“Gooning is a new kind of masturbation. More precisely, a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime”
“The gooner goons to reach the “goonstate”: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time.”
“The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption.”
“These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world.”
“No one, besides maybe Neil Postman, could have predicted the formation of an international pornography cult. But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability.”
“Discord was where zoomers went”
“away from their parents’ social platforms into private, self-policed spaces, little islands of affinity”
“Picture this: you work for a masturbation factory in hell”
“Gooncultist offered a deep prehistory of gooning. It is his contention that at least one strain of this practice has its origins among certain 4chan users, who would play an image- and text-based game called Fap Roulette on the site”
“But as Gooncultist emphasized, any attempt at a comprehensive, linear history of gooning is doomed to failure. Like MAGA, it is a big-tent movement in which many eccentric tendencies have converged”
“Like runner’s high, or epiphany in prayer, the goonstate is not the point of the practice, but rather its occasional and unbidden reward.”
“I was struck by the, let’s say, complex sexual valence of wankbattling and feeding in the context of a culture centered on heterosexual pornography”
“you can almost see in Goonworld the realization of the Nineties dream of the internet as an incorporeal, judgment-free, gender-fluid sexual playground”
“What you hardly need an amateur goonthropologist to tell you—and what the Questionnaire amply bears out—is that this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history”
“Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit. And they were watching some serious stuff”
“opinion columnists have fretted over this state of affairs, primarily over how all of this porn—a fair share of it violent and explicitly misogynist—was affecting the sexual behavior of young men in real life. What they apparently hadn’t considered was that the porn alone might be enough, that at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity it could function as a workable substitute for life itself”
“This was certainly true for some before the pandemic, but the lockdowns appear to have disastrously accelerated this particular outcome in younger members of Gen Z”
“You can think of the pornosexual as a species of voluntary celibate, or “volcel.” Like a volcel, the pornosexual chooses not to have sex. Unlike a volcel, the pornosexual does so because their sexual needs are entirely met by pornography, which not a few of them conceive as a kind of “entity” or “goddess” requiring absolute and daily-enacted fealty”
“Reared on the tube sites, where a user might skim ten or more clips in the course of a given session, they have grown accustomed to a degree of stimulation that most porn isn’t equipped to satisfy. Hence their adoption of a new form, one that enshrines this rapid-fire mode of porn consumption as a compositional principle: the “porn music video,” or PMV”
“Many appear beamed in from some future Gooner Republic, a screen-enclosed world of rigorous illiteracy in which all human exchanges, from restaurant orders to marriage proposals, take the form of elaborate pornographic-GIF trading. And the gooners love them. They can’t get enough of them”
“They are far more interested in e-girls, a nebulous category that in Goonworld refers primarily to women who dabble in gamer-girl aesthetics—neon hair, cat ears, spandex Spider-Man costumes—and who, more often than not, sell adult content on OnlyFans”
“The sheer quantity of material generated by the OnlyFans revolution in porn is staggering. Compare the thirteen thousand films released by the professional porn industry in 2005 to the 4.6 million registered OnlyFans creators last year and you start to understand the bind today’s diligent porn addict finds himself in: there is simply too much to masturbate to”
“PMVs, which blend the best of this material into supercharged, rhythmic highlight reels, are a logical response to the glut”
“Healthy gooning, as any gooner can tell you, is an oxymoron. In this world, I was coming to learn, the degradation is the point”
“If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them”
““Ruin your mind,” “go deeper,” “give up on life”: these are goon porn’s basic slogans, the movement’s rallying cries”
“it seems to me troubling that so very many people are discovering in themselves an appetite for this particular strain of virtual degradation”
“a bunch of guys sitting alone in their rooms being viciously abused by their computers, sinking deeper into the despair that compelled them to seek out that abuse in the first place”
“what your average gooner is up to is basically a kind of sad, confusing role-play”
“it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends”
“It’s probably more useful to think of a company like Aylo—the owner of Pornhub and most of the other major tube sites, as well as most of the name-brand porn studios—as just another large tech-entertainment giant, like Meta, Netflix, or FanDuel.”
“From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games”
“You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box, about the absurdity of your need for it. What do these companies care? They’ve won. If they have their way—and they usually do—in time we will all be gooners, of a kind”
“Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself”
“Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults?”