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.
The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.
نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.
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:
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:
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.
Daniel Kolitz is a writer living in New York.
Man it just keeps going huh
He didn’t reveal the secret but the author is a gooner and his fetish is writing
I am gunna give the article a crack, but yeh I wanted to know what I’m in for first. I’m happy the author found an outlet
TIL volcels are a thing outside of the volcel police
نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.