A Short History of 'Fapping'

LOS ANGELES—Amidst the hue and cry over the hacked and leaked celebrity nude photos, a label has quietly been attached to the escapade: The Fappening. Needless to say, the word itself—a nominalization of the verb "to fap," which Know Your Meme defines as "an onomatopoeic Internet slang term for the act of masturbation"—is an obvious pejorative for those who see the hack as yet another reflection of a pervasive and perverse cultural misogyny. Though to be clear, even someone who does not share that perspective would have to agree that the term obviously implies that the photos are meant to be fodder for mass male masturbation. One could also expand the meaning of the term to include the larger media jerk-off over this story, but that would probably be a reach-around. The simplest explanation for the stickiness of the term is probably the most accurate. As one commenter among many wrote in reaction to an article on the Daily Beast today by Amanda Marcotte decrying our sexist culture, "You people have it all wrong nobody is doing it to violate women against their will people simply just want to see them naked that is literally all there is to it it isn't sexist and it isn't just men." Despite the author's obvious disdain for punctuation, his sentiment is repeated more than a few times on this site and others, mostly by men, with the rather simple message that boys will be boys, even when they become men. It is the apparent acceptance of that perspective that has resulted in the near universal use of the male-centric "The Fappening" to define the hack. Women have not been ignored for this sort of sex-based slang. As Know Your Meme points out, "'schlick' refers to female masturbation." But of course no one is referring to the current hack as "The Schlickening." That might have been the case if the hackers were female, but they obviously were not. Indeed, another aspect of hackery that this case emphasizes is the extent to which males dominate the field. As The Telegraph put it, "The fact that 100 of the 101 targets are women firstly proves the bleeding obvious: most hackers are bored, hormonal, time-rich young men." That said, it's important to note that "fap" has no intrinsic political meaning attached to it, but instead appears to be a simple and somewhat clever creation that first reared its slap-happy head in 1999, according to Know Your Meme. "The earliest known transcription of the word 'fap' online can be found in the Sexy Losers webcomic titled “Video Girl Etchi” ... published on April 28th, 1999," noted the site. "The comic parodied a scene from Video Girl Ai, a manga series written and illustrated by Masakazu Katsura and released between 1990 and 1993. On July 12th, 2011, Sexy Losers’ artist Clay revealed in a post on Tumblr that he was inspired by a Heartbroken Angels comic strip by Masahiko Kikuni depicting God masturbating when searching for a sound representing masturbation in his own strip." The Know Your Meme section on "fap" also includes several other incidents of its early usage over the years, particularly in the early to mid 2000s. By 2011, its standing as a bone fide slang term was well established. Indeed, two years earlier, AVN reported on the launch by Pink Visual of FapMapper, a mobile mapping utility for the iPhone that offered "a visual and geographic element to your sexual exploits, be they real or fabricated.” It was all in good fun, of course, as were most usages of the term, which, let's be honest, is mostly used as fun shorthand for the boring "masturbation," overused "jerk-off," or silly "spank the chicken." "Fap," as we can now see, is also a highly flexible word that can be bent and shaped to appeal to almost any situation, even one as apparently polarizing as this one is. In that sense, the term has helped reveal yet another chasm of differences in America. Whether it can survive "The Fappening" unscathed is another question. More info about the history of "fap," including the cartoon in which the term was reportedly originally used, can be found here.