The Goon Squad

This past January, a few dozen young men in hoodies and baggy jeans congregated outside a coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona, to mourn the death of a twenty-seven-year-old man named Nautica Malone. They arrived on foot and riding shotgun in parents’ cars; they carried flowers and votive candles, homemade placards and shirts printed with Malone’s smiling face. The café where they were gathered, Bikini Beans, was part of a chain whose baristas wear bikinis. Days earlier, Malone had pulled up to the drive-through window, nude from the waist down, a hand on his penis. The barista was already filming by the time the car reached her window. It’s hard to say why this particular sex crime went viral. Maybe it was something about Malone’s expression: he looked confident, even sultry, like he was hoping somehow to seduce the barista. Whatever the reason, the video was soon inescapable online. The view count was still climbing when Malone drove a few towns over and shot himself in the head in the front seat of his Dodge Challenger, leaving a note to his wife and young children asking for their forgiveness.

Malone’s death was covered widely in the tabloids and trended on social media, where it was described as the “Goonicide.” His vigil, meanwhile, was an ironic, livestreamed stunt that came to be known as the “Gooneral.” Remarkably, this language—Goonicide, Gooneral—was broadly legible to hundreds of thousands of people who engaged with it online. The implication, unmistakable, was that the verb “to goon,” the root of these terms, had broken containment. By the time you read this article, a full definition might be needless, but in the sincere hope that that day has yet to—will never—arrive, I will provide one.

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 act itself resembles “edging”—repeatedly bringing oneself to the point of climax without actually climaxing. But gooning is more goal-oriented and more communal. 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 Gooneral’s attendees didn’t care that Malone was, from all available evidence, not a gooner at all but rather an unaffiliated, lone-wolf pervert. That he’d been, in their eyes, martyred for a form of self-expression was enough to make him a cause célèbre for what was increasingly coming to feel like a movement, a homegrown zoomer Tea Party that might one day produce its own gooner congressmen, gooner news networks, extremist gooner terror attacks.

The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption. You’d think a person, having just built a gooncave, would take every possible measure to conceal its existence, would bulk-purchase padlocks, price high-end CCTV systems, craft detailed alibis for every hour, every minute spent alone, and would still, after all that, bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding at the fear of discovery. Instead, the gooners bragged about them. They posted photos of their gooncaves to Reddit. And these photos, which circulated through the young-to-youngish internet as early as 2021, were astonishing. One of course noticed the screens, sometimes three or four of them, sometimes upwards of a dozen, each lit up with porn, but one especially noticed the gooners’ own erect penises, foregrounded in the frame like waggish thumbs-ups. 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. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

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. Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality. In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible advances in the world of pornography. When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror. But by the time I started college, in the late Aughts, the foundations of our present porn environment were firmly established. Widespread broadband internet had enabled the rise of the so-called tube sites: platforms like Pornhub, which streamed untold numbers of clips free of charge. Then came the smartphones, transforming every toilet stall into a potential porn theater. The very air, suddenly, was misted with pornography.

In this earlier stage, if you wanted to watch porn, you still had to actively seek it out. That has since changed. Right as gooners began to solidify as a social force, I could no longer open Instagram without encountering dozens of large-breasted women skipping rope, romping in tank tops, brushing their teeth while drooling erotically. It was the same story on TikTok, the little of it I watched. Twitter was the exception: there I simply encountered uncut, hardcore pornography. We make our own algorithms, I know, but I don’t think I was uniquely deviant. The situation was the same for nearly every straight man I knew. Invariably this content was intended to funnel the viewer to platforms like OnlyFans, where a paid subscription would allow them to spend even more money on special extras like personalized dick evaluations or nude kitchen-cleaning videos. It seemed increasingly plausible that, faced with this onslaught, some percentage of psychically defenseless men would simply crumple, follow the platforms’ logic, and start watching porn full-time.

