Alex Rhodes is an interesting guy. At the age of 11, he says he started a years-long pornography addiction that turned his life upside down. When he decided to do something about it, he found a community of people online who had the same problems. He started his company, No Fap, in 2011 as a community forum for people to discuss the effects of excessive porn use, compulsive sexual behavior, and recovery. “Fap” is a slang term for masturbation. Rhodes’ road to recovery began with stopping masturbation and avoiding pornography.
The community he created grew to huge numbers of people from all walks of life who benefitted from No Fap’s encouragement. The website says, “we’re here to help you quit porn, improve your relationships, and reach your sexual health goals.” Rhodes says he isn’t in favor of censoring pornography or banning it in any way, but he wanted a community where people affected negatively by it could support one another in breaking their addiction to it. No Fap is not religiously based, as Rhodes is not a person of any faith, which makes his site and mission even more dangerous to the porn industry because he can not be smeared as a religious zealot.
While porn addiction is not listed on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it is a real problem that many struggle with. According to Psych Guides, “porn addiction, which is a subset of sex addiction, can refer to a range of behaviors that are done in excess and negatively impact one’s life.”
There are mountains of information available about the negative impact pornography use is having on children, including a rise in sex crimes as reported in the UK, where “figures from 30 forces show reports of sexual offences by children aged 10 and under have more than doubled from 204 in 2013-14 to 456 in 2016-17. Experts in the UK point to the rise in pornography access by minors as a cause.
Pornography addictions are also a leading cause of the break-up of marriages and relationships. Psychology Today reported that 500,000 marriages that end every year name porn addiction as the reason.
With that in mind, an organization like No Fap seems like it would be a non-controversial solution for those who choose it to redirect their lives in a more positive direction. But some people are not fans. Sexologists and porn industry people hate Alex Rhodes with a passion they usually reserve for their sex toys.
Rhodes has filed a lawsuit for defamation against Kinsey Institute graduate Nicole Prause, a scientist who studies sex. Rhodes believes that Prause targeted him to destroy his business and smear his name. Sexologists like Prause have very strange ideas about human sexuality. On her Twitter feed, Prause laments the inability to study the sexuality of minors without being called a pedophile.
This is not surprising coming from a person who studied at the Kinsey Institute. Alfred Kinsey was a monster. His sexual experiments on children should have put him behind bars. He published research that involved at least 188 children and toddlers who were sexually manipulated by pedophiles known to Kinsey to induce orgasm and their orgasms were timed and recorded for the study. His research was determined fraudulent and criminal, but the research is still used by people like Prause and her ilk. There is a documentary available on YouTube called “The Children of Table 34” about the abuse the children suffered because of Kinsey. Kinsey did more to normalize pedophilia than anyone before or after him and yet there are people who consider themselves distinguished to graduate from a school bearing his name. It is clear that Prause sees no issue with involving children in studies about sexuality.
(Twitter screenshot)
“If you talk about youth sexuality, people will say you are advocating showing porn to kids,” she wrote. “It’s happened to me and many of my colleagues. It’s vicious, defamatory, and horrifying. This is why there are few studies of youth sexuality. Pure intimidation.”
I reached out to Prause and asked her to explain how she would study “youth sexuality” without breaking current laws about corrupting minors and violating the age of consent and received no response. How would adult scientists study the sexuality of minors when minors can’t consent to sexual activity? How does that kind of research work? It’s also interesting that the sexologists moaning about the lack of access to minors for sex research are clearly ignorant of how repulsive they appear to normal people who never think about children having sex.
Prause’s behavior online toward anti-porn organizations and Rhodes is well-documented and truly bizarre. Your Brain on Porn has compiled extensive screengrabs of her online behavior that includes harassment of Ted Talk speakers who talk about porn addiction and porn harm. It seems that Prause’s main beef with the porn addiction help community is that she believes porn is good for people and not addictive. This belief has apparently led her on a crusade to discredit anyone who disagrees with her.
Prause does not like to be connected to the porn industry and claims she is fully separate and a scientist. But she attends porn industry events and is photographed with porn stars and executives and she lobbies publicly with porn industry organizations to block legislation they don’t like. That’s her in the pink on the far right.
(Screenshot from Twitter)
screen shot from Twitter
California Proposition 60 was legislation to require condoms in porn productions in order to limit the spread of HIV. Prause vociferously opposed this legislation along with the major porn industry lobbyists. She can be seen on Twitter regularly communicating with and defending the porn industry and sex workers.
Rhodes’s lawsuit claims that Prause accused him of being “a stalker, misogynist, serial harasser, promoter of violence against women, cyberstalker, subject to restraining/no-contact orders affiliated with an extremist ate group and threatens rape.” There is evidence of at least one of those things being a demonstrable lie.
After Prause posted on Twitter that she had made an FBI complaint about Rhodes, he sought the report through the Freedom of Information Act. What he got confirmed that she had made it up.
“Dear Mr. Rhodes,” read the letter from the FBI in response to FOIA. The FBI has completed its search for records responsive to your request…We were unable to identify any main file request and; therefore your request is being administratively closed.”
Despite this evidence that Prause never filed any such report with the FBI, she persists in repeating the claim publicly, which Rhodes’s lawsuit claims is damaging to his reputation. Rhodes isn’t the only person she tries to smear with bogus police reports. Prause also went after Gary Wilson, a physiology teacher with a particular interest in the latest neuroscience discoveries, who founded Your Brain and Porn. Prause accuses Wilson regularly of stalking and having multiple police reports for harassing her. Wilson says none of it is true and he has the documentation to back it up. Wilson posted on his website:
While Prause continues to falsely claim she is “the victim,” it is Prause who initiated all contact and harassment towards the individuals and organizations listed on this page. No one on this list has harassed Nicole Prause. Her fabricated claims about being a victim of “stalking” or misogyny from “anti-porn activists” lack one iota of documentation. All the evidence she provides is self-generated: a single info-graphic, a few emails from her to others describing harassment, and five spurious cease and desist letters containing false allegations. You will also see evidence of a number of formal complaints Prause has filed with various regulatory agencies – which have been summarily dismissed or investigated and dismissed. She seems to file these bogus complaints so she can then go on to claim her targets are all “under investigation.”
Perhaps most illustrative of Prause’s character in this saga is her charge that Rhodes is a Nazi and white-supremacist, as detailed in the lawsuit. This should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention since 2016. The minute an SJW disagrees with someone, that person becomes a Nazi. Rhodes’s crime? He allowed political commentator Gavin McInnes to interview him while he was still working for Vice. And since Prause found out that Rhodes spoke to McInnes one time and didn’t throw a drink in his face, she has been accusing him of supporting the Proud Boys (who got in a lot of trouble for street brawling with Antifa). It’s still a stretch, in my opinion, to call the Proud Boys anything but a male drinking club, but Rhodes actually has disavowed the Proud Boys as an “extremist group” on several occasions. He was never a member, nor a supporter. No Fap has never been political and is dedicated to providing addiction help to anyone who needs it. This does not stop Prause from continuing to link him to “white supremacists” through the weak association of one interview with McInnes, who isn’t a white supremacist either.
The lawsuit should be interesting to watch as it opens up statements on Twitter to legal scrutiny. Will Prause be held accountable for publishing false claims on social media?
Megan Fox is the author of “Believe Evidence; The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo.” Follow on Twitter @MeganFoxWriter
