"But PornosexualGooner101 Died 35 Years Ago...This Very Night!"

A round table on credulity, sexual kayfabe, and the people sexuality wasn't supposed to ruin

Eli and Max are two guys I know from the internet.

Danny: I like Daniel Kolitz’ writing a great deal. I like Harper’s Magazine substantially less. I thought this week’s piece about online gooning subcultures was very silly and entirely too credulous, although I did like that it got everyone on my timeline to start talking about jerking off all at once.

@No_earthquake said “Doing perverts’ ethnography is always epistemologically problematic,” which sums up my issue pretty well. Kolitz takes the perverts so literally at every turn, with a seemingly unchecked desire to pin what he considers to be a profound social degradation on the pandemic! What do you think is going on ?

Eli: There were elements of the piece I really enjoyed but I think he doesn’t really understand his position within it very well. It seems like he thinks he’s doing an authoritative study on a swelling group of internet-poisoned young men (the scale of which always seems somewhat foggy), but doesn’t see himself as caught up in the performance. He picks up the fact that getting swept away in sex for 8-12 hours is a fantasy that is very rarely achieved, but I don’t think he really understands why it’s a fantasy. He’s just like, It would feel good I guess, like drugs, or TikTok.

Max: Yeah, he doesn’t seem to totally grasp that it’s a fantasy of degradation specifically, a variant of bimbofication. Kolitz seems to harbor the fear that instant gratification rots your brain and fucks up your life, but that’s the explicit point of the fetish.

Also, I don’t like the piece opening with the suicide of that guy who had no relation to the subculture. I do kind of understand what it’s trying to illustrate but it feels off as a lead-in to what the piece ends up being. It’s like, Oh, this guy wasn’t actually a gooner, of course, but he was claimed by some gooners and people called him one. That’s not actually very surprising or important if you know much about internet culture. “Gooner” has become the in-vogue, memetic phrase for someone who’s just “too horny.”

Danny: Right, drawing an implicit parallel between “someone who fantasizes about jerking off for hours” and “someone who exposed himself to baristas in a drive-through.” I don’t believe one necessarily leads to the other.

Max: This guy could have just as easily been a “simp” or a “cuck,” or whatever, if his death had occurred at a slightly earlier time. Niche internet communities will semi-ironically adopt random public figures and people in the news as “icons” all the time. I still see memes about Christopher Dorner semi-regularly.

Eli: I feel so crazy about how people are responding to this article, specifically the sort of florid tone of Doom (a tone that Kolitz also slips in and out of). Like, I fear the extremely online, particularly extremely online men who frequent Discord, but I haven’t seen any particular reason to fear the gooners. I don’t think the subculture is very big and I think the people engaging in it are directly incentivised to lie that they definitely do it all the time, and it’s definitely melting their brains.

Then people project every other anxiety they have onto the guys in the article: inceldom, manosphere, AI psychosis, 764 (???), male loneliness crisis...We don’t actually know anything about these men. The idea that they’ve flunked out of being alive is a projection. They may just have a weird sexual hobby and be underemployed, like many of us.

Also, growing up with porn means growing up with shame around pornography and seeking to eroticize that shame. If you believe that these guys are avatars of sexual ruination and failed masculinity, you’re buying into the exact thing they’re getting off on. A lot of women and trans people also notably get off to similar ideas of being sexually ruined. It’s cathartic for sexual shame. Cis men just don’t have the escape hatch of saying it’s a coping mechanism for trauma or whatever.

Max: it’s interesting that he seemingly did not talk to any women for this piece – or if he did, he didn’t include any of their perspectives in the final piece. There’s a subreddit with 555k subscribers called “Goonette Hub” where only women are allowed to post. I’m sure a lot of the subscribers are horny men, and a lot of the posters are sex workers essentially doing business, but I imagine there’s at least some proportion of women that are sincerely into the fetish. The effect of internet pornography on women seems totally underexplored, beyond anxieties about it affecting what men expect of them and their bodies.