Some part of me, I’m saying, was convinced that these gooners were human. Almost certainly they had, in their lives, hugged grandparents, cuddled pets. Bundled in winter coats, they had sled down snowy inclines, secure in a legal guardian’s love. None of them had thought, When I grow up, I want to consume pornography in such immense quantities that strangers will fear for my sanity. None of them had lovingly sketched, on the backs of geometry worksheets, the gooncaves where they would one day jerk off, should life go according to plan. I wanted to find these people. I wanted to talk to them. They were, I had come to feel, emissaries of a future I could just barely glimpse. I figured they might have something to teach me.

So where were the gooners? A few seconds’ research revealed their home base: Discord, a social messaging platform not unlike Slack, offering a multiverse of chat-room servers accessible by invitation. If Instagram was where millennials went to post infographics about racial disparities in income and policing, Discord was where zoomers went to swap the screeds of lesser-known school shooters. Or to talk about gaming. Or whatever zoomers did. This was supposedly where the online youth were headed: away from their parents’ social platforms into private, self-policed spaces, little islands of affinity. I joined the first relevant server I could find: the GoonVerse, which had more than fifty thousand members. I examined the rules, which were at once surprisingly woke (no hate speech, no misgendering) and strict enough regarding the posting of child pornography as to suggest a serious and recurrent problem. Before entering, I was prompted to choose my “roles.” Age, region, and gender I could make sense of, but things grew confusing from there. Did I want to be “pinged for tournaments”? Was I a “hentai wankbattler,” or merely a “regular wankbattler”? These questions I answered at random, and then I entered the “stream room.”

Picture this: you work for a masturbation factory in hell. You log on to your scheduled workplace Zoom call. What do you see? You see what I saw in the GoonVerse. There was, inescapably, the porn itself, which occupied most of the screen, a hyperkinetic montage of tremendous penises barreling into and out of Japanese cartoon heroines, crudely rendered CGI horse-women, and actual female porn stars. Then, of course, there were the gooners, arrayed side by side in boxes at the bottom of the screen, their heads obscured—cut off by their cameras at the neck—and their hands in frantic motion. Primitive fears from childhood surfaced in an inchoate rush: a gigantic omnivorous worm I once saw in a movie on TV; the uncontrolled swarm of color that consumed the screen whenever my family’s PC crashed, suggesting something organic and harm-intending in what was supposed to be just a machine. One of the guys in the stream room was masturbating on the toilet. One of them looked like he was masturbating in jail.

Okay, I thought, this is interesting. This is a lot. I’ll come back to this. I decided to try my luck on X, where I found self-described “handpumpers” and “pumpsluts” praising “fat juicy cellulite wobblemeat,” practicing “gooncraft,” and thirsting for “goonfuel.” My eyes were still adjusting to this assault when I came across a poster going by the username Gooncultist. He was the kind of chronic social-media user who works full-time in tech and was seemingly raised by niche online-forum moderators, but who nonetheless exhibits a curious fluency in continental philosophy. (One representative tweet began: “yknow corruption/pornification kink fit really well into post-9/11 baudrillard.”) Finding him among this welter of lunatics was a tremendous relief: here, at least, was someone who seemed to acknowledge that what was going on here was strange, that a normal person might find it repellent. Clearly I needed an entrée into this world, someone to ground my investigations; maybe Gooncultist could help. I sent him a message.

When we spoke on the phone a few days later, 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. (Imagine one of those niche small-batch board games with multiple dice and fifty-page rule books. Now imagine that the rules are poorly photoshopped onto an image of a ludicrously proportioned cartoon woman. Now imagine eating your own ejaculate off the floor because the cartoon woman told you to. That is, from what I can make of its surviving remnants, Fap Roulette.) As for the on-cam streaming stuff, Gooncultist traces it to something called Rabbit, a platform designed to allow users to watch Netflix together, which proto-gooners found their own novel uses for. 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.

