Bad news, folks. The faux-intellectuals are at it again. They just found out about niche internet pornography again. They anticipate your shock & disgust again. This really says a lot about [CURRENT GENERATION] again. So on and so forth. How many times must this same low-hanging fruit be picked before we all catch on to its hollowness?
Courtesy of my girlfriend cursing me with the knowledge of its existence just in time for Halloween, I come to you now with a Harper's Magazine article by a Daniel Kolitz: The Goon Squad. Credit where credit is due, Kolitz is at least operating with a proper definition[1] of the term "gooning", successfully seeing through the colloquial muddying that insists upon it being just another silly synonym for masturbation like "fapping". But for every refreshing bit of nuance & genuinely astute observation, there's at least a dozen more eyeroll-worthy dramatizations & misunderstandings, all inspiring me to write a full-fledged retort. I already took the bait, he's already gotten my rageclick, so I might as well try to make something worthwhile out of it.
INTRODUCTION
We open with a multi-paragraph description of the "Drive-Thru Goonicide"[2], an indecent exposure incident-turned-meme I'd never heard of until reading this article, somehow a critical component of Kolitz' thesis. What this long-winded account of a disposable internet plaything ultimately boils down to is marveling at the virality of gooning-related terminology, noting how "the verb 'to goon,' the root of these terms, had broken containment." Indeed, gooning has broken containment, as I myself have pointed out in LP13. But where Kolitz begins losing the plot is in his bizarre assertion that the "Gooneral" — a mock-memorial for the now-dead man in that viral video, which he already acknowledged was an "ironic, livestreamed stunt" — saw attendees earnestly mourning someone they viewed as having been "martyred for a form of self-expression". Where he managed to extrapolate that motivation from is beyond me.
Granted, netizens are often known to blur the line between irony & sincerity, but even with that in mind, I find it very hard to believe there was anything gravely serious about a gathering of random shitposters proclaiming "Hallowed be thy dick" in honor of sexual harassment committed by a man who — by Kolitz' own admission — was "from all available evidence, not a gooner at all but rather an unaffiliated, lone-wolf pervert." They only called his suicide a "Goonicide" because "goon" happens to be the memelord's current Funny Sex Word of choice, as it will remain until the next one comes along. Any relation this situation has to the actual subculture from which "gooning" originated is tangential at most, and to assume otherwise demonstrates a profound ignorance of the lolcowing that brought us to this point. Gooners are not in on the joke; they are the joke. So no, it is not particularly surprising to me that hundreds of thousands of people were able to comprehend such obscure terminology. That was made possible by its bastardization, its simplification, its reduction to yet another stand-in for "degenerate", "coomer", and other such pejoratives for Online Sexual Deviant. What we're witnessing here is not some kind of Mass Gooner Awakening, nor "a homegrown zoomer Tea Party that might one day produce its own gooner congressmen, gooner news networks, extremist gooner terror attacks", a completely unhinged sequence of words that my girlfriend tells me is "definitely a joke" and I will charitably assume/hope that is indeed the case even though some other near-equally unhinged remarks elsewhere in the article make it hard for me to be certain.
QUALIFICATIONS
Before we go any further, I'd like to establish some personal context, where exactly I'm coming from. I may have reservations with actively self-identifying as a "gooner" (or "goonette" in my case) — namely that it sounds fucking stupid, which is of course by design, just not something I care to embrace outside of individual roleplay sessions — but for the purposes of this post, that's what we'll be going with, since I do believe I meet the criteria in most respects. In fact, several years before the concept of gooning had even broken into the cultural consciousness, my teenage self had already independently arrived at a core facet of it, that being the simultaneous viewing of multiple images and/or videos across multiple screens, as immortalized by routine "fapcap" screenshots dating back to 2018. I was ahead of the curve and had no idea. That was just the way things were.
