FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO VIRAL MEMES OF LOCKTOBER

From Satire to Steel

The chastity belt was first mentioned in Bellifortis, Konrad Kyeser’s 1405 war manual that humorously depicts military magic, absurd siege weapons, and wall-scaling devices – essentially a medieval shitpost compendium. It was satire, a joke about paranoid husbands, never an actual historical practice. It doubled as a metaphor marking the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, suggesting a refinement of noble values. The belt itself, however, was always fiction.

Since its fabulation, a fragmented proliferation of scornful comics, sexy poems and erotic paintings materialised the object and transformed it into a narrative vehicle. By the 18th and 19th centuries, replicas were produced with embellishments of hearts, leather, metal, and satin, inadvertently elevating mockery into supposedly historical authenticity. Museums displayed them as genuine artifacts, and the fiction became fact.

Although the earliest versions targeted women, over time the chastity belt was rendered as the ‘male chastity apparatus.’ From the mid-1800s onward, doctors claimed that masturbation caused insanity, blindness, epilepsy, paralysis, and early death – Victorian moral panic disguised as science. In the early 1900s, patents were filed with specifications for member housing, partial ring, and locking pin to prevent sexual activity. Throughout the 20th century, design iterations progressed globally, as if nations were competing over technological innovation toward containing the bulge. The mythology had metastasised into medical devices and finally ideology. By the time the internet arrived, the groundwork was already laid: a fictional object with centuries of accumulated meaning, ready to be reactivated by communities searching for structure, purpose, and belonging.

Bellifortis Meets Reddit

Political theorist Carl Schmitt wrote that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts.’ The 21st century online chastity belt communities prove this point: their governance structures, rituals of accountability, and language of ascension translate imagined medieval Christian discipline into platform-mediated practice. In their framework, God becomes algorithm, confession becomes Reddit post, penance becomes locked retention.

Clicking through the subreddit r/Chastitybelts, one can imagine the following scene playing out nightly across forums:

Picture three men, biceps rippling, typing in darkness. The room reeks of sweaty socks and cheap, acrid €10 cologne. Their sticky fingers glowing before LED screens as they coach a newbie. A Wolfpack relation unfolds under a click-down Reddit thread for the upcoming four-month male improvement continence: #NoSimpSeptember, #Locktober, #NoNutNovember (#NNN) and #DenialDecember. Myth becomes legend. Facts blur into romanticism over chivalric virtue in the pursuit of blue-balling discipline against modern temptation. Their masculine bond chastises the goonscroll of Pornhub shorties, UwU voices and TikTok baddies. Instead, they build together a virtual world of nobility, where ideology and fantasy merge into cultural escape. Together, they glorify involuntary celibacy (Incel culture) on their own terms.

Self-discipline takes on new forms online, where the body is both the target and medium of its performance. The chastity belt becomes fodder for the manosphere world-building, an ecosystem of reactionary males receptive to this narrative of control, fear, and impotence far beyond its original comedic intent. They revel in projected reverie of cast-iron girdles and dames in ivory towers, continuing a lineage of indoctrination that echoes the aesthetic revival of European monarchies. Users post progress pics overlaid with Pepe the Crusader edits, and the forums erupt: ‘Yes, KING!’

Digital Fiefdoms

While economist Yanis Varoufakis describes techno-feudalism as platforms acting like overlords, another form emerges from users themselves. Online spaces function as digital fiefdoms where invented medieval hierarchies replace conventional social power, a phenomenon Wassim Z. Alsindi describes as ‘knightwork states.’ In The Chain Mail Gaze (2023), Alsindi analyses how loyalty and authority structure communities online without territorial foundations. Forums operate like courts with rigid roles:

Kings: moderators and high-karma users

Knights: streak posters collecting upvotes

Squires: newcomers posting ‘My first No Nut November’

Peasants: lurkers not contributing – the ultimate NPCs.

The language reinforces this feudal structure: ‘discipline,’ ‘brotherhood,’ ‘noble quest,’ ‘sacrifice,’ and slangs like ‘cumrade,’ (cum + comrade) borrowed from a fantasy of the past. What emerges is mythology deployed to justify new forms of masculine governance. Subreddit chastity forums feature popular formats like the ‘progress report,’ where users detail their journey in quasi-religious terms. In one thread on r/NoFap, ConfusionSpecialist2 posts:

‘Locktober Day 10: Brain fog clearing. Energy levels insane. We’re reclaiming what the coomers gave away. Reject the weakness of modern times 🚫 Embrace the strength of masculinity 💪 ‘

and run89prof responds:

‘Germane and touché. Reason why those on long streaks are mentally strong is because they’ve learnt to avoid surging urges, every single day. Noobs will say that streaks don’t matter and that’s why they remain imprudent even after multiple relapses. Sacrificing orgasm is what makes men, true leaders. Because you’ve learnt to lead yourself, now you can lead others.’

