Proud Boys, Blue Balls*
They're Too Damn Proud to Wank
You can call the Proud Boys a lot of things. You can call them racists, insurrectionists, or perfect specimens of toxic masculinity and white male fragility. You can call them misogynists and—let’s face it—you can probably call them a**holes, but apparently, you can’t call them wankers. According to the recently released Initiation Ceremony Manual, masturbating is mostly forbidden by the group.
The document was the subject of a heated debate in court this week as part of the sedition trial of five Proud Boy members who are accused of conspiring to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and prevent the election results from being certified. While prosecutors want to introduce the manual into evidence, the lawyer for one of the accused has said it is too incendiary. He wrote: "The document is riddled with politically incorrect remarks and assertions which would cause most or many Americans to recoil in anger, hatred and disgust."
So, this document that explains the beliefs of the group for which these men apparently served as leaders is so awful that their own lawyers feel it will prejudice any jury. Umm, maybe they shouldn’t have written then?
How bad is it? Well, it contains chestnuts like:
“All other cultures are not merely different than us, they are worse.”
“America was not stolen from the Indians and it was not built on slavery.”
“This is about rebuilding the patriarchy.”
It gets even scarier as those running meetings are told to “check the perimeter” and clear the room of any women or non-Proud Boys before toasting “to the housewives that create human life, shape it, and build the communities in which we live." The group then makes another, more ominous toast:
“To the parasites both on the streets and in the White House who want to attack us and take what we earn…To the trespassers who want to attack us and take what we earn. To the trespassers who want to sabotage our culture our family and our way of life…You want a war?...Well, you've got one. To all of our enemies both high and low."
At the end of the toast the Proud Boys in the room are supposed to yell: “Bring it on.” (What’s wrong with l’chaim?)
Obviously, I’m more interested in the No Wank Policy. According to this manual, Proud Boys cannot masturbate except for once every 30 days and even then it is only allowed if there is a woman less than one yard away who has consented and who is “not a prostitute.” Bully on them for mentioning consent, but what the actual f**k?
Why would this group of supposedly extra-virile men prohibit masturbation and why would any man want to join a group that cares whether he spanks the monkey a few times a week? I have no answer to the second one and the first is so complicated that I expect it to be the subject of numerous doctoral dissertations but I have some initial thoughts.
The first answer I could come up with is simply that wanking isn’t for “real men.” Real men have sex with women, and real men can get laid on demand, so they shouldn’t need to jerk off. (They’re wrong, of course, real men masturbate—a lot—and it’s a perfectly healthy and beneficial thing to do).
As I thought more about it, I wondered if one of the unspoken goals of this rule is to keep members pent up and on edge. I was reminded of a joke my dad used to tell about the crocagator. It goes something like this:
Guy 1: Whoa, be careful of that crocagator, it’s the most vicious animal there is.
Guy 2: A crocagator, what’s that?
Guy 1: Well, it has the head of a crocodile on one and the head of an alligator on another.
Guy 2: If he has one head on one side and another on the other side, how does he poop?
Guy 1: He doesn’t, that’s why he’s angry all the time.
Masturbation is an important release of tension (not just sexual tension) for men and women regardless of whether they are also having partnered sex. I may be giving the Proud Boys leadership too much credit, but maybe they want their members to stay tense.
Apparently, this rule has leaked before. In a 2018 article for Gen (a Medium publication on politics, power, and culture), Lux Alptraum offered another possible motive for the ban: group unity. They write: “If every time you get the urge to indulge in self-pleasure you’re forced to think instead about the organization that has banned you from masturbation, that group can feel increasingly essential to your life — purely by virtue of the fact that you cannot stop thinking about it.” This make sense to me, as does Alptraum’s further suggestion that as the ultimate act of individuality, masturbation “encourages us to consider what we want rather than what we are being told to do.”
The Proud Boys isn’t the only radical men’s group that takes a hard line on masturbation and pornography. Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist and psychologist who studies sex addiction, has spoken about active communities of self-diagnosed sex addicts online. Prause describes these forums as riddled with misogyny and hate. The rhetoric reinforces shame by suggesting that giving in to the urge to view porn shows a lack of self-control while also absolving men of personal responsibility by agreeing they are victims of their “addiction.” (BTW, Prause and I do not believe sex addiction is a thing.)
This feels similar. By only allowing masturbation under the watchful eye of a woman, the Proud Boys No Wank Rule would certainly reinforce shame but might also absolve guilt since “real men” are allowed to think about sex if there’s a woman in the room.
I’m interested in reading all those doctoral dissertations to see other theories about why the Proud Boys are so opposed to/obsessed with masturbation.
Of course, I’m also interested in figuring out how this group of “real men” chose a song from a Disney musical as their theme. That’s right, according to the newly leaked manual, leaders should try to play the ballad “Proud of Your Boy,” from the Broadway version of Aladdin in its entirety at all meetings. Listen to the song. Maybe we have it all wrong, maybe these guys just have mommy issues.
*Note: Blue ball are also not a thing but I couldn’t resist the headline.
It’s A Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Super Gonorrhea
The CDC and Massachusetts Department of Public Health recently announced two cases of a new strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea that they’re calling “concerning” and the media is calling “Super Gonorrhea.” (Super Grover was one of my favorite things about Sesame Street and he’s the only thing I can think of when I hear this phrase.)
