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“Hello, my friends,” a bald, bearded man named Will Blunderfield tells his four students, plus me, over Zoom on a recent afternoon. “Welcome to our self-pleasure Sundays.”
Our leader is topless, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his hands pressed together at his chest in a prayer position in his Vancouver apartment. The screen cuts off around his belly button and, given his previous exploits on-camera, I strongly suspect that he is naked. (I blindly signed up to his “Rewilding Sexual Kung Fu” workshop after interviewing him days earlier.)
Amid a backlash against porn, Blunderfield, the 40-year-old former Broadway hopeful and son of a doctor, has emerged as an unlikely guru for a legion of disaffected men who do not generally struggle to get laid, but feel society — and not their left hands, of course — has wrung them dry.
We’re here to learn about the supposedly ancient practice of semen retention. Adherents may still masturbate or have sex, but endeavor to keep their presumed masculine rocket fuel safely on the launchpad — where they believe it can be converted into confidence, charisma and clarity. The scientific evidence for this tantalizing possibility is thin, but the idea is increasingly finding a receptive audience of men who fear they have quite literally been spilling their potential.
To retain one’s semen, in the view of the men gathered here, is almost revolutionary. And Blunderfield is not the only one fighting back, as he puts it, against the matrix. Jackass star Stephen “Steve-O” Glover recently told Playboy that his 431 days of semen retention turbocharged “the most fucking productive year ever,” while New York Knicks owner James Dolan in April urged his players to abstain from sex en route to the team’s first championship since 1973. “Like Spartans, they deny themselves so they can have an edge,” he told the team. “If I’m having sex, I ain’t releasin’,” rapper NLE Choppa told an interviewer. “I just keep it bottled up. It’s kundalini energy.”
Where there is an alleged edge, there is potential profit. And as men search for the answer to their sticky late-capitalist malaise, a cottage industry of expensive coaching programs, men’s sexual mastery apps with hundreds of thousands of downloads, and luxury cotton shorts (because polyester kills testosterone, duh) has sprung up. The subreddit r/semenretention has 47,000 weekly visitors. Members share milestones — “90 Days Next Week. I Don’t Recognise Myself. 30M” — refer to Taoist, Hindu and Christian teachings, and sometimes denounce women as energy vampires.
Many see the battle against the primordial temptation to ejaculate in existential terms. If they are unable to retain their seed in the face of adversity, then their sense of masculinity may be lost forever. If they can hold it, then limitless abundance — including a whole bunch of hot babes — naturally awaits. (One man who has a small moving company in Montreal told me that two separate women left their numbers on his windshield on Day 72.) Welcome to the cult of semen retention.
“Most men have a very small balloon,” Blunderfield declares with the diction of a Shakespearean town crier, referring to the area where semen is stored. “Just the cock and balls to hold the charge, then when it gets too much, they have to shoot out their life force into a Kleenex on PornHub, giving their energy to the internet sex beast. In this practice, we turn the whole body into this massive cock.”
The practice in question is a so-called “microcosmic orbit” popularized by Taoist master Mantak Chia, one of Blunderfield’s many teachers who he cites incessantly. “When we can reconnect to our dick and balls and really take the shame and judgment and bring the powerful chi in our nuts up into our third eye through the spine, our leadership skills expand astronomically,” Blunderfield tells the group.
Blunderfield, who podcaster Joe Rogan once referred to as “the nutty dude,” leads us through a round of Hindi mantra chanting. “In many cultures, the penis is called the pillar of light,” he says. “So I bow to the light within — really chant from your nuts and your cock. Ong namo guru dev namo.” (I bow to the subtle, divine wisdom; I bow to the divine teacher within.)
His bellowed incantations echo and the class progresses quickly through a series of yogic postures and breathing exercises, as Blunderfield becomes increasingly frenzied. Clearly, he is passionate about his work, but it’s difficult to take him seriously when his face contorts and his eyes bulge as if they are primed to leap out of their sockets. All in all, he takes us on a stupefying journey. “Satnam, Satnam, Satnam, Satnam, Satnam,” he chants, “which means truth is my name, Satnam, Satnam, Satnam, Satnam. Your navel points should be dancing in and out, you’re a lot stronger than you think, tapping into that testicular fortitude between your legs.”
And then he reveals his penis, standing over his screen with his tongue sticking out like the devil incarnate. His students follow him in exhibiting their genitals. He directs them to “self-cultivate” — not masturbate, because the word derives from the Latin root for defile — yet not to exceed a state of 80% arousal, part of the training to become a sexual Adonis who has sex for hours without ejaculating. “You can imagine you’re penetrating a beautiful woman, or man,” he advises sagely. “Just feel the energy when you’re self-pleasuring, and breathe it up here. Inhale, squeeze your pelvic floor, curl your toes, feel it rise.”
Now for a “primal dance” to integrate the experience. “The world needs more grounded men,” Blunderfield declares as he asks for us to imagine him with horns, putting on some suitably Celtic drum music. “Imagine we’re naked up in northern Scotland, our bodies painted with blue oud. We have antlers on our heads, and we’re dancing amongst the stone circles with a fire in the middle celebrating fertility.”
Modern men, he argues, “are like caged beasts, so let’s hold in our cum and rewild ourselves. When men gather like this, there’s an invisible nutrition that gets transferred between the ball sacks of men, charging them all up. It’s like a type of food.”
I just hope that he is not somehow harvesting my “extra yang energy,” as he recently claimed to have done to an unsuspecting man in a viral Instagram video. (“I just felt his nut sack in his fucking boxers and I just inhaled his extra chi,” Blunderfield said in the clip, clarifying that he is not a vampire. “I feel fucking studly. I got so much energy from that.”) I also learn from his profile that not only does Blunderfield drink his own urine, but he consumes his semen on the occasions when he does “consciously” ejaculate — once making and eating a cum-containing flan and sharing the video with his 79,000 Instagram followers.
I look through his socials further and, yes, Blunderfield also has an OnlyFans, and posts gay porn on his X account. In short, the more I get to know him, the less he seems like an ascetic. He’s been working on it, though, he assures me. “I was celibate for about five years,” he tells me over the phone, prior to self-pleasure Sunday. “I became superhuman — I was averaging 400 kilometres a month running. I ran five marathons in four years in my Jesus cruisers, my earth runner sandals.”
The longest he says he has ever withheld is 74 days, but he now believes that most guys should cum about twice a month. (Another man tells me he retained his seed for more than a year, and “didn’t get any blueballs.”) Blunderfield, however, “was getting too hot and bothered,” he recalls. “I wasn’t really able to focus, I was getting almost a little bit irritable.”
As his workshop comes to a close, Blunderfield invites us to share. I admit to getting a little lightheaded with one of the breathing exercises that I did take part in, and that the faces he made with his penis in the frame were quite intense — anti-arousing, even, as a straight man at least.
“That’s what the Scottish man taught me,” replies Blunderfield, referring to a friend and fellow nudist who versed him in “the wild man activation” that is apparently quite natural because of the Māori Haka dance, and since archaeologists are allegedly “finding all these cave paintings of warrior dudes with full erections in battle.” And with that, the workshop is thankfully complete.
I had very much kept my pants on, but as I closed my laptop, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Blunderfield may not be one of the grounded men that the world does indeed desperately need.