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.”

I think it’s telling that they get this fear of fakery and solipsism when they watch something that’s entirely fake (and everyone knows it) and one-sided (male-gaze-based, POV-heavy, mysoginist-coded). These worries wouldn’t have come about if they were able to have human relationships prior to watching pornography, or at least the explicit kind they’re consuming now.