I love writing about gonorrhea because I get to go way back in history as this pesky STI has plagued mankind pretty much since the beginning of mankind. A disease that sounds like gonorrhea is described in a Chinese textbook written in 2600 BC. Hippocrates talked about a similar disease in the 400s BC, there’s evidence that Roman soldiers fighting with Julius Caesar between 100 and 40 BC suffered from gonorrhea, and it was officially named by Greek physician Galen somewhere between 130 and 200 AD. He referred to it as “an unwanted discharge of semen” and therefore named it “gono” for seed and “rhea” for flow. Some even believe it is mentioned in the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament. (I admit I have not studied The Bible—is it that everything sex related is in Leviticus, or is Leviticus just about sex?)
One of my favorite factoids about gonorrhea (which I’ve probably mentioned here before) is that it got its nickname “the clap” from an early treatment in which doctors used to put an infected penis between the pages of a really thick book and clap the pus out. It’s such a funny visual (unless, of course, it was your penis) and I can almost smell the heavy, musty pages of the book. There are other theories of where the name came from (that it causes a clapping sensation during urination or that it was named Les Clapier after the area in France that housed many of the brothels), but I’m sticking with the book.
In the modern world, we still have a lot of gonorrhea—about 700,000 cases each year in the United States—but the treatment no longer involves an almanac or unabridged dictionary nor does it involve mercury (1600s), bloodletting (1800s), or heat therapy (1900s). For almost 100 years we’ve had antibiotics (thank you Dr. Fleming). That, however, might not be true for long because the bacteria that causes gonorrhea has a remarkable ability to dodge the drugs used to fight it.
It was resistant to sulfanilamides by the 1940s, was no longer deterred by penicillins and tetracyclines in the 1980s, and crossed fluoroquinolones off its personal threat list by 2007. Today, the only class of antibiotics that remains effective are cephalosporins, but its susceptibility to these drugs is declining rapidly.
Both patients in Massachusetts got better after being given injections of ceftriaxone which is the recommended treatment so we’re not looking at cases that can’t be treated (yet). Further lab studies of their infections, however, showed that this strain had some resistance to almost every drug known to treat gonorrhea. This is particularly concerning because there aren’t very many drugs in the pipeline that might be able to treat gonorrhea when the ones we have stop working. Moreover, antibiotic resistance and the need for new antibiotics is not just about gonorrhea: it has become harder to treat cases of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and sepsis because of resistant bacteria. The World Health Organization lists antibiotic-resistance as one of the top 10 global health challenges.
If left untreated, gonorrhea can spread to the uterus or fallopian tubes and lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, which in turn can cause infertility or increase the risk of ectopic pregnancy. In rare cases, untreated gonorrhea can also lead to infertility in people with penises. Untreated gonorrhea can also spread to the blood and lead to a condition called disseminated gonococcal infection (DGI) which can be life threatening.
Still, it’s hard to get people to take it seriously because this bacterial STI is considered easily treatable. Super Gonorrhea is here to tell you that’s not necessarily true.
Researchers Pull the Plug on HIV Vaccine Trial
Anthony Fauci, the face of a reasonable pandemic response, stepped down last month without reaching one of his stated goals. Fauci was on the front lines of the fight against HIV/AIDS since the beginning, and had said that he would not retire until there was an HIV vaccine that was at least 50 percent effective. Unfortunately, that has not happened yet.
In fact, this month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Jannsen Pharmaceuticals, a company owned by Johnson and Johnson, announced they were cancelling the Mosaico vaccine trial which had been running in the U.S. and seven other countries in Europe and the Americas. The Mosaico trial enrolled 3,900 men considered at higher risk for HIV because they had sex with men or transgender partners. The vaccine being tested was similar to one that had been used in the Imbokodo trial which included 2,600 women in Africa. Both studies were cancelled (Imbokodo in 2021) because independent reviewers found no evidence that vaccines lowered participant’s chance of acquiring the virus when compared to the placebo groups.
Both vaccines were referred to as mosaics because they included genetic material from different HIV strains found in different regions around the world in the hopes of making one vaccine that could work globally.
The quest for an HIV vaccine has been going on for decades and while other vaccines are in the works—including some based on the mRNA technology that brought us the Covid vaccines and boosters—this was the only one that was in late-stage trials.
Fauci has explained that one of the challenges in creating an HIV vaccine is that the body tends not to have a very strong immune response to the virus itself: “We have highly effective vaccines against COVID-19 because we know the body can do it, and we induce the body to do it. With HIV, that's not the case. We've got to do better than what natural infection does."
While he may not have stayed at the NIH long enough to see an HIV vaccine come to fruition, he can be very proud of the biomedical interventions that were developed during his tenure to both treat and prevent HIV. Today, HIV-negative individuals at high risk of HIV can take PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), a medical intervention that can be 99% effective in preventing HIV acquisition. Moreover, people with HIV who take antiretroviral mediation can get to a point where HIV is undetectable in their blood. Those who are undetectable cannot transmit HIV to sexual partners. (This strategy is sometimes referred to as U=U or undetectable equals untransmittable.)
While many people are hopeful that a vaccine will be discovered, the existence of other highly effective prevention methods have made the ethics of vaccine trials more complicated. In the Mosaic trial all potential participants were offered PrEP, and only those who “adamantly refused” were enrolled in the study.
Fauci swears that he’s not retiring at 81 but moving on to the next phase of his career in which he wants to “continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats.” We wish Tony well in his endeavors and hope that that next generation is able to fulfill his dream of finding an HIV vaccine.