When I asked Gooncultist to describe the average gooner, he insisted that such a person is a “statistical fiction.” The community is too vast, composed of too many distinct and overlapping spheres. Gooncultist himself is fairly ecumenical, as far as gooners go—he has his niche fixations, which I won’t ruin your day by describing, but he seems to dabble in much of what the space has to offer. There are definite camps in Goonworld, as I was quickly coming to learn. Once I had acclimated myself to the gooners’ online spaces, I could identify at least a dozen of them. Their names meant little to me then, but they would signify soon enough: the cringe gooners, the e-girl fanatics, the BNWO freaks; the intox types and the PMV buffs; the battlers and feeders and drainers. There were also the more or less open pedophiles assembled under the “No Limits” flag, chased from Discord to Discord and explicitly banned from most I encountered. But what statistics was Gooncultist talking about, exactly? Over hours of focused trawling, I couldn’t identify a single rigorous study of gooning culture; cybersexologists, having quantified every twitch and spasm of the online erotic imaginary, had overlooked the gooners almost entirely.

Without big-picture ballast, I’d never nail down the gooner soul. Thus was born the Gooning Questionnaire: thirty-three questions touching on such subjects as session duration, porn preferences, pre-gooning sexual history, etc. I pushed it on as many gooners as I could find.

I’d figured that the gooners would need some coaxing, some assurance that I wasn’t setting them up to be ridiculed. But it was like they’d been waiting to hear from me; they flocked to the Questionnaire in droves. I had to cap it at around a hundred respondents. Within a few days, I had more raw data than I could ever hope to parse. But from the roiling swamp of responses—eighty thousand words of often movingly ungrammatical text from respondents largely based in the United States and Europe but encompassing at least four South Americans and two guys in Africa—we can rescue a few broad insights.

For one thing, and crucially: most gooners do not regularly masturbate for eight to twelve hours at a stretch, as I’d initially been led to believe. They tend to do that only a few times a month, the rest of the time masturbating for—and I really did try to calculate this—an average of two or three hours a day. In other words, the goonstate, so central to the subculture’s branding and self-conception, is only rarely attained. (A sizable minority of respondents claimed never to have reached it, although none doubted its existence.) Like runner’s high, or epiphany in prayer, the goonstate is not the point of the practice, but rather its occasional and unbidden reward. You’ll never get there if you don’t put in the work. As for what “there” refers to—what the goonstate actually feels like—a sampling from the Questionnaire should get the point across:

It’s like being high while high

Intense bliss pure happiness and love

It’s so beautiful! It’s sublime. Like being washed away.

It’s like I’m in antigravity or covered in liquid. tingles all over me, brain fuzzy, skin tingling all over. No fears about cumming, because this was the real pleasure I was after, and I couldn’t cum at that point if I wanted to anyway.

What binds these disparate masturbators together, then, are the communal rituals surrounding the goonstate: 70 percent of Questionnaire respondents claimed to engage in one or more of them. By far the most popular of these rituals is “feeding,” a sort of porn-mediated cybersex in which one gooner sustains another’s session by sending them curated porn from their private collection. (This, apparently, is what is meant by “goonfuel.”) Sometimes they send short clips, sometimes they send GIFs, but more often than not they send what are known as “gooncaps”—essentially, pornographic memes. (A lively economy surrounds the production of gooncaps: one Bulgarian teen I spoke with—who took pains to distinguish himself from a real gooner—told me that he and his friends earn a modest living churning out customized gooncaps part-time. He agreed to talk to me because, in his words, “I would like to shed some light on how the moral systems are failing some of the younger people.”)

