On Gooning; Or, Self-Pleasure in the Digital Age

The New Goon

“Gooning” is the obsessive masturbation method that’s sweeping the nation, emerging from a cocoon of pornographic extremity, compulsive engagement, and terminally-online sociality. The gooning subreddit, r/GOONED, which claims to be a “bastion for all bate addicted fistfuckers,”[1] boasts some 1.8 million members as of December 2024—2.5 million as of August 2025. The images on this subreddit are shocking and run the gamut of everything from provocative but fully clothed to hardcore and violent. The posts are generally large collections (“dumps”) of gifs and images of people masturbating or having sex, often overlaid with text reinforcing a singular narrative — that the viewer (the “gooner”) is being compelled into masturbating, that it is out of their control, and that there is a system of rewards which can be gotten only by intensification and further masturbation. A microcosm of phone and internet addiction, gooning also represents an addiction to contemporary capital relations and a full acceptance of the individuation of sexuality. That is, whereas masturbation has tended to be a rather fleeting satisfaction of physiological intensity, gooning leans into a highly mediated self-pleasure that expands towards the limits of modern technology. In the thrall of pornography, consumers are sucked further into the networks of slave economies that make its representation on-screen possible in the first place — rape and sex trafficking, cobalt mining and assembly line production.[2] Through hypnosis and compulsion, gooning represses anxieties about the violent nature of capital expansion and the atomization of human sociality.

With black-and-white spirals rotating in the background of otherwise uninspiring images and bold text commanding the consumer to act in a certain way or have a particular reaction to the content, hypnotism is a central refrain in the posts on Reddit. “You get dumber every day” and “Goon yourself blank,” the captions often read. Posts on the subreddit similarly tell other internet goers to “Make your addiction worse,” implying a high level of awareness of the hypnotic and addictive nature of this porn subculture.[3] Goon content tells its listeners, “Porn is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen … That’s right, gooner. It’s safe to call this an addiction.”[4] Hypnotism appears as the full embracing of sexuality fully mediated through the internet; there is no attempt to move beyond the screen. The screen is everything, depth in flatness. As one Master’s thesis already exploring the genre explains, the gooning subculture “explicitly encourages pornography consumption (to an extreme level) … and actively suggests that consuming pornography gives their life meaning.”[5] Not simply watching pornography, but finding self-actualization through it, is the key to this new type of self-pleasure.

The hypnotic leads directly into a denial of material constraints in the human organism. As a result, many gooners claim to achieve a fully non-communicative state, an erotic non-being. They call it “going monkey”: reverting entirely to pre-human existence, acting purely as an animal, driven by instinct. Rather than extracting themselves from a culture of extremity, gooners desire to hit rock bottom, taking the bull by the horns and riding it, a perverted version of “the only way out is through.” Force and hypnotism mix, as posts claim that they “Need a bud to make me explode” or ask “How quickly could you mxke me cum if you fxrced me to goon like this with you goon bud?”[6] People want to be hypnotized. They want to go deeper. They want to go past their ordinary boundaries. Yet, paradoxically, they are scared to do it. So, a community of like-minded individuals is all they need to sink into the atmosphere of pornographic consumption for hours and hours at a time.

Gooning shores up an internet-born mediatized subject position, a consciousness that is totally mystified by its being steeped in pornography. Hypnotism allows gooners to forget the real-world conditions that make their own existence possible, and gooning allows this for hours at a time — some claim to masturbate for 14 hours straight.[7] It is a digital repetition compulsion, a desire to dive headfirst into the waters of pornography and never swim to shore, all to fantastically ignore the real violence and exploitation of the world around us, including the violence that makes gooning possible in the first place. By this, I not only mean the feminist critique of pornography as itself a kind of violence against women, but also, more generally, the capitalist violence that imposes an international division of labor in which servers and machines tended to abroad make possible the seamless consumption of images at home. Or, the capitalist violence that traps workers in developed countries into wage slavery. Gooning gives its practitioners a fantasy of a time before jobs, a time of pure leisure, when they were in charge of their time and could spend the whole day not on the clock at the office but with their hand on their cock at home. Contemporary consumers know that they are being used by the bourgeoisie, but continue to desire that utilitarian relation — a cruelly optimistic attachment to capitalism itself. Hypnotism sweets the sting, so to speak, of the violence which capital requires to produce our technologies and infrastructure of connection and communication.

