It always makes me wonder when I bump into a really serious Homestuck fan who's under the age of 25, because that means either you were reading it when you were eight years old, or you got into it when it was well past its peak and you're still Like This, and both options raise fascinating questions.

(If you're not sure what I mean by "a really serious Homestuck fan", then you're not. Trust me.)

November, or, as anyone who follows artists of a certain stripe knows it, Anatomical Fanfiction Month.

I do not follow artists of a certain stripe. What happens in November?

In brief, the month of November is observed in some online communities as "No Nut November", in which participants challenge themselves to abstain from sexual activity of all kinds, including masturbation, for the full duration of the month.

The event is usually treated as a meme on the surface, but in practice, many of its actual participants are adherents of the pseudo-science of semen retention, which – they claim – brings about various beneficial transformations to the body and mind; as you may already have guessed, there's a great deal of overlap between semen retention true believers and the online alt-right.

While active participation in No Nut November is largely restricted to Reddit incels and other alt-right weirdos, the idea of No Nut November has been taken up by many artists whose work focuses on what might politely be described as "speculative biology". Though most of them have very little interest in the political dimension of No Nut November, the notion of protracted semen retention bringing about bodily transformations – typically paired with some degree of orgasm denial kink – appeals to them for what I trust are obvious reasons.

The upshot is that in certain circles, the month of November sees an outpouring of fanart playing with the idea of semen retention leading to bodily transformation (not always beneficially). The subject matter ranges from the anatomically implausible to the thermodynamically impossible, and hits every point in between.

This is so weird man, back when I was in high school the homies were always like "It's a challenge to see how long we can last without sex or jacking off" and it was kinda entirely there just to laugh at whoever failed first and give yourself something to pat yourself on the back for, just something to compete about. We even included girls and we all double-challenged with No Shave November (which the girls were always happier with bc they could skirt the societal expectation to shave all the time for a whole month and say "It's a thing my friends and I are challenging each other to do")!

It was just some dumb shit we did for kicks and to compete over fuck all back then, at what point did someone take that shit SO SERIOUSLY they had to go do pseudo-science around it?

It's the other way 'round, oddly enough. The semen retention truther movement is considerably older and larger than No Nut November, and eventually they just sort of moved in and took over in many online spaces. I'm given to understand that NoFap (both the Reddit community and the website) is a big part of how that happened, though I haven't looked deeply into the details. It's not terribly recent, in any case – criticisms that participation in No Nut November had been co-opted by the alt-right were circulating at least as early as 2018.

I for one prefer NNN's less well known cousin, No Poop November.

the rise of nofap can be mostly attributed to the 4chan board /r9k/, which also played a big part in growing the incel community. It was specifically the idea that semen retention would make you more attractive because hormones and pheromones or whatever. The “fun game” side of it probably comes from people seeing memes about it and being unaware of its frankly insane origins

To the best of my knowledge, the neither 4chan nor the incel movement originated No Nut November – in fact, it slightly pre-dates both. I was around when the event was just getting started circa 2000, and as far as I'm aware, it began as a goofy meme inspired by an episode of Seinfeld; early No Nut November events (though it wasn't yet called that) even used George Costanza as a mascot for a while. It took about a decade for the semen retention weirdos to really start taking over.

(Of course, the plot of the Seinfeld episode in question bears a striking resemblance to a couple of specific claims made by semen retention pseudoscience, so this may be a case of inspiration at one remove!)

November, or, as anyone who follows artists of a certain stripe knows it, Anatomical Fanfiction Month.

I do not follow artists of a certain stripe. What happens in November?

In brief, the month of November is observed in some online communities as "No Nut November", in which participants challenge themselves to abstain from sexual activity of all kinds, including masturbation, for the full duration of the month.

The event is usually treated as a meme on the surface, but in practice, many of its actual participants are adherents of the pseudo-science of semen retention, which – they claim – brings about various beneficial transformations to the body and mind; as you may already have guessed, there's a great deal of overlap between semen retention true believers and the online alt-right.

While active participation in No Nut November is largely restricted to Reddit incels and other alt-right weirdos, the idea of No Nut November has been taken up by many artists whose work focuses on what might politely be described as "speculative biology". Though most of them have very little interest in the political dimension of No Nut November, the notion of protracted semen retention bringing about bodily transformations – typically paired with some degree of orgasm denial kink – appeals to them for what I trust are obvious reasons.

The upshot is that in certain circles, the month of November sees an outpouring of fanart playing with the idea of semen retention leading to bodily transformation (not always beneficially). The subject matter ranges from the anatomically implausible to the thermodynamically impossible, and hits every point in between.

This is so weird man, back when I was in high school the homies were always like "It's a challenge to see how long we can last without sex or jacking off" and it was kinda entirely there just to laugh at whoever failed first and give yourself something to pat yourself on the back for, just something to compete about. We even included girls and we all double-challenged with No Shave November (which the girls were always happier with bc they could skirt the societal expectation to shave all the time for a whole month and say "It's a thing my friends and I are challenging each other to do")!

It was just some dumb shit we did for kicks and to compete over fuck all back then, at what point did someone take that shit SO SERIOUSLY they had to go do pseudo-science around it?

It's the other way 'round, oddly enough. The semen retention truther movement is considerably older and larger than No Nut November, and eventually they just sort of moved in and took over in many online spaces. I'm given to understand that NoFap (both the Reddit community and the website) is a big part of how that happened, though I haven't looked deeply into the details. It's not terribly recent, in any case – criticisms that participation in No Nut November had been co-opted by the alt-right were circulating at least as early as 2018.

November, or, as anyone who follows artists of a certain stripe knows it, Anatomical Fanfiction Month.

I do not follow artists of a certain stripe. What happens in November?