Other gooners engage in “wankbattling,” a kind of competitive feeding in which players rate one another’s porn selections on a ten-point scale. I learned all about it from Fuji, as he called himself, a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian gooner I met while conducting supplementary fieldwork in a wankbattling server on Discord. Many things about Fuji were compelling—for instance, he’d spent months training his pubococcygeus muscle in order to climax without ejaculating and thus to spend even more time masturbating to porn based on his favorite video-game characters. But I was particularly intrigued by his relationships with his fellow wankbattlers. There appeared to be real tenderness there, as in this exchange Fuji showed me between himself and a fellow gooner:

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. (There is, it should be said, a separate, equally vibrant, and by all accounts far less psychosexually muddled world of gay-porn gooning.) Fuji, from what I can tell, is representative here: someone who identifies as heterosexual and claims to find gay porn “disgusting,” but in whom gooning has unlocked a limited, primarily virtual strain of bi-curiosity, one that manifests in his case as a desire to “dominate” other men in porn-based online trading games.

This is not to erase the many pure bisexuals in the community, nor the unambiguous straights, nor the self-described femboys, nor the trans women of every sexual orientation. Squint very hard—to the point of risking permanent eye damage—and you can almost see in Goonworld the realization of the Nineties dream of the internet as an incorporeal, judgment-free, gender-fluid sexual playground. But I suspect what these gooners might really be after is—as one Questionnaire respondent put it—“the sense of community” that these spaces offer, this being “something [the] modern world has become increasingly deprived of.”

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. Stuff that, in earlier eras, you’d need to go out of your way to find—stuff that you could only get your hands on with the help of a middleman.

On a near-daily basis over the past decade, 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. I’d been surprised at first to find that out of 107 respondents, 47 claimed to be sexually active in some capacity—roughly 47 more than I’d expected. But a quick crunch of the numbers set things straight. Median age of the sexually active gooner: twenty-seven. Median age of the non–sexually active gooner: twenty-three—i.e., someone in high school or college when the lockdowns began. It was this latter group that, in the Questionnaire, was likeliest to identify not merely as a gooner but also as a “pornosexual.”

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.

A twenty-eight-year-old pornosexual living in Los Angeles who goes by Spishak is not quite that far gone. I’d found him on Reddit, where his gooncave caught my eye: I counted twenty-seven separate pornographic videos playing simultaneously in the image he’d posted, accompanied by detailed technical specs—eight tablets, three twenty-seven-inch monitors—for other at-home tinkerers. (Unfortunately for Spishak, he has to reassemble this setup every time he gets the urge and disassemble it directly afterward, at least until he moves out of his parents’ home.)

Before Spishak joined the gooning community and began identifying as a pornosexual, he was simply a virgin, a fact he did not find particularly erotic, unlike some other Questionnaire respondents. By his own admission, Spishak has never been “good with talking to women”—“I just don’t know how to read signs: blah, blah”—and by the time his junior year in college rolled around, there were no women around to talk to anyway: the pandemic was in full swing. Struggling through online classes in his childhood bedroom, he needed an outlet.

Spishak gave me a few stated reasons for his pornosexuality. One is a fear of STDs; another is standard-issue performance anxiety. These both make a degree of sense: gooning compilations can’t give you chlamydia; a zip file can’t impugn your virility. But what a zip file also can’t do is lie to you—and it is this element of Spishak’s pornosexual philosophy that seems to me most striking, and most emblematic of the Gen Z gooner mindset writ large. It turns out that what most frightens Spishak about sex is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s (or anyone else’s) head. What if she’s bored by what Spishak’s doing but too polite to tell him? Worse: What if she’s uncomfortable with the entire situation? How could Spishak possibly know? “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” he says. “For both parties.”

In a best-case scenario, a pornosexual like Spishak would get a girlfriend and spend the rest of his life fighting gooncave flashbacks at doctor’s appointments and children’s piano recitals. Maybe he can change his name or something. Until then, there is porn’s unconditional embrace. But as the Questionnaire made clear, the porn that many of these gooners are watching bears little resemblance to the form as it’s conventionally understood. 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.

The PMV is freebase pornography—porn purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to the brain. These are schizophrenic porn mosaics of often staggering density: hundreds of clips sourced from existing online porn and spliced into productions of just a few minutes’ length, soundtracked by the kind of ludicrous, pounding techno more often associated with unlicensed weed stores. Some contain seizure warnings. Others contain prompts to inhale poppers, and for how long. 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. What’s the appeal? Per the Questionnaire:

It’s overstimulation at it’s best.