Gooners therefore also constitute a fully online social circle, acting on a desire to find oneself in “a place where the outside world melts away and sexual ecstasy takes over” or “a sort of sexual abyss.”[8] These statements might be able to describe network-oriented existence in the twenty-first century more broadly, but have found their home in subcultures of pornography. In this they recognize that the internet is not actually a method of interacting with other people, but interacting with their avatars and personas. “Someone wanna help me goon,” reddit users ask, with no hope for interpersonal relations except as a method of exacerbating and pushing further their pornographic mindset.[9] Though they often refer to each other as “bros” or “brothers,” they maintain none of the closeness that those familial monickers evoke. Instead, relations to others are mediated through pornography; indeed, life itself is mediated through pornography. In the diffusion of internet technologies, real life has become uninteresting. Gooning evinces a desire for the next stage in pornography — full access, anytime and anywhere, to the masses of networked content searchable with just a few simple swipes of the finger.

In the era of what Jodi Dean has called “communicative capitalism,” we see the complete immersion of society in networked devices of phones and computers. Some gooners surround themselves with as many screens as they can get their hands on, turning ordinary rooms into “goon caves,” complete with waterproof floor mats and gallons of lubricant. These “caves” include the maximum number of screens that the user is capable of finding, each showing their own sexual material (often videos which themselves are compilations of climax scenes from other videos). Gooning stands as the full technological commodification of sexuality, a full investment in the porn industry, seeped into everyday life: goon porn gets you to alter your living space, to orient entire days towards masturbation, to forego real relations with other people in order to achieve higher levels of pleasure. It is the pornographic maximalization of contemporary dissociative society. Alongside the increasing “epidemic of loneliness,” it seems that gooning offers yet another aestheticized and sexualized deflection of the massive atomization of contemporary society and the attendant lack of (male) bonding in ordinary social spaces.[10] Rather than producing a desire for change, the goon genre encourages complicity, further immiseration, and a deeper penetration of pornography into the whole web of human social relations.

Until people can actually have sex with their computers, gooning is the height of excess achievable through a pornified social life. Amidst what has been described as the decline in symbolic efficiency — the decreasing power of institutions and social contracts to establish and secure common understanding, an increasing inability to anchor meaning in a social web of signification — the increasing prominence of gooning indicates the failure of yet one more institution — the act of sex itself.[11] As the common language of sex and sexuality begins to erode, and as the phenomena of everyday life take place entirely on the internet, we can no longer rely on traditional categories of erotic experience. In a postmodern craze of meaninglessness, pornography appears as one final commodity to cling to, a commodity through which one might establish a sense of self, a reified object that nevertheless gives its users hope for further connection. As such, pornified responses to world events mark a new extremity of the sexualization of everyday life — for instance, the suspect charged with the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO was turned into a sex symbol and internet commentators made pages of his nudes within just a day.[12] People beg anyone finding their fifteen minutes of fame to make an OnlyFans within mere hours of their popularity. Sex no longer exists in the real world, but instead appears only on screen.

“Edge all day for porn,” the captions tell us, the full implication being that you’re serving pornography itself, an industry, something beyond you or any individual relation. What this phenomenon is really doing, in terms of human capital and the world’s resources, is conscripting young adults into fetishizing (literally) the extractive nature of contemporary economics. Don’t think about the modern-day slave economies that procure the cobalt for your many screens; don’t acknowledge the reliance of the porn industry on rape and sex trafficking. Goon as aesthetic wholly embraces the violent underpinnings that make it possible. “You are being manipulated,” the content blatantly tells its viewer, baldly displaying a knowledge of being controlled, of surrendering self-restraint, of giving in to the commodity machine. When exploitation, violence, and destruction is the stuff of everyday knowledge, it is all one can do to refrain from breaking down and crying. Perhaps it is easier to give in.

Recent Marxist theorizations of mediatized resistance are inadequate for dealing with this problem. It is not enough, for instance, to “expose the produced presence” of the object and “evok[e] the underlying logic of capitalist extraction,” which Anna Kornbluh has recently called for.[13] Goon pornography does this, and quite explicitly, drawing its consumers into a hypnotic spiral through an overt acknowledgment of their being hypnotized. Demystification is not the language of the hyper-extractive era, because it is built into the self-referential structure of its very media. We are witnessing a wholesale surrender to contemporary technological processes. That there is nothing external to this system, no way out, seems a banal platitude. The apotheosis of capitalist realism is following instructions, knowingly and intentionally, that feed the beast.

