy of once an addict, always an addict. They consider it a permanent, lifetime disease. Groups such as AA tell people to tell themselves they are powerless, which I think is counterproductive, but AA does have results.

There is also the nueroplasticity school, which believes that brain changes aren't permanent, but that the brain slowly heals. This doesn't mean that the person should go back to using whatever, because they know they are susceptible to it! This is the school of thought I'm in. I don't see myself as an addict to alcohol, tobacco, or coffee anymore. They aren't part of my life, and don't define me anymore. I don't have chemical or psychological dependency on them anymore. I think it's better to consider myself a former alcoholic, not a "powerless" alcoholic for life, which to me encourages relapse "because I can't help myself". Medically, I think most doctors are in the lifetime "disease" school, as I'm classified as having "Alcohol Use Disorder, in Remission". It's like how they treat cancer - you can only ever be in "remission", not "cured", but you have to ask, if you get cancer again, is it actually the same cancer, or are you just susceptible to cancer in general or a particular type of cancer?

There is also the social connection theory of addiction, which states that addiction is simply a symptom of lack of social support, and social support can prevent or heal addiction. This is a bit different, but does have similarities to both other schools I mentioned. It has some interesting science and research behind it, so I'm open-minded to it. It's possibly why traditional 12-step programs work in the first place - meetings are social support, and not going to meetings usually means isolation and lack of social support.

There may be other theories I'm not aware of, but the most common theory seems to be the "disease" theory of 12-step programs.

 

My only question to all you guys is that what will you do if you were a girl and some random men starts messaging you(harassing).....and makes you paranoid
I know that only 5-6% men would behave like this.....but still
The solution which I see is to report against them
But this kind of behavior scares some girls and they might feel wrong to join this forum

 

This thread has made me a bit paranoid, not that the OP cares. But whatever...

 

Creepy. It's not only women. I have recieved a few fishy pms as well.

It's sad that we have to deal with predators. This should be addressed in the welcoming message (if it isn't already)

 

Yeah. Unfortunately I have had a few guys ask me to go on another app with them to “talk”.

 

Do you know what the word "patronizing" means? That's how you're talking to me.

No, they don't. Expectations and acceptance of reality are mutually exclusive. I think the behavior of the users who made sexual advances on your imposter account was highly inappropriate. I don't think that type of behavior is acceptable at all. However, I expect it nonetheless because of the nature of this forum. I don't think that expectation is a reflection of the overall climate of this forum. Overall, I think this is generally a safe place for addicts (and those who are supporting addicts) to come for support, even though there are users who behave inappropriately. If I see someone behaving inappropriately or breaking the forum rules, I will report them, because I don't think it's acceptable.

I'm claiming that this sort of behavior already is and already was alienated before your experiment was conducted. Making sexual advances on other users was deemed inappropriate before your experiment happened. I think it's pretty clear that making sexual advances on another user who didn't give any indication that such advances were welcome is breaking the "Respect other users" rule.

I understand your intentions, and I'm not bringing your intention into question. I said it before, and I'll say it again now: your intentions and your politeness aren't on trial here. My main point in my previous response was that there was collateral damage incurred by your experiment. One addict walked away from your experiment feeling deeply ashamed (I imagine this thread might have brought that person even more shame, if he's seen it). Shame is the last thing a porn addict needs in recovery. I'm not saying we shouldn't strive to be better. I'm just saying that we can become a better community without deceiving other users and without incurring shame.

No, expecting people to smoke doesn't make it okay. What did I say that suggested to you that I thought users making sexual advances on other users was okay? I've referred to their behavior as inappropriate from my very first comment on this thread, and I also referred to them as "offenders". I don't think this sort of behavior is acceptable, but I still expect it. I don't think smoking is good for one's health, but I still expect people to do it.

There are no hard feelings for me, but I'm a little concerned about the subjects of your experiment. I've already mentioned that shame is a major component for a lot of porn addicts, so why would you risk incurring more shame for them when there are equally effective, less deceptive means of supporting them?

Do you seriously believe that I meant "I don't think" as an independent clause? Why would I say that about myself unless I was joking?
The quote, with context, was: "...I don't think any of the items on your list actually helped these people with their addictions..."
That's being incredibly unfair to me. If you have more important things to be doing than replying to this thread, then I can understand that. You don't have any obligation to respond to this thread, and I understand that your time is valuable and that there may be more important things you need to be doing with your time. Just don't throw me under the bus when you no longer have the time to reply in full.

Again, I'll encourage you to look up the definition of the word "patronizing". This is a heavily patronizing comment. It's not a great way to make friends, and it certainly does nothing to improve the soundness or validity of your argument.

 

Oh so that is common. I've had a couple guys ask me to do that too. I was wondering if people were doing that to me because I was honest about my sexuality.