It means i don’t have to scroll as much and get more porn in my brain

Think of how TikTok is so engaging because it’s an endless stream of variety and stimulation and “brain rot” so to speak. People can’t stop watching TikToks. The PMVs I tend to enjoy are like porn and TikTok doing a fusion dance.

The fast pictures, [the] movements of the girls make you crazy to goon even more!

If you find yourself watching dozens upon dozens of PMVs for putatively professional purposes, you will come to notice that, much of the time, the sucking and/or thrusting in each clip is synced to the beat. That was NoodleDude’s innovation. NoodleDude is a twenty-eight-year-old Dutch web designer whose roughly thrice-yearly video drops are received with Swiftie-like enthusiasm among the terminal-porn-addict cognoscenti. After a sputtering start with “Don’t Stop: A Post Orgasm/Cum Again PMV,” he took the scene by storm with “I Fuck with E-Girls: A TikTok PMV.” Today there is hardly a video on PMVHaven.com that doesn’t ape his signature effects.

The e-girl thing is important. Many of the ostensible porn fans who responded to the Questionnaire claimed not even to know the names of any actual porn stars. 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.

NoodleDude, talking to me from his home in Amsterdam, was humble about his achievements. It is the contention of NoodleDude and other PMV artists I spoke with that their craft is not unlike that of early hip-hop artists, twisting existing material into novel shapes. Aware that he and his peers are profiting off others’ labor—and spooked as well by some angry emails and a few threats of legal action—NoodleDude has recently begun to credit each woman who appears in his videos, and has used his outsized influence over the board of the World PMV Games to insist on mandating the same from entrants. (He has also formed a corps of volunteer NoodleDude fanatics to comb through clips he’s thinking of using to verify that the women they feature are not underage; a few have slipped through in the past, which, per NoodleDude, “is not a very good situation to be in.”)

Not long after we first spoke, I had occasion to witness one of NoodleDude’s productions in the wild. It was the kind of January afternoon that makes life seem completely pointless, just one miserable thing after another, and I was on the seventh floor of a hotel room in Jersey City, watching a fiftysomething man known as WristbandGuy energetically lay the groundwork for a communal, in-the-flesh porn-watching party—the thirty-fifth installment of a series called Real Porn Meets. WristbandGuy was hunched over one of his three porn-filled laptops, wrestling with the hotel’s Wi-Fi, when a NoodleDude clip flashed on the screen.

“NoodleDude!” I said. “I know that guy!” The excitement I heard in my own voice chilled me to the bone. WristbandGuy paused his efforts and turned in my direction.

“He’s an artist,” he said, with reverence.

Nothing about WristbandGuy’s appearance shouts “raging pornography fiend.” Nothing about WristbandGuy shouts at all. He’s low-key, an IT worker who maintains a winningly self-deprecating attitude toward his passion project: “It’s like, ‘What’s your hobby?’ ‘Oh, well, every couple months I get twenty guys in a hotel room to watch porn.’” As it happened, he was at that very moment streaming a curated porn playlist to the Discord server Porn Streaming Hub (thirty-five thousand members at last count), a form of passive promotion for Real Porn Meets, which he founded in 2019 and was itself inspired by Discord’s then-emergent stream-room jack-off culture. (As WristbandGuy describes his thinking at the time: “This is great—but we should be in a living room, instead of online.”) One hundred and twenty gooners had RSVP’d to that evening’s event, which, from WristbandGuy’s experience, meant that about fifteen would ultimately show.