In recent times, with the power to recognize this technique by name, I've come to understand it as explicitly therapeutic for a hyperactive brain such as mine. For situations where more traditional forms of meditation fail to ground me, my next best bet is to simply drown out the noise by force, overwritten with all-encompassing stimuli of my choosing, generally once per night. To me, a good "goon" has functionally similar appeal to noise music; it's a kind of consensual overwhelm I find cathartic as someone who greatly struggles with nonconsensual overwhelm. Hell, it doesn't even have to involve especially raunchy capital-P Pornography; I often utilize the very same technique with erotica more "tasteful" for lack of a better word, vision instead filled with softly-rendered curves & folds presented purely for their own sake, equal parts arousing & soothing. A Comfy Goon of sorts. Maybe call that a "Coom", since no one says that anymore. If gooning is like noise music, then "cooming" (by my just-invented definition) is like ambient music. No doubt my approach to self-pleasuring is Unusual, but there's hardly anything I'd change about it. I have found what works for me, and consider it a beneficial source of relief, vastly preferable to all the legitimately self-destructive coping mechanisms I could've theoretically ended up with instead.
That may sound contradictory to anyone familiar with my projects @Jhxy #4, Anime break TV Receptor, or the aforementioned LP13, all of which could in some way indicate a negative relationship with porn, at least on a surface level. But the truth is a lot more complicated than that. In Jhxy's case, my critique is solely relegated to the porn industry, the mainstream beauty standards, the systemic exploitation. The higher the budget, the greater my skepticism, and for this reason (among others) I have practically zero interest in engaging with 'IRL' porn. In AbTVR's case, my intentions evolved over time. While this alias admittedly began somewhat jaded, and there does continue to be an element of the uncanny in its presentation, what I hope to convey by the end of its 'reboot' is that yes, the internet-based sexuality of a NEET stuck in the middle of nowhere is strange and lends itself to mixed emotions, but with a healthy distance (illustrated by the still-uncanny presentation), I can nonetheless recognize a genuine beauty in the realm of fantasy, which although certainly not a Replacement for physical contact, offers a lovely playground to fill in the gaps, and has produced innumerable works of gorgeous art in the process. So let anime girls be anime girls. They were never the problem here. In LP13's case, I lamented how in that moment my whole experience with sexuality still resided in The Digital, how porn at times felt less like a form of self-care and more like a mirror dimension taunting me with simulacra of a life I'd seemingly never live, how even the sight of my partners were mere text & images on a screen, their voices mere audio playing through my headphones. You'd be missing the bigger picture to blame porn for how I was feeling at the time; it was a matter of external circumstances I had little power to change, circumstances that soured everything around them. Porn as an option with its own unique purpose is no bother to me, but porn falsely occupying a role it could not possibly fill when I literally had nothing else at my disposal became incredibly demoralizing.[3] Very important distinction!
THE GODDAMN POINT
This article conveniently places multiple crucial points — which directly undermine much of the surrounding contents — near the very end, buried beneath mountains of camera-winking finger-wagging that already lulled readers into the comfortable conclusion of "Damn, Those Fetishists Sure Are Weird!" long ago. As such, I will bring those points to the foreground in advance, starting with:
“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.”
Would this information not have made more sense to include upfront when defining what gooning actually is? Does this not significantly recontextualize Kolitz' exhaustive descriptions of "the terminal-porn-addict cognoscenti" and their eccentric habits? How can he take everything gooners say at face value when appearing hopelessly "addicted" is part of the fetish? A pretty blatantly dishonest maneuver if you ask me, which unfortunately makes perfect sense considering his consistently unflattering framing of the kink's practitioners up to that point. There we already see gooner roleplay referred to as "sad" & "confusing", but some key remarks beyond that include:
“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.”
How terrifying it would be if people already knew the definition of this Weird Fetish. Yes, let us pray that day never comes. The knowledge is Forbidden. This bit has the same energy as those guys who respond like "Heh... Buddy, trust me, you do NOT wanna know. Let's just say it's, erm... Kinda sus." when asked about an in-joke with NSFW origins. It's just obnoxious. A kind of purity signaling to the Normal onlookers. See? I'm just as disgusted as you are!
“No one, besides maybe Neil Postman, could have predicted the formation of an international pornography cult.”
Ah yes. An online fetish community. Truly unprecedented, and exactly like a cult.
“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.”
Could he be any more condescending? We're not talking about a fucking alien species here. Yes, the people with an esoteric hobby are in fact people. They have in fact partaken in things other than their hobby before. How empathetic of you to consider that as a possibility. A passage like this could have just as easily been spoken about bronies by a Fox News pundit 15 years ago. Simply fill in the blank. ["None of them had thought, When I grow up, I want to watch a cartoon for little girls with such immense passion that strangers will fear for my sanity."] And don't forget to dress up your judgment as merely Concern. It's ~Fear for their Sanity~. You're just trying to help. Works like a charm.