I think a lot of people still quietly believe that women don’t watch porn and don’t have fetishes. And I think this piece would’ve been improved by any attempt to investigate or potentially challenge that underlying assumption.

He does note that there are trans women in the community, but doesn’t dig any deeper into that fact, either. Some of them are presumably there for work, too, but it does make me wonder if he’s just going “Ah, of course, trans women are perverts” without considering that more deeply. He doesn’t seem interested in investigating gender relations within the gooning community. The only woman we hear from is, I think, the woman who is a long-time professional porn actress with no personal or on-the-ground connection with the gooning community. She just knows them as good customers.

Danny: I don’t read Kolitz as intentionally phobic so much as classically liberal on that front. It reads like he feels underqualified to even discuss gay and trans sexuality in this context, so he sidesteps it.

Eli: I’m interested in the idea of the ruined straight white guy, the one kind of guy who sexuality wasn’t supposed to ruin. That phantom character who ends up in the imagined psych ward seems to have something to do with him not being in education, a job, or a relationship. But those things probably aren’t because of the gooning.

Danny: Right, there’s this phantasmagoric character called “PornosexualGooner101” that a few of Kolitz’ interview subjects keep claiming to know, although no one is able to get in touch with him or provide any evidence of his existence. He’s an erotic urban legend – he never pisses in a toilet, only in his own bedroom; he’s taped all the windows shut to block out the sun, he owns fifty sex toys and never cleans them…I kept waiting for someone to say that he actually died 35 years ago “this very night!!!”

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. I searched for every permutation of what JustDamage remembered as the friend’s username—PornosexualGooner101-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.

It’s a very funny variant on the “I want to rescue this sex worker with a heart of gold” narrative.

Who do we actually meet in this narrative? What does their life look like? Do we see any actual evidence for a profoundly unique lack of social support and interpersonal connection, or does that come primarily from the author’s assumptions about people generally, and younger people especially?

Eli: We learn about the wider life of exactly one ‘gooner’ in this article and it’s a 28-year-old who lives with his family in Los Angeles. Seeing people compare this to AI psychosis or 764 is like, “No, those things are about people going into the woods and dying or killing people with guns, rather than exchanging porn gifs with their good buddy Girthmaster84.”

I felt startled by certain assumptions that get made about the guys in the article, when we really don’t see much of them, except for one garden-variety socially awkward guy who seems a bit stymied by the pandemic and like he doesn’t want a girlfriend yet. It’s not exactly apocalyptic.

Danny: Guys who used to store their porn in the woods used to go jerk off together too! It’s very funny to sentimentalize forest porn caches as like “Oh, you really had to work for your nut then, porn had to be earned by hard work and honest sweat.”

I also fundamentally disgree that masturbating “too much” is the problem the article wants us to believe it is. A lot of people seem convinced that there is some amount of jerking off that ruins you as a person, or makes it so you have so much fun alone that fun becomes evil, and forces you to stop valuing the society of others, and I just don’t think that’s true. Certainly I think it’s possible to be anti-social, or to be creepy, but I’m just not scared of the idea of a lot of people jerking off, even if they do it (or merely want to do it) for a very long time.

Eli: Heavy video game use does seem to be a social glue for some of the nastier corners of the internet, and it’s very possible that some porn stuff is too, but video games and porn both have this terrifying role in culture where people are so scared that you’ll withdraw from the world and just do that thing until you die of starvation. You can tell that Kolitz hears the guy explaining the appeal of “damaging your penis” as a sort of clarion call that Extreme Masturbation will destroy the natural masculine.

I think there are perfectly benign reasons to be interested in the idea of jerking off for a very long time, particularly if you have a dick and have therefore been conditioned to fear premature ejaculation. Also because there’s something blissful about a long period of utter recreation, of non-productivity, of “wasted” time. And people respond to that fantasy like, “Well, what if people waste so much time that they die?”

