“To fap or not to fap? That is the question.”
Porn and masturbation are everywhere–comedy, music, TV, etc. and it seems like everybody’s doing it these days! In the world of “no-fappers” though (men who abstain from masturbation), you’ll find a shocking list of all-stars and real life superheroes.
Who is and isn’t watching porn?
Let’s first break this down and look at who is and who is not watching porn and masturbating.
First of all: No, not EVERYBODY is doing it. There are groups and programs online with hundreds of thousands of followers improving their lives through the benefits of retention. Second of all, just because everyone is doing something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s like the classic dad quote: “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”
To be fair, though, yes, the vast majority of guys single and in relationships do either one, the other, or both. According to a recent study, 91.5% men and 60.2% of women, which may have increased since the start of COVID19. However, by contrast, I want to show you just how many of the true “greats” have sexually restrained themselves and publicly attributed their success to it.
Great Men Abstain
As one Reddit user, malesromm, stated: “Could you imagine great men like Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, or MLK sitting behind a computer monitor for three hours straight watching porn and fapping?” Well, they didn’t and that’s in part what made them great, or at least gave them the time, energy, and other resources to do incredible things and achieve success.
So here is a comprehensive list of extraordinarily successful and influential men who practiced no pron/ no masturbation/ and somtimes no sex:
Abraham Lincoln
Aristotle
“True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you’re having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn’t grow you as a person.”
Beethoven
The Buddha
Carl Jung–Philosopher
“Addiction is not a disease, it is an attitude. Addiction, in the end, is a behavior that we choose to indulge.”
Dalai Llama
“Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually, I think is short-period satisfaction and, often, that leads to more complication.”
David Haye–Heavy Weight Boxer
“I don’t ejaculate for six weeks before the fight. No sex, no masturbation, no nothing. It releases too much tension. It releases a lot of minerals and nutrients that your body needs, and it releases them cheaply. Releasing weakens the knees and your legs. Find a lion that hasn’t had some food for a while, and you’ve got a dangerous cat. So there won’t bet a drip from me. Even in my sleep — if there are girls all over me in my dream, I say to them, “I’ve got a fight next week, I can’t do anything. I can’t do it.” That’s control. I’ve been doing that since I was fifteen and its part and parcel of my preparation now. That’s why Im am who I am today — it’s down to all those little sacrifices. Find me another boxer who makes that sacrifice, and you’ll find another champion.”
D.H. Lawrence–Famous Writer & Poet
“In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening.”
Elon Musk
Galen
“It is shameful to degrade to such bestial uses that grand limb, that formidable member, which we votaries of Science dub the Major Maxillary–when they dub it at all–which is seldom, It would be better to amputate the os front is than to put it to such use.”
Gandhi
“I think lust is a very different thing from love. I believe in sex love.”
“The horror with which ancient literature regarded the fruitless loss of the vital fluid was not a superstition born of ignorance. . . Surely it is criminal for a man to allow his most precious possession to run to waste.”
Georg Hackenschmidt– 20th century strongman, wrestler and philosopher
“Moderation in sexual intercourse is very important. Sexual abstemiousness should be strictly observed during the early age of manhood and development. He who observes this recommendation will soon benefit by the immense prerogatives of chastity. A few years ago a colleague of mine said to me: “Nonsense, that is only human nature.” This “clever” man, however reached only a secondary position as a strong man, and now, at the age of thirty, he is actually degenerating as an athlete.”
The Great Gama Undefeated World Champion Wrestler and Champion of World Wrestling 1910 and 1928
Henry David Thoreau
“The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”
Hippocrates
Isaac Newton
In a letter to John Locke: “The way to chastity is not to struggle with incontinent thoughts but to avert the thoughts by some employment, or by reading, or by meditating on other things”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau–Philosopher, Writer, Composer
Called Masturbation “mental Rape”
“If once he acquires this dangerous supplement he is lost. From then on, body and soul will be enervated; he will carry to the grave the sad effects of this habit, the most fatal habit which a young man can be subjected to.”
Jesus Christ
“But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Immanuel Kant: German Philosopher in the Enlightenment
“The ground of proving is to be sought, no doubt, in this, that man meanly abdicates his personality, when he attempts to employ himself as a bare means to satisfy a brutal lust.”
“[He] resigns himself an abandoned outcast to brutality, enjoying his own self-abuse – that is, he makes himself an object of abomination, and stands bereft of all reverence of any kind.”
Dr. Harvey Kellog–Inventor of Corn Flakes
In an 1887 book, Kellogg described masturbation as “self-pollution” and called it “the most dangerous of all sexual abuses”.
“If illicit commerce of the sexes is a heinous sin,” Kellogg wrote, “self-pollution is a crime doubly abominable.”
Lao Tzu
Leonardo Da Vinci
“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself… the height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. …And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.”
Leo Tolstoy Legendary Novelist
“I had become what is called a voluptuary; and to be a voluptuary is a physical condition like the condition of a victim of the morphine habit, of a drunkard, and of a smoker.”
“These periods of irritation depended very regularly upon the periods of love. Each of the latter was followed by one of the former. A period of intense love was followed by a long period of anger; a period of mild love induced a mild irritation. We did not understand that this love and this hatred were two opposite faces of the same animal feeling.”
Mark Twain
“If you must gamble your lives sexually, don’t play a lone hand too much. When you feel a revolutionary uprising in your system, get your Vendome Column down some other way – don’t jerk it down.”