The internet is changing, and new generations brought up in this milieu are mediating their lives entirely through it. Gooning is an exemplary expression of this quagmire, as it distills much of mediatized existence in general: full surrender to the networked technologies that make modern life, self-awareness and acknowledgment of its violent conditions of possibility, and a depressed, reactionary, repressive spiral further and further into the techniques of atomization that drive global immiseration. As the pornographic relation becomes increasingly dictated by commodity fetishism, internet users are driven to find community through online spheres of totally reified engagement. Sexuality is becoming increasingly mediated through the internet and its functions, like subreddits of millions of people who desire to be hypnotized into submission. Indeed, it may well be possible that sexuality itself is wholly online.

[1] “GOONED,” accessed December 15, 2024, https://www.reddit.com/r/GOONED/.

[2] “How ‘modern-Day Slavery’ in the Congo Powers the Rechargeable Battery Economy,” Fresh Air (NPR, February 1, 2023), https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara; Nicholas Kristof, “The Children of Pornhub,” The New York Times, December 4, 2020, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html.

[3] Luden9191919, “Make Your Addiction Worse 💜 Goon Your Day Away to Porn Mommy 💞,” Reddit Post, R/GOONED, December 15, 2024, www.reddit.com/r/GOONED/comments/1heqxjk/make_your_addiction_worse_goon_your_day_away_to/.

[4] Gooner Audio Labs “This Healthy Addiction,” qtd. in Shirah Theron, “Pornography Conceptualised as an Addictive Substance” (Master’s Thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2023).

[5] Theron, 52. Though Theron argues gooning and hypnotic pornography encourages users to “overcome shame” regarding porn consumption, much gooning pornography also humiliates its consumer. There is a far more complex tension between these two poles than has been acknowledged in current scholarly attention. See, for instance, Adam Morby, “Wait, What Just Happened? Desubjectivation, Queerness and Reaching for The Real In Contemporary Porn Consumption” (Doctoral Dissertation, University of London, 2024), 25, https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37747/1/POL_thesis_MorbyA_2024.pdf.

[6] eatapjoessy445, “Cant Stop Stroking to Girlcock, Need a Bud to Make Me Explode,” Reddit Post, R/GOONED, December 15, 2024, www.reddit.com/r/GOONED/comments/1heuz23/cant_stop_stroking_to_girlcock_need_a_bud_to_make/; MilkMeDryBeta, “How Quickly Could You Mxke Me Cum If You Fxrced Me to Goon like This with You Goon Bud? I’m Pretty Sensitive 😓🥵 🐽,” Reddit Post, R/GOONED, December 15, 2024, www.reddit.com/r/GOONED/comments/1henrff/how_quickly_could_you_mxke_me_cum_if_you_fxrced/.

[7] Michael Stahl, “The Psychedelic Science of ‘Gooning’ — Or Masturbating Into a Trance,” MEL Magazine (blog), November 21, 2020, https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/gooning-porn-how-to-goon-reddit-edging-masturbation.

[8] Jason Armstrong, “Solo- and Autosexuality 101,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 27, no. 2 (March 1, 2020): 20–24.

[9] therpattrick, “You Were Caught off Guard When Your Friend Facetimed You after He Was Gone for a Whole Week. He Said He Was Trying out a Mysterious Cream That Easily Turns You into a Hot Girl… and It Worked Wonderfully!,” Reddit Post, R/GOONED, November 13, 2024, www.reddit.com/r/GOONED/comments/1gqndyu/you_were_caught_off_guard_when_your_friend/. It is clear from this and other posts (regarding “girlcock,” for instance) that the fetishization of trans women is another prominent feature of this genre of pornography. It seems to me that this is a result of the increasing sexualization of trans women generally, and of the fetishization of deviance more generally, as Donald Trump’s recent campaign has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on transphobic attacks and the American legislature begins to float possible anti-trans bills.

[10] Juana Summers, Vincent Acovino, and Christopher Intagliata, “America Has a Loneliness Epidemic. Here Are 6 Steps to Address It,” NPR, May 2, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173418268/loneliness-connection-mental-health-dementia-surgeon-general.

[11] Matthew Flisfeder, “Whither Symbolic Efficiency? Social Media, New Structuralism, and Algorithmic Desire,” Rethinking Marxism 34, no. 3 (n.d.): 413–32.

[12] Guillermo Alonso, “In Love with a Killer: How the Internet Became Obsessed with Luigi Mangione,” EL PAÍS English, December 12, 2024, https://english.elpais.com/usa/2024-12-12/in-love-with-a-killer-how-the-internet-became-obsessed-with-luigi-mangione.html.

[13] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2024), 193.