Max: Kolitz in this article makes a number of underlying assumptions, some spoken and some unspoken, about what the gooners should be doing instead. Working, or working more, starting families, having normal, potentially reproductive heterosexual intercourse. Which is like, okay, is it impossible to take these guys at their word that that isn’t what they want? Why do they have to live a certain lifestyle and engage in certain sexual practices if they’re not interested? Other than, well, that’s what most people do. It’s what they’re “supposed” to do.

I guess as a trans person I’m sensitive to that kind of rhetoric. Why would I do things to my body that make me less normatively attractive? Why would I not pursue a conventional life to the extent of my ability to do so? And at the bottom of it is, my answer is just “I don’t want to.” and I think that should be a sufficient answer for most ways people might choose to live their lives.

Danny: Right, that anxiety about non-productive time is so intense. It would be soooo bad if all these guys felt soooo good! I keep coming back to that section where Kolitz imagines this alleged extreme gooner being treated, stunned and dazed, in a hospital gown, with “limpid blue eyes.” It’s straight out of A Little Life! What a fantasy all on its own! I’m happy to say it: I think that’s a very hot fantasy. I celebrate Kolitz for sharing it with us.

It’s like he’s reporting from a war zone! It feels like a comrade-tinged inflection of that “aborted gf” meme: I would have been your brother-in-arms, anon, if I hadn’t been infected by the pornographic mind virus….we could have been so wholesome and sexually pure together…

Max: It reads like he wants to bridal carry PornosexualGooner101 out of a burning building.

Danny: I celebrate that. I would be very happy to watch that.

Eli: As a journalist who has written enough about pornography to be on Bonnie Blue’s wikipedia page, it is pretty difficult to situate yourself vis-a-vis pornography in a way that isn’t taking up a position of elevated authoritative disgust, but that also doesn’t feel like showing your own sex tapes to your friends and family.

That said, I still think he lets his own excited belief that he’s reporting on the apocalypse get away from him. It’s sort of like he’s channelling any potential sexual energy he’s experiencing into libidinal images of dead and dying boys.

Max: i’m not a journalist and obviously there’s a literary quality to Kolitz’s writing, so I can kind of allow him his flight of fancy, but also like…this did not happen! He is imagining a seismic gooning impact on these people’s lives but nobody is reporting this getting-clean-from-porn group therapy scenario to him. It reminds me of that saying, I don’t know who to attribute this to, but, “What do we not need evidence to believe?”

Kolitz is entering Goonworld with, probably, a lot of cultural anxieties about our increasingly atomized society, the popularity and alleged dangers of internet porn, and so on, and he’s very ready to project all that onto what is happening.

There is something kind of libidinal about it, the way I think there often is in these youth panic stories. My understanding is that these used to follow a narrative of “Kids these days are fucking too much!” but now there’s been a pivot to “Kids these days don’t fuck anymore!”

Statistically there is likely truth to that, but I’m increasingly frustrated with the kind of writing that posits every kind of negative (or perceived negative) social change as the result of some sort of cultural, spiritual sickness. The vibes are simply off these days. I wonder what Kolitz thinks the solution to the problem he’s identifying is, or if he doesn’t think there is a solution, what he thinks should be happening instead.

Danny: Is query naive? Is it impossible to be impressed, pleased, titillated with the playful imaginative intensity of gooner fantasies? Must we take all their claims “I know this guy who owns a million sex toys and never goes outside and who lives in filth 24 hours a day” at face value, or can we enter into the world of fantasy and kayfabe for a minute?

Max: I think it’s probably very tempting as a journalist to take everything these guys say at face value, because it’s a more dramatic story that way, and of course all you have to go on here is what these guys say about themselves. But there is a kind of kayfabe afoot in online fetish communities like this, where the line between “in character” and “out of character” can become very blurry. There’s a good chance they’re getting off on the answers they’re giving to Kolitz’s survey, either consciously or unconsciously, and that would affect the answers they give and the stories they tell about themselves. There is a collective fiction quality to goonworld. They’re not “porn addicts” per se, they’re guys with a fetish for the idea of being a porn addict.

