Google analyst Alexander Rhodes grew weary of masturbating to online porn, a habit he says began at 11 when he accidentally clicked on a site for rape porn.

In 2011 someone posted a note on Reddit, “When men don’t masturbate for 7 days their testosterone levels increase by 45.7 percent.” A study from the National Institute of Health was attached. A challenge was launched: how long could Reddit readers go without masturbating. Could anyone go a week? Rhodes, who was nursing his sometimes 14-times-a-day fap habit, started a subreddit to keep the challenges going.

Within a year, he did what any red-blooded Google analyst would do. He started a website. Called NoFap, it refers to the slang term for masturbation. Rhodes calls himself and the habitués of his site “fapstronauts.” The NoFap Reddit page now has 183,000 members, up from 70,000 three years ago.

Rhodes wants you to know right away that he is no kind of religious freak. He is not a believer. NoFap makes that abundantly clear. Not that religious folk are not welcome there. It’s just that he is not religious and he is seeking a secular solution to the porn habit that has exploded in America in recent decades. NoFap is loaded with science and social science related to porn addiction.

According to NoFap:

A growing body of scientific research characterizes both substance and behavioral addiction as disorders involving the reward system of the brain. The reward system is a group of neural structures which help us learn from our environment by reinforcing behavioral responses to certain stimuli. These structures include circuits of neural pathways which, over the long course of evolution, developed to activate when we seek out things that benefit us.

To show the hipster cred of the movement, though they insist it is not a movement, one of them posted this at the NoFap subreddit:

Choking your pathetic chicken to some moving pixels instead of building up to get vivacious, horny p***y is like buying a dimebag of shitty, shitty mids when you could just MAN UP and get a hold of a whole bag of dank dank sweet geezy sweet crunktakular dope bud. Stop the brown nasty mids of fapping – invest your energy into attaining the dank quality of beautiful, radiant ACTUAL women.

WebMD says there are 420 million pages of porn on the Internet. Porns sites like HamsterX will get 100 million page views a day with several thousand videos being watched every minute during peak hours. Internet porn plays on what’s called the Coolidge Effect that describes how a male with enthusiastically have sex with a new partner but that his ardor will cool only to reignited with a new partner. The Internet feeds the Coolidge Effect like cocaine to a lab-rat.

Key to NoFap are challenges and rebooting. Guys loves challenges. Right now at the subreddit they are running something called “Don’t Jerk Off July.” NoFap says, “Rebooting is a personal process with no single correct approach. We challenge our users to abstain from pornography, masturbation, or even sex altogether for a period of time. Rebooting the brain by abstaining from these behaviors has freed many users from porn addiction and porn-induced sexual dysfunction.”

Rhodes wants you to know that he is not against masturbation per se. “A clear majority of NoFap users and administrators alike agree there’s nothing inherently wrong with masturbation,” says the site. They just think you can get carried away with masturbating to pixels and this effects your brain and your ability to connect with real live women. After a cooling off period, they believe you can get back to masturbation and that it is sex-positive, something they insist upon.”

The reboots, which last for 90 days, sometimes longer, are for the purposes of breaking the porn habit. However, Rhodes and his allies do not want any legislation to “restrict the creation or consumption of pornography.” Rhodes says the “dangerous effects of porn are best dealt with in sex-ed class and not through government regulation.” He calls himself “an Internet-freedom zealot.”

The NoFap community is largely young, male, straight, white, sexually inexperienced, and non-religious.

According to a 2012 survey, forty-four percent said they were virgins, sixty-two percent said they were atheist, agnostic, or not interested in religion. Seventy-two percent are Caucasian, six percent Asian, four percent Hispanic, three percent Indian, with Black, Middle Eastern, and Non-Caucasian European coming in at two percent each.

Most are lefties, with only nine percent calling themselves “conservative.”

Ninety-one percent reported they were straight, though the site has been endorsed by homosexual activist Dan Savage who says, “There is an online support group for you. It’s called NoFap.”

As to going cold-turkey on the chicken-choking, Fapstronauts report “a burst of energy about 1-2 weeks after beginning” abstinence. Though they experience something they call “flatlining” which is a reduced libido “occurring 2-6 weeks into abstinence,” 56 percent reported they “were more willing to talk to women,” and 60 percent said they “gained a better knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses.”

NoFap is not the only group of hipsters fighting porn. There is Fight the New Drug, a group of millennials pumping out innovative anti-porn memes. One says, “Porn is to sex what bathroom graffiti is to art.” Another says, “Pixels will never love you back.”