“Your Seed is Your Life Force”: Masculinities of Spirituality and Entrepreneurialism in NoFap Lifestyle Gurus on YouTube

Abstract

This paper investigates mainstream injunctions of contemporary masculinity on YouTube and what I will call “spiritpreneurial masculinity”, a construction that privileges both entrepreneurialism and spiritual values for producing the ideal masculinity. I particularly focus on how spiritpreneurial discourses play out around the so-called NoFap movement, which is an online movement with various dedicated websites, coaches, bloggers, and forums preaching men to avoid pornography and masturbation in order to flourish. While previous studies of NoFap focused on the more amorphous discourses of the movement, including forum discussions, communities, and audience practices, I here look at how this floating internet fad becomes monetizable in online micro-celebrities and expert organizations with a substantial number of followers running their accounts as businesses. I use discourse analysis to look at men’s lifestyle gurus, arguing that NoFap clusters around nodal points of “energy”, “transformation”, “resistance” and “productivity”.