I think for someone lacking firsthand experience with these kind of kink spaces, it’s easy to forget that the fetish does not begin and end with the gooning itself. The construction of the gooncave, the construction of the “gooner self” as social identity, that’s all part of it! And there are real aspects to it but I don’t think it’s the 100% literal reality of the majority of these people’s lives.

Danny: “If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself.” Oh, like the petit mort? This is unusual among gooners, associating sex with death?

Max: Right, as we’ve referenced earlier with the comparisons to bimbofication, sissy porn, etc, it’s actually very common and I would argue not especially unhealthy, for sexual fantasies to involve this kind of death of the self. The fantasy of, what if you didn’t have to be you and didn’t have to be burdened with your thoughts and the challenges of your daily life? What if you were free of the desire for money, status, validation from the opposite sex, and you were just jacking it 24/7 and loving it?

Eli: There’s this idea that straight cis men have an entirely uncomplicated relationship to porn because they’re the most normative porn consumer demographic, but straight cis men are often surprisingly tightlaced about porn, and about the idea of being made submissive or defective by overusing porn. The whole “porn addiction” business, which Kolitz does rightly push back on, is driven by evangelical Christian guys who use porn once a month and are drowning in shame about it. Most guys use porn for, at most, 25 minutes a day if they’re single, usually less. Using it too much is unmasculine. Gooning’s unmasculine, which is what makes it kind of a relief. It’s basking in the humiliation of being subordinated to porn. Hence it’s often combined with paypig/findomme/submissive stuff.

Max: There’s a kind of subject-object reversal going on here, I think. When these guys watch porn, they’re not fantasizing about doing something to these porn stars, or being an active agent in the accepted normal straight guy way. Their fixation is on what the porn is doing to them. You know, they’re kind of “bottoming” in this arrangement. They’re the sexually receptive person, I mean.

Danny: Which, at the risk of overplaying my hand, is very hot! Certainly one of the things I felt while reading the article was a sort of hazy bafflement: You’re telling me all these guys get together and text each other about their helpless attachment to the idea of a nonstop haze of arousal, where they feel out of control, hypnotized, and desperate for comrades in squalor, and I’m not supposed to find that overwhelmingly hot? Put me in, Coach!

I just don’t find the idea of eroticizing short-form video content frightening or dehumanizing or like it would necessarily prevent you from also having sex with other people in real life. It makes perfect sense to me, that people would do that, and I hope some of these gooners give me a call.

I think the only part of the article I think I really disliked (as opposed to disagreed with) was this:

“It seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.”

That doesn’t seem beyond dispute to me at all! It seems highly disputable! Sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been eroticizing ARPANET or the Kodak Carousel, and I’m not at all sure where he got the idea that “fathers” and “compulsive masturbators” are two distinct groups.

This fantasy of broken blue-eyed lads recovering in mental hospitals, and dependable, slow-moving fathers in hats with perfumed thoughts, just feels like a very idiosyncratic fantasy of what manhood “used to be like” that doesn’t bear up under much scrutiny. I just don’t understand where he got that assumption from or why an editor wouldn’t have questioned it. Is it better to think about stocks all the time than to text other men about your fantasies of endless masturbation? I’m not at all convinced. Give me the guy who’s stoned on a fantasy of endless pleasure over “Buy low, sell high,” thanks.