I’d first heard of the Jersey City event from a pornosexual who went by Whiteboy Jacker. Jacker was an interesting case, one of Goonworld’s truly lost souls; he’d spent part of our call trying to explain the appeal of damaging your penis badly enough to permanently prevent getting an erection, but not so badly as to prevent masturbating for hours on end. I don’t know whether Jacker eventually showed up; WristbandGuy had barred me from sticking around for the main event, a decision I was not particularly inclined to challenge. But our conversation had tanked my mood for days, and the PMVs I was at that point watching continuously were only making things worse. By the time I’d arrived in Jersey City, I despaired of finding even the slightest redemptive glimmer in all of Goonworld.

WristbandGuy, for his part, was an amiable if preoccupied host. With great efficiency he arranged the lube station, propped a Fleshlight hole-down on the kitchen counter (“It doesn’t get much use, but it’s there to be shared”), and taped full-color printouts of gooncaps to the walls. I mentioned to him that these memes seemed markedly cheerier than the ones I’d come across online, which tended toward nihilism (pump until your mind is broken, and so on). Most of WristbandGuy’s, by contrast, were cheeky encomiums to the pleasures of jacking off with your friends.

These gooncaps, I discovered, were a key part of the “hidden agenda” underpinning his parties. As a veteran of kink culture, WristbandGuy puts a premium on comfort, self-care, and consent. The actual wristbands he distributes at his gatherings attest to this: As WristbandGuy explains it, not every guy who shows up to a porn-watching party does so with a definite mind toward getting jacked off, jacking someone else off, etc. The wristbands allow attendees to efficiently broadcast their comfort levels—green for “all-in,” yellow for “curious,” and red for “not interested.” But it goes deeper than that. WristbandGuy, it turns out, has zero tolerance for those Gen Z-ers who flaunt their degradation, who “brag about going multiple days, or not eating, or skipping work or school.” He told me, “If someone says, ‘Oh, I’ve gone for six hours straight,’ when everyone else is saying congratulations, I’m saying, ‘Hey—are you staying hydrated? Are you taking meal breaks? Maybe you need to get some sleep.’” The goal, said WristbandGuy, is to foster the conditions for “a long, healthy goon life.”

I saluted WristbandGuy’s efforts while suspecting they were futile—roughly equivalent to trying to stave off a tornado by double-locking the front door. 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. Even NoodleDude—as tame a practitioner as one can find in this space, and whose productions a non-gooner might conceivably find, if not arousing, at least not actively terrifying—has adopted this attitude. In the introduction to his recent video “Follow Me,” a woman’s voice whispers ominously, or perhaps sexily, that “over two hundred ten million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You are one of those people. Keep scrolling. Further. Deeper. Forever. And ever. Submit. To porn. You can’t. Turn back.”

I’m not trying to spoil anyone’s fun. And I’m aware that the desire to be erotically humiliated has been hardwired into certain psyches since the dawn of time. But it seems to me troubling that so very many people are discovering in themselves an appetite for this particular strain of virtual degradation. No less an eminence than Angela White—the biggest mainstream porn star of her generation, oft referred to in the tabloids as the “Meryl Streep of porn”—is now actively courting the community, releasing gooner-targeted videos and giving shout-outs to “my gooners” during media appearances. (White to the Australian podcast I’ve Got News for You in 2022: “They’ll edge for days, weeks, months without completion. And they just obsess over me and I really enjoy making content for them, because they get so excited about it. They’re a lot of fun.”) This isn’t healthful in-person power play, which demands from its participants certain sensitivities, or at least the social acumen to leave one’s home and look another person in the eye. No: this 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. Even the people who make this content are starting to feel slightly weird about the whole arrangement.

My conversation with the porn producer who runs HumiliationPOV, the studio behind such recent titles as Little Dick Losers Deserve Loneliness, Isolation, and Endless Gooning, was particularly illuminating on this front—so illuminating, in fact, that I’m just going to quote the producer’s remarks as a lightly compressed and edited monologue:

People really get into the darkness of the fetish. It’s not just the addiction—the guys enjoy the humiliation of being humiliated for their addiction while they’re participating in it. And it hits some very real places in a guy’s head. When I started out sixteen years ago, it was nothing like it is today. Numbers-wise, I can tell you as someone in the business, it’s grown exponentially.

