The Goon Squad
harpers.org
harpers.org
> 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.
"... the formation of an international pornography cult."
"The very air, suddenly, was misted with pornography."
There is more, but that seems sensationalist enough to me.
My understanding of "sensationalist" is that something is grossly exaggerated in shocking way, not just trying to be "poetic", although I'd argue that what the author did in this article comes off as more "cringe" rather than "poetic".
Enjoying sexual pleasure and comfort in a world otherwise not providing you any, or trying to live in supposedly "stable and robust mental health", defined as "being a father, small-business owner, being a dependable man in a hat riding slow commuter trains" with "mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawncare" "at doctor’s appointments and children’s piano recitals", when none of these things are attainable, or even desirable?
Is this lifestyle really a matter of being "psychically defenseless" or simply facing the reality of being ignored, unneeded and unwanted, living in a world that has never attended to, accepted, appreciated, encouraged or loved your self and its sexuality, ever, or like you always needed in your soul?
A world in which some gloat at their sexual power and freedom of choice, treating you like an option? It's love and war then. "I won't be your first choice? Then you will never be mine, or my millionth." It's a cold war of sexual status and insecurity, of the sacred and profane, of different upbringings and moral convictions, of regret and expectations. The plain brutality of sexual selection.
> Certain social systems had failed
"The child who is not embraced by the village will goon on its own to feel its warmth"
And now the village of late empathizers and never-loners lately realizes that they, too, might burn in the (goon)fuel. What they don't see are unaccounted and unforgiven (or unforgivable) deeds and insufferable realities of unfulfilled or unrequited love, which for some are deadly.
As for the child, they came to realise too late, that the society doesn't owe them love. Humanity isn't so different from animals and insects, where also only a few succeed in passing on their genes and the rest just die.
Terror? If you're steeped in guilt, perhaps so.
If pornosexual is a new orientation, maybe spend more time exploring why that happened instead of blaming and shaming?
Sex has been weird* since before Kinsey. It's gonna just get weirder with AI.
The idea of exploring a sexual subculture on the Internet doesn't strike me as a bad idea for an article, but I'm concerned that the author conflates the idea of the fetish-- its mindset and language-- with the real-world implementation of it. Vore, for example, is a fetishization of states of affairs that will almost certainly never come to pass in the real world, like that one could shrink to a tiny size and be swallowed whole by a sexual partner.
Gooning, then, to my understanding, is fetishization of a sort of mind-control view of pornography and masturbation as totally highjacking the viewer's life. It's something one conceptually gives oneself over to. Implemented in the real world, this looks like compulsive masturbation and pornography addiction. And that's the fine line I'm not optimistic that this piece will examine: the degree to which people are getting off on the idea of giving themselves over to something versus the degree to which it actually consumes their real lives.
--gryfft reads the article--
> 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.
One suspects the author doesn't move in circles where the phrase "kink shame" is used often.
> So where were the gooners? A few seconds’ research revealed their home base: Discord,
The phrase "a few seconds' research" sure seems right at home in this article so far.
> 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.
Surprisingly woke?! Being strict about child porn "suggests a serious and recurrent problem??" This is, excuse me, the most astonishingly normie take I've seen anywhere since before COVID. These are table stakes rules for any major discord server. The first one isn't "surprisingly woke," it's just Don't Be A Dick. The second one is standard on every public NSFW space of any kind because a whiff of CSAM gets your whole server nuked. I feel like this author has never used the Internet before.
> 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.
Hours of focused trawling? A single Google scholar search popped up results immediately like "Solo- and Autosexuality 101 (2020)" [0] which speaks to "A GROWING SUBCULTURE OF MASTURBATION," or this 2019 paper which "introduces the core behavioral and ideological characteristics of solosexuality and then applies a concise set of sexual health principles to assess potential benefits and risks of what some people consider to be not just a set of associated sexual practices but an emerging sexual identity" [1] or "SEX AS/AND/ON SOCIAL MEDIA" (2024) [2] in which "Author 1 examines online ‘gooning’ communities, oriented around prolonged masturbation sessions to multiple streams of pornography. Gooners build community around the fetishization and roleplaying of porn addiction, but simultaneously produce a problematic queerness that reifies some elements of heteronormativity." Or this 2025 entry in the Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior [3] which says "While gooning is often engaged in as a solo practice, there are homosocial elements to it..." There's even thought provoking artwork out of Cambridge referencing gooning [4]. So, if I was able to find all that in a few moments without even trying, I am curious what these "hours of trawling" were really spent on.
> 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.
Waaaaoow. -.-
> an average of two or three hours a day
cough self reported, by gooners, but sure
> 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.”
Oh good is it time for more exhausting moralizing
> 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.
how woke of you to say so, daniel
> The PMV is freebase pornography—porn purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to the brain.
I feel like there are interesting questions to examine here, and I wish I was reading that article instead
> 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.
There's so much to unpack, I'm just not going to anymore.
> 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.
Just adjacent to the conversation I'd like to see. Like whales with mobile games, I'm guessing the greatest harms are most concentrated in the most vulnerable and exploitable populations. For all the time the author spent around the community, for all the ink onanistically spilled for this article, it seems like nuance is crushed flat rather than drawn out.
> Universal conscription, I thought. Reeducation camps. We’ll make them fun for the gooners, they won’t have to suffer.
:| :| :| Hilarious.
> Even this late in the game, I struggled to understand how anyone could find any of this pleasurable, let alone addictive.
You know whose review of gooning I want to see? Forrest McNeil. Now that would be journalism.
> 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.
I can confidently say Daniel Kolitz and I have very different media diets.
---Read finished---
Well. That was longer and more in-depth than I expected while also being fairly devoid of understanding, nuance, or genuine curiosity. Sorry for the long comment.
0. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA618030734&sid=googleS...
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10720162.2019.16...
2. https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/14082
3. https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-031-08956-5_2250...
4. https://www.cambridge.org/engage/api-gateway/coe/assets/orp/...
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Love you bringing up The Review. That would be a great one.
Social media had opened a new floodgate, and the water level near the US turned out to be not higher at inside than outside. People aren't so happy about that, some trying to close it, but it's all too late, so they argue there are risks and hopes, while adoption goes on.
Doesn't that make more sense than like, "kids these days are addicted to porn and it's new"? It's not like there were any point in time they were not.
Not adding a value judgement to any of that, but I've seen this sentiment a few times and it jars with my experiences at least. Porn today is basically infinite, you can construct a whole world for yourself out of it and exist within it almost entirely.
The theory I have is it's because porn and porn-adjacent contents are slowly replacing Western contents. AIs are used to generate anime porn and specifically Ghibli-style contents. Those kids don't know if it's technically possible to do an AI Marvel porn. I think that's what actually upsets people.