Mark Whalberg
“I don’t get down with jerking off, dude. I lead a clean and pure life”.
“I don’t get down with jerking off, dude. Look. I don’t believe in everything that the church says. I try to do the right thing. I lead a clean and pure life. I’m a married guy. I have a beautiful wife. Sex is not the most important thing to me, being horny all the time, spanking the—I mean…”
Michaelangelo
Mike Tyson
“I never knew that conquering so many women takes so much from you more than adds so much to you. I always read that the great fighters never had sex before fights and I was a young kid and I wanted to be the youngest heavyweight champion in the world, so I restrained myself from sex for around five years.”
Miles Davis
“Davis: You can’t come [cum], then fight or play. You can’t do it. When I get ready to come, I come. But I do not come and play.
Interviewer: Explain that in layman’s terms.
Davis: Ask Muhammad Ali. If he comes, he can’t fight two minutes. Sh*t, he couldn’t even whip me.
Interviewer: Would you fight Muhammad Ali under those conditions, to prove your point?
Davis: You’re ****** right I’d fight him. But he’s got to promise to f*ck first. If he ain’t going to f*ck, I ain’t going to fight. You give up all your energy when you come. I mean, you give up all of it! So, if you’re going to f*ck before a gig, how are you going to give something when it’s time to hit?”
“…He asked me did I ever masturbate and I told him, no. He couldn’t believe that. He told me that I should do that every day instead of shooting dope. I thought that maybe he should put his own ********* self in the nuthouse if that’s all the ********* had to tell me. Masturbating to break a habit? Sh*t, I thought that ********** was crazy.”
Muhammed Ali
Boxing Coach Harry Wiley: “There’s a kid just come down here named Cassius Clay. If you bet on him every time he fights, you’ll be a rich man, ’cause he won’t lose a single fight. I believe his thing is sexual control. And he’s got it. Any kid who can control his sex can with the title. I believe it.”
Napoleon Hill– the author of “Think and Grow Rich”
“It helps to master laziness and procrastination. It gives one the fighting qualities necessary under all circumstance for self-defense”
Nikola Tesla
Plato
Pythagoras
Rickson Gracie MMA and Jiu-Jitshu Legend
“No sex. Yeah, because you know, by having sex you waste a lot of energy. I mean, the vital energy in your body goes away. I mean, it’s normal, it’s something we normally do, and it’s no problem at all, but if you want to accumulate energy, if you want to get full energy, you cannot waste…So I try to keep myself away from sex at least two weeks before the fight.” Rickson Gracie in “Choke”
Saigō Takamori
“He saw abstinence as empowering rather than constraining…In his youth Saigo saw sex not as pleasurable dissipation or intimacy but as an impediment to happiness and loyalty.”
Socrates:
“Socrates first prescribes abstinence from sexual pleasure. A conventionalized treatment of his view on sex then follows which illustrates and amplifies the earlier summary treatment of its dangers…Xenophon [one that Socrates advices] makes the wrong move and finds that though sex may be a pleasure, it makes you a slave.
Steve Jobs
“Our birth control method up to that point was Steve’s coitus interruptus, also called the pull-out method, which for him was about his conserving his energy for work,’ she wrote. He explained that he didn’t want to climax so he could build ‘power and wealth by conserving one’s vital energies.’” (Former girlfriend Chrisann Brennan)
Swami Vivekananda–Indian Hindu Monk
“You may wonder what made them do this, you may wonder if I had some strange power. Let me tell you that I did have a power and this is it — never once in my life did I allow myself to have even one sexual thought. I trained my mind, my thinking, and the powers that man usually uses along that line I put into a higher channel, and it developed a force so strong that nothing could resist it
Takamori, known as “The Last True Samurai”
Thomas Jefferson
The Stoic Philosophers
Henry David Thoreau
“The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”
George Washington
William Shakespeare
Winston Churchill
“The reason that I can write so much is that I don’t waste my essence in the bedroom”
50 cent– Rapper & hip hop artist
“I’m practicing abstinence women = confusion I don’t need right now”.
“Masturbation is a sin you stop right now fool!!! lol God is watching you#”
He also posted 4 tips for quitting on Twitter: “Step 1. To avoid the urge to masturbate stop going to porn sites. Step 2. Make a conscious decision not to turn your head after people walk by you. Step 3. Do not go to strip clubs. Step 4. Do not look at lust filled magazines”
Modern Celebrities Against Porn
And to top it off, here are a few modern celebrities who have come out against pornography sepcifically:
- Terry Crews
- Orlando Bloom
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- Kansas City Royals
- Ben Roethlisberger– Steelers quarterback
- Lamar Odom – NBA champion and pro athlete
- Nick Willis– Olympic runner from New Zealand
- Russell Brand–Comedian and actor
- Kirk Franklin– Gospel music star
- Tyler Ward
In Conclusion…
It’s normal to have stronger urges after reading an article about why you should quit. Remember, you’re not in competition with anyone, rather use these stories and quote to learn about the benefits and reasons YOU have for quitting. Again, there are probably countless others that haven’t made public statements regarding pornography and masturbation, but who have benefited from the awesome and life changing effects of quitting!
Please share your thoughts down below. If you’re struggling with a PMO addiction, feel free to check out my coaching page and sign-up to get trusted support!