Gooning kind of automatically took off. I don’t know where it came from, but everyone loves it. We use the word as much as possible. We talk about it as much as possible. There’s a large amount of guys who come home from work every night and put these types of videos on and masturbate for hours, and it’s become their sex life. In my clips, we humiliate them for the fact that gooning to femdom videos is their sex life now. We encourage them not to have sex anymore, and to spend the rest of their life spending money on femdom clips.

You know, it’s a little fucked up, I’m going to admit. It’s almost like a drug, and we’re almost, like, pushing that drug on addicts. And honestly, I question the ethics of it sometimes. [Laughs.] We’re pushing people who are forgoing personal relationships because they’re so lost in their gooning addictions. And encouraging that only drives them deeper. So, do I ever have questions of morality about that in my own mind? Yeah, I do. But has it stopped me? [Laughs.] No. I enjoy my job. I like what I do.

The producer’s words were still echoing in my mind a few weeks later when I spoke to a nineteen-year-old gooner called JustDamage. By that point, I was not only weary of Goonworld, but jaded: What was this gooner going to tell me that I didn’t already know? What large-scale scientific gooning surveys had he orchestrated lately? And indeed, the basic outline of the gooning journey that JustDamage walked me through was a familiar one: he hears the term around; stumbles into a Discord server; reorients his life around prolonged quasi-mystical masturbation; starts a side hustle in customized gooncaps and PMVs. His customers may or may not know he’s a teenager, but some would likely be pleased to learn it. When one person sent him child porn to stitch into a PMV, he decided to retire. These days, JustDamage is “still gooning avidly,” mostly to porn edited with voice-overs insisting that you should not be watching the porn you’re trying to watch. What’s new, I thought. Sweet kid, I thought. Universal conscription, I thought. Reeducation camps. We’ll make them fun for the gooners, they won’t have to suffer. I was preparing to wind things down, to thank the gooner for his time, when he began to tell me a story.

JustDamage, it seems, once had a friend. Or maybe “friend” isn’t the word. JustDamage knew another kid on Discord with whom he’d occasionally trade pornographic GIFs and images. For large swaths of Gen Z, it’s possible that this simply is friendship. This gooner was also nineteen and was fairly new to the scene—he’d joined the community just a few months earlier—but had taken to it passionately, so passionately that JustDamage was concerned for his welfare. His room was “littered with trash.” The bed was littered with trash; the floor was littered with trash. The floor was also stained with piss (“every time he needed to go to the bathroom, if it was peeing, he’d just stand up”), and the walls were stained with cum. He painted his windows to keep the light out; he didn’t want to know the time of day. “I think he had over fifty sex toys: butt plugs, dildos, personal masturbators,” JustDamage told me. “None of them was ever cleaned.” Eventually, JustDamage had to stop talking to him. He didn’t know whether he was still in the community; he hadn’t seen him around since.

By this point, I almost prided myself on my unflappability, but the story of JustDamage’s friend, by far the most gruesome I’d heard, touched a nerve. I wanted to find him—I needed to know how his story had turned out. Over and over again, I gave out his description to my network of gooners: nineteen, blacked-out windows, piss and trash on the floor, etc. The gooners racked their brains. They got thoughtful. Pissing on the floor, sure, one had seen that. But blacked-out windows? This wasn’t ringing a bell. I searched for every permutation of what JustDamage remembered as the friend’s username—PornosexualGooner101—but this was like going door to door looking for a guy named Sal on Staten Island.

To preemptively deflate the narrative: I never did find him. But I will say also that when I pictured him—the young man for whom all of this was real, who either missed the joke or understood that there had never been one—I’d see him always with limpid blue eyes, in a gown, with a shaved head, adjusting to the pills and reflecting, with stunned acceptance, on his ill-fated tenure in Goonworld. He would open up in group counseling sessions and organize movie nights for the other patients and see occasionally, in his mind’s periphery, the looming friend request of another would-be feeder, battler, jerk bud. And he would resist it.