“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 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.”
Again with the false equivalencies! We're really bringing MAGA into this? I'm genuinely in awe that these lines made it to publishing. Total nonsequiturs, and deeply insensitive ones at that.
So yeah. Not exactly a good-faith neutral examination we're dealing with here. The second conveniently-concealed realization of Kolitz' I'd like to highlight is this:
“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?”
Setting aside the repeated batshit insinuation that gooning is in any meaningful way comparable to a fucking suicide cult, he's so close to getting it. So close to understanding that the real poison of the internet exists at a systemic level far beyond the capabilities of any individual fetishist. He plainly acknowledges this dynamic, and yet here we are, still talking about gooning, still responding to this asinine article. In a slightly better world, this would've been the moment Kolitz thought to himself "perhaps I'm approaching this from the wrong angle by putting an insular fetish community on blast" and scrapped the whole thing. But he was already in too deep, I suppose. Can't abandon those clicks.
Where this all comes to a head is in a lone anecdote recounting the debilitating mental illness of a mythical "PornosexualGooner101", who no one else in the community is ever able to recall or identify. Regardless, Kolitz treats us to every gratuitous detail of this alleged user's decline, implicitly framed as a case study of The Dangers of Gooning, ignoring the underlying conditions that would've made a scenario like this possible to begin with.
“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.[4] 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.”
As I read this, I'm reminded of Jon Rafman's infamous music video for Oneohtrix Point Never's "Still Life"[5], a remarkably similar exercise in Cringe Compilation Masquerading As Artistic Social Commentary, both invoking the image of garbage-drowned bedrooms as nebulous consequences of ~Internet Debauchery~, both incredibly vapid & demeaning. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about works like these is how in their reactionary approach, they miss out on the numerous genuinely interesting conversations there are to be had about niche internet sexuality, conversations that don't require gawking at random weirdos who have done no harm, conversations that don't assume fetish porn to be an indirect arbiter of societal collapse.[6] To Kolitz' credit, I do at least appreciate his observation that "there is simply too much to masturbate to", and how gooner-oriented highlight reels such as PMVs are a logical response to that. It's something I can certainly attest to, given the literal Porn Backlog I have saved in OneTab, a backlog that has proven to be just as sisyphean of a task as all my other backlogs. Gooning is undoubtedly a product of our time in a lightning-fast media landscape, and I think it's fascinating how porn is unique among artistic mediums in being so perfectly suited for that kind of multi-faceted hyperconsumption. Can't say I've ever listened to multiple albums simultaneously, or watched multiple movies simultaneously, as much as some part of me might wish that were feasible. And sure, I may be really fucking tired of living in a world where everything happens at once nonstop, where getting "caught up" with anything is a laughable prospect, where my senses are violated day in and day out. But that is precisely the appeal of eroticizing it! Taking agency over your loss of agency! When you really get down to it, gooning is functionally no weirder or more dangerous than many other well-established kinks, no matter how wacky its chronically-online coat of paint can get, and on some level Kolitz already understands this. He's willing to acknowledge that "the desire to be erotically humiliated has been hardwired into certain psyches since the dawn of time", but the Online nature of it all is what continues to trip him up here, as he imagines "a bunch of guys sitting alone in their rooms being viciously abused by their computers", once again thoughtlessly taking a roleplay premise at face value. It's DIFFERENT this time, because it's ON THE COMPUTER. And that's SCARY.
Look, I'm not saying it's impossible for anyone to get carried away with their porn consumption to a degree they find interferes with their daily life, just as it's possible to overindulge in any other form of entertainment. Everyone needs to find what works best for them personally. But to act like there's something uniquely sinister about The Gooners on that front is just patently absurd to me. It is exactly as silly as it sounds. Nobody was helped by the publication of this article. And all of that was without even getting into the near-total absence of goonettes in Kolitz' analysis, or the assumed mutual exclusivity of gooning & "normal" family lives, some issues which thankfully have been covered excellently by those who arrived before me.[7] I'm guessing this whole thing is considered old news already. Reams of arguments have surely already played out in the places I refuse to browse. But I don't mind. Good takes on internet porn are alarmingly hard to come by, and I am passionate enough about the subject to happily provide some of my own, hopefully.