In brief, the month of November is observed in some online communities as "No Nut November", in which participants challenge themselves to abstain from sexual activity of all kinds, including masturbation, for the full duration of the month.

The event is usually treated as a meme on the surface, but in practice, many of its actual participants are adherents of the pseudo-science of semen retention, which – they claim – brings about various beneficial transformations to the body and mind; as you may already have guessed, there's a great deal of overlap between semen retention true believers and the online alt-right.

While active participation in No Nut November is largely restricted to Reddit incels and other alt-right weirdos, the idea of No Nut November has been taken up by many artists whose work focuses on what might politely be described as "speculative biology". Though most of them have very little interest in the political dimension of No Nut November, the notion of protracted semen retention bringing about bodily transformations – typically paired with some degree of orgasm denial kink – appeals to them for what I trust are obvious reasons.

The upshot is that in certain circles, the month of November sees an outpouring of fanart playing with the idea of semen retention leading to bodily transformation (not always beneficially). The subject matter ranges from the anatomically implausible to the thermodynamically impossible, and hits every point in between.

Too much too hope this is just people drawing their blorbos with swollen foreheads, huh?

The "Flowers for Algernon" scenario whereby semen retention turns the depicted character into some sort of comic book mad scientist (and then they reach a breaking point, jizz out all their IQ points, and go back to being a dumbass) isn't a particularly common interpretation, but I have bumped into it on several occasions, yes.

November, or, as anyone who follows artists of a certain stripe knows it, Anatomical Fanfiction Month.

I do not follow artists of a certain stripe. What happens in November?

In brief, the month of November is observed in some online communities as "No Nut November", in which participants challenge themselves to abstain from sexual activity of all kinds, including masturbation, for the full duration of the month.

The event is usually treated as a meme on the surface, but in practice, many of its actual participants are adherents of the pseudo-science of semen retention, which – they claim – brings about various beneficial transformations to the body and mind; as you may already have guessed, there's a great deal of overlap between semen retention true believers and the online alt-right.

While active participation in No Nut November is largely restricted to Reddit incels and other alt-right weirdos, the idea of No Nut November has been taken up by many artists whose work focuses on what might politely be described as "speculative biology". Though most of them have very little interest in the political dimension of No Nut November, the notion of protracted semen retention bringing about bodily transformations – typically paired with some degree of orgasm denial kink – appeals to them for what I trust are obvious reasons.

The upshot is that in certain circles, the month of November sees an outpouring of fanart playing with the idea of semen retention leading to bodily transformation (not always beneficially). The subject matter ranges from the anatomically implausible to the thermodynamically impossible, and hits every point in between.

I fully understand why "character A is astounded at the sight of character B's penis" is a specific kink that gets tagged for, but the fact that some platforms choose to tag this kink as "penis awe" is unintentionally very funny. Now I'm picturing penis experience kink tags for all those other allegedly transcendent emotions in the glossary of your Philosophy 101 textbook. Penis faith. Penis Weltschmerz. Penis apprehension of the absurd.

The existence of penis awe must therefore imply its antagonistic opposite, cock ennui.

#ennuiner #if you will (tags via @blujayonthewing)

Fanartist whose work covers a broad range of fandoms with exacting emulation of each source's distinctive style and a finely honed grasp of the eroticism of various body types, except the second party in every single pairing without exception is Wallace Wells from Scott Pilgrim.

Wallace still looks like Wallace in the Scott Pilgrim style.

Naturally.

Sometimes I'll see a piece of art of two women fucking, except the posing is super awkward because there's also this anonymous dick poking in from off-frame that has to accommodated, and I'm like, I appreciate the technical mastery that went into arranging this tableau, but there is an extremely obvious way this could have been simplified.

@doodle-mole replied:

Though Occam's razor is often misstated as favouring the simplest explanation, it's really about favouring the explanation which introduces the fewest unsupported assumptions. Applying it here, then, wouldn't necessarily mandate fewer dicks, but merely fewer unsupported dicks.

Ships with height differences. Reblog if you agree

I just stumbled across a 'fic tagged "cock warning", which in context I'm about 99% sure is a typo that was meant to be tagged "cock warming", but I'm seriously tempted to adopt the former into my own tagging lexicon. Heaven knows many of my posts would warrant it!

THERES A COCK WARMING TAG?!?!!?

What, on AO3? Of course – when I checked just now it had like 25000 works in it.

("Cock warning", conversely, contains two works at the time of this posting, so if it is an uncorrected typo it's one that's happened twice.)

For comparison, on Tumblr, the tag "#cock warning" appears to have been used three times prior to this post: once in 2013 on an Adventure Time shipping comment; once just this past May on a series of nude paintings; and once in 2015 for a post concerning, and I quote, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Hyper-Realistic CGI Genitals".

I just stumbled across a 'fic tagged "cock warning", which in context I'm about 99% sure is a typo that was meant to be tagged "cock warming", but I'm seriously tempted to adopt the former into my own tagging lexicon. Heaven knows many of my posts would warrant it!

THERES A COCK WARMING TAG?!?!!?

What, on AO3? Of course – when I checked just now it had like 25000 works in it.

("Cock warning", conversely, contains two works at the time of this posting, so if it is an uncorrected typo it's one that's happened twice.)

I just stumbled across a 'fic tagged "cock warning", which in context I'm about 99% sure is a typo that was meant to be tagged "cock warming", but I'm seriously tempted to adopt the former into my own tagging lexicon. Heaven knows many of my posts would warrant it!

THERES A COCK WARMING TAG?!?!!?

What, on AO3? Of course – when I checked just now it had like 25000 works in it.

("Cock warning", conversely, contains two works at the time of this posting, so if it is an uncorrected typo it's one that's happened twice.)