That is to say: on some level I always imagined I’d find him better. As opposed to—as is more likely the case—much, much worse.

In my first conversation with Gooncultist, he described the goonstate in near-religious terms. “It’s one of those things where it only works if you believe that it could work,” he said. “Which makes it a real pain in the ass to reason about.” Did I believe in the goonstate? Months into my time in Goonworld, this came to seem like an urgent question, unanswerable by conventional journalistic means. If the goonstate were a collective fiction—if the gooners were lying about its existence, to me or to themselves—this would have to bear on my conception of them, would it not? How could I presume to cast judgment without trying to reach the goonstate myself? Plus, I’m only human, only so capable of absorbing the blows of any given day without occasionally yearning for a temporary off switch. The idea of dissolving the self in an acid bath of erotic imagery was not, in the end, so unappealing.

As a kind of warm-up, I decided on a bit of wankbattling. FeedBitch was by far the more courteous of my two eventual opponents, dismissing my opening volley—an image of the porn star Annabel Redd I’d sourced from the GoonVerse—with a sweet (if gently condescending) “not my taste qt.” Cumdumpster, by contrast, was brusque, peremptory, and stingy with his scores, as if I’d been put on earth to curate pornography for him. Of course, all of this was just so much procrastination in the face of my actual task, which awaited me in the GoonVerse’s stream room.

Looking back now, there are things I could’ve done to make my time in that stream room more successful. I could’ve purchased one of the many complicated male masturbation toys the gooners had drawn my attention to. I could’ve spent my years of peak brain development romping around a toxic-waste site, slurping sludge and indiscriminately licking circuit boards. As things stand, I can say only that it wasn’t for me. If there is a goonstate, I failed even to reach its threshold, stalling instead at states better known to me—the state of despair, the state of panic, the state of paralyzed awe at the onrushing future. I sat alone in a room with a laptop, watching myself watch other guys watch porn, wondering what the world will look like when I am old.

Even this late in the game, I struggled to understand how anyone could find any of this pleasurable, let alone addictive. But then, by the gooners’ own private admission—despite their constant protests to the contrary on their preferred Discord servers—most of them are not actually addicted to porn. (In fact, the research is far from settled on whether “porn addiction,” in a clinical sense, exists in the first place.) Certainly, they like porn a whole lot. Certainly, they are aroused by the concept of being ruinously in its thrall. Certainly, many of them are using porn to cope with some fairly serious life problems. But what your average gooner is up to is basically a kind of sad, confusing role-play. Like those lunatic trolls who emerge now and then to threaten the children of right-wing media targets, the gooners are just having fun, playing around, saying the things one says to get ahead in their particular community. Most of the gooners I spoke with had no interest in completely surrendering their lives to porn, and many looked askance at the truly devoted, ruin-your-mind pornosexual contingent. Those gooners, the other gooners insisted, are crazy: they give gooners a bad name.

But I can’t get entirely behind the few-bad-apples theory. Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

Granted, day-in-the-life TikToks or unboxing videos won’t poison your soul to precisely the same degree as gooner porn. But it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends. Pornosexuals are clearly not the only people out there in the process of retreating from life. 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.

This isn’t to suggest that we aren’t enthusiastic collaborators in the progressive annihilation of our brains. Nor is it to suggest that, absent attention-shattering social platforms, we’d use the internet solely to keep up with friends and engage in improving hobbies. 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? I find it hard to imagine. In the case of the gooners, one can hope—and in more cheerful moments, I do think it’s possible—that sustained overexposure to porn will dampen the medium’s effectiveness as a numbing agent. That at a certain point, the gooner will open his eyes, find himself in a room filled with lube but void of love, and decide that the boredom of staying in that room outweighs the fear of whatever lies beyond it.