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"Remember when Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer quit masturbating on Seinfeld in \"The Contest?\" Well, men across America \u2014 who've long been known as some of the greatest and most frequent monkey-floggers in the biz \u2014 have taken to the Internet for a more successful example of masturbatory abstinence, according to New York Magazine. Well, grab my butt and call me Shirley! I never would have guessed.The concept of masturbation and/or porn addiction is a trickier one to classify than, say, a tobacco or alcohol addiction, because the chemical cocktail released during orgasm is the same whether you're alone or with a partner. Instead, porn addiction is largely the result of social needs, not chemical ones: Many modern men choose masturbation over sex, leaving confused girlfriends in their wake and sex researchers wondering what kind of lasting effects that consuming large amounts of pornography (if a guy's been watching it since he was 16 all the way up to his senior days, that's a lotta porn) has on this generation of men.\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nBut whether or not porn is your spank-bank of choice, it looks like an increasing amount of guys think they know the answer to \"How much jerking off is too much?\" The answer? The decline of so-called \"masculinity.\" Research has shown that the more desensitized to sexual images that men get, their need for stimuli in order to achieve an erection increases, which can cause virility problems. And we all know that a guy's low libido can lead to relationship weirdness.\n\nOnce men caught onto this (many of them caught on from a TED Talk by Philip Zimbardo called \"The Demise of Guys\"), testosterone-laden user-generated sites like Reddit saw an upswing in anti-masturbation support groups. One such forum, NoFap, gained 20,000 members in just a month. Now it's up to 40,000 and climbing, with members chiming in about the benefits of quitting masturbation cold turkey, from landing a new girlfriend to everyday observations like \"I was able to notice birds chirping.\"One 19-year-old male virgin told the forum that after 70 days of \"fapstinence,\" he slept with a woman on a plane. His newfound confidence, he said, \"not only helped him perform well at a job interview later, and secure a job at a hedge fund for the summer, but also enabled him to call a long-simmering crush and ask her out.\" (Whoa. Maybe I should stop watching porn.)Many anti-masturbators liken it to unplugging and reconnecting with the world. One of them claims that his voice has deepened since he's quit jerking off, and compares his newfound feelings with being on an antidepressant.If the tables were turned, do you think you'd be able to give up masturbation? I dare you to try it. Being single, I probably wouldn't last longer than three days. Who needs to hear those birds, anyway?!Follow Anna on Twitter: @annabreslawPhoto via Getty Images/istockphoto"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a12449/men-quit-masturbation-masculinity/>