Max: Cards on the table here, I really hated the article the entire time. Not because it was a bad piece of writing because it wasn’t. I think I just have a real distaste for internet ethnography journalism from people who seem disinterested in the historical context (such that it is) surrounding the scenes they’re covering. Gooning is not unprecedented in internet fetish community. Frankly there are people out there doing way more intense stuff to their penises. putting metal rods in there and so forth. I’m struggling to put it into words here, but everything that happens online kind of gets written about like it’s the first or worst or most world-shifting thing to happen. The truth is that five years from now gooners may well call themselves something else and jack off in a slightly different manner…Actually I was surprised reading this that anyone still says “e-girl.”

Danny: That reminds me of how surprised I was by this claim: “There is, it should be said, a separate, equally vibrant, and by all accounts far less psychosexually muddled world of gay-porn gooning.” What accounts are these? What makes gay gooning less psychosexually muddled? What makes the kind of gooning Kolitz does write about not gay?

Max: Yeah, he quotes a self-described straight guy who has also started to beat off to a little bit of gay porn. As a demonstration of his gooning prowess. It is kind of wild that he says that about gay gooning and does not elaborate on it at all. I feel like I need one more line of explanation there. Is it just that Kolitz doesn’t feel the foundations of society are threatened by gay masturbation debauchery? They weren’t going to wear hats and have wives anyway.

Danny: It’s a good question! I truly don’t know. It felt like someone told him to imagine a big scary monster, and he spent the rest of the article in mortal terror. I would have liked an attempt to set that fear aside! It’s difficult not to read that line as “Gay men are so mysterious and impossible to understand, it’s not within my abilities to try,” which as you point out, is a pretty short distance from “Well, they were never going to ride trains or wear hats to begin with, so who cares how far they degrade themselves.”

Max: The final frontier of journalism: the inscrutable gay guy.

Eli: I think a lot of people lack familial and communal support in general, but it seems to me that the distinction between “social failure” and “nerd with a weird hobby” in practice is “Do you have a job,” which is a problem. Also, some of these guys are going to have jobs. I don’t know. I often feel conscious in my own life that my work and my degrees are the best buffer I have against being designated as insane or degenerate. I wonder what a journalist who encountered me in an anonymous sexual context would assume about me.

Danny I would love to encounter more journalists in anonymous sexual contexts! That sounds flippant but I mean it sincerely.

Max: I’ve always found “journalist” to be one of the most conceptually hot professions but then in practice they don’t seem as worldly and interesting and sexually non-judgmental as you might hope. And also I’m very conscious of the same social forces Eli is discussing, vis-a-vis having a job, degrees, et al. Speaking as someone who is currently unemployed and does not have a degree. It’s unfortunate that we as a society can’t seem to move past “If you’re so right, why aren’t you rich?” as a way of evaluating, like, the total worth of any given human being.

Eli: For me there’s some salient stuff he picks up on, though I think it’s always tempting to find a weird subculture and fudge its numbers in a way where it sounds like it’s going to take over the world. But I am interested in how the internet and the pandemic have affected young people. I’m interested in the stuttering attempts to socialize through porn, when the sociality porn allows for men is quite homoerotic. I’m interested in how straight men and women are struggling with some heterosexual culture collapse stuff and the reactionary movements that feed on that. I’m less interested in how young people may fail to thrive or procreate because of the ease and thrill of porn. That’s an old panic.

Danny: I think that’s the heart of it, for me. “Sexual release should be harder to achieve and function as a civilizing process, people should have to work for it, otherwise we’ll all be contaminated and degraded by the easy reach of pleasure.” I just don’t agree with that at all.

But it was a pleasure talking through some of my disagreements with the two of you. I would happily bridal carry either of you out of a burning building any day.

Eli: I think it’s very difficult to write about pornography, and I want people to keep throwing themselves at that challenge, but that I think the article fails to note that we are all working from a surplus of sexual shame rather than a deficit. Also trans men must be recognised for their labor as innovators in the goonsphere, hashtag men in the humanities.

[Image via]

P.S. I wasn’t kidding. If you’re the kind of guy who’s into this kind of thing and you want someone to be a little mean to you about it, get in touch with me. I’m free most Fridays.