Within this ideology, the chastity belt serves as both crown and chains: a symbol of elite self-control that simultaneously marks submission to the group’s invented tradition.

Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition

Today, the belt sits in online shopping carts where its craftsmanship shares vibes with the meme Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition. It performs retroactive materialisation – fabricated history bleeding into modern ideology through the production of physical objects that ‘prove’ the myth was always real. Alsindi calls this ‘zealotry-without-faith’: unapologetic capitalism using spiritual pretense to manipulate the dispossessed. Conservatives use the past to justify futures through the voices of the dead, forging undebatable narratives that never existed. It’s trad LARP – but the lock is real.

Archaeologist Ian Hodder notes that in post-processual archaeology – a framework that rejects the notion of a single objective historical timeline – subjectively ‘othering’ the past allows later societies to replace factual methods with mythic tradition and magic. The medieval chastity belt belief functions precisely this way: a deliberate historical distortion that serves present needs. What makes this object unusual in material culture is its reverse trajectory: not from people and community to object as reflection, but from political discourse to manufactured tradition to physical product. Each century layered new meanings onto the myth, weaponising it for different forms of control.

A pinned post titled The sacrificial aspect of semen retention makes contemporary male frustration explicit:

‘The perversion of the Divine Feminine is literally everywhere and by consuming this inverted feminine, we are being devoid of our own Divine Masculinity. Our sacred life energy has been unconsciously taken away from us, and this requires it’s own form of magick to return…’

‘…So, we must sacrifice PLEASURE. That’s right, I want you to observe every single urge you get as a sacrifice. Acknowledge where this urge comes from, meditate on it for a while and let it go. Resisting each urge and sacrificing the pleasure from orgasm will make you STRONGER every single time.’

This language reveals the techno-feudal bargain. Aforementioned Reddit users trade bodily autonomy for ideological belonging, surrendering agency to a phantom lineage of warrior-monks who never existed. The belt becomes a token of this fabricated past, an emblem of membership in a masculine order that only exists online. It’s sold as ascension, as leveling up, as becoming ‘based’: but it’s really just another algorithm keeping you locked in the loop.

The Tower Goes to Market

The final irony is its arrival on Amazon. Eventually you search ‘male chastity belts’ on Google. You scroll past AI slop ads. A popup blinks: ‘I’m bored free to talk right now?’. Palms sweat, tension builds. You might just wanna spit in your hand and polish the helmet one last time. But you’re edging while filtering materials and prices. Devotional product reviews read: ‘Finally found purpose,’ ‘My copy of the Holy Trainer v2 is golden quality’ ‘Highly recommended :)’ You click Add to Cart, no questions asked. Secret shipment arrives at your gate. Only when you post progress photos to Reddit does anyone know about the two wolves inside you. The unboxing post gets hundreds of upvotes. You shake coworkers’ hands. Steel presses against your thigh under business casual garb. They don’t know. You possess a power beyond them: a self-inflicted strength conditioned through retreat, delivered with Prime shipping. The tower is real now, locked. The commercialisation doesn’t undermine the mythology; it completes it.

Knights of the Feed

The contemporary use of the chastity belt reveals how digital platforms enable the construction of techno-feudal orders through deliberately falsified tradition. When communities lack access to actual social power, economic mobility, political influence and romantic success, they manufacture historical justification for imaginary kingdoms. The chastity belt remains the perfect symbol precisely because it was always fiction, making it infinitely adaptable to whatever hierarchy needs legitimising next.

The joke is that these men think they’re rejecting modernity when they’re actually perfecting its most cutting-edge form: algorithmic tribalism, platform-mediated identity, consumerism disguised as asceticism. They’ve adopted neoliberalism’s mandate of constant self-optimisation and individual responsibility for structural failures, then dressed it in crusader memes. Which is to say, they’ve built their medieval fantasy on Reddit’s infrastructure, their noble brotherhood funded by Amazon’s logistics network, their ancient wisdom dispensed through Discord servers. The chastity belt wearers are capitalism’s ideal subjects – endlessly working on themselves, purchasing self-improvement tools, measuring worth through controllable metrics (streak days, muscle mass) because the metrics that determine actual life outcomes (wages, housing, political power) have been placed beyond individual reach. The feudal fantasy doesn’t resist this condition; it makes it bearable.

The peasants never left the castle. They just moved it online and called it tradition.

Stay locked, kings.