"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."
Writing here as one of the people Daniel interviewed for the article - I really enjoyed this conversation and I think it makes some great points. Here's my thoughts on the original article.
I'm personally, as you can imagine, pretty deeply involved in the gooning space even though I don't really do it myself. What's really interesting to see is that some people 'get it', and some people just don't. As open-minded as Daniel was, especially during the interviewing process (he genuinely seemed really interested in all the intricacies of the space), I'd put him in the latter group. I think if he wrote an article about sounding, swinger clubs or CBT, he'd hit a lot of the same notes.
You mentioned he makes a lot of assumptions, which I agree with. I think before he even started writing this article, he already has a bunch of presuppositions, and didn't explicitly set out to get them proven wrong - but rather to see how the reality confirms them. For example, he seems adamant that being into gooning and having a 'normal' family are mutually exclusive. He conveniently left out that I met my wife in my own gooning Discord server. I'm fairly certain he also briefly talked to one of my mods, who a) is a woman with a child and b) who's husband is also in my server.
As much as I like Daniel, and I genuinely enjoyed talking to him, it very much feels like a 75-year-old politician trying to understand blockchain technology. I'm sure he's genuinely curious, but all of it is just a little beyond him.
as I was reading the Harper's piece, I was thinking something similar about the author - I felt like he just didn't understand, like, anything about these communities and it was really frustrating seeing people who enjoyed the article get upset with any sort of push back - regardless how mild. Thanks for sharing some of your experience.
Leaving out that you're married, in context, much less *married to someone also involved in this culture*, seems a bit, uhhh, journalistic malpractice. At the very least, I really feel like someone whose goal is to make up a world in their head and get paid for it should be submitting to fiction markets and letting the journalism space belong to people who want to report on reality without conveniently editing it.
Also, as someone who also met their life partner in a creative sexuality space - isn't it wonderful? Isn't it grand? We have the coolest relationship ever, because we got to meet each other id-first and work out from there. We never have to sacrifice or "pre-compromise" our deepest weirdest desires for the other person because we already know those parts of ourselves exist in harmony.
It feels like a perfect one-in-a-million lightning strike event, but also I wish our social culture embraced and encouraged this possibility rather than trying to stifle it.
Also, PornosexualGooner101 is the most Law and Order-ass fake screen name I’ve ever heard. How do you, as a journalist, hear that and not realize you’re being fucked with?
The general squeamishness around any queerness in the space - an inability to reckon with the fact that this both somehow not queer and also profoundly defined by the ways in which queerness is (or can never be) absent - is telling. As are the ways it takes fantasy language at face-value. Reminds me of mid-century BDSM pearl-clutching.
What’s also interesting is that the most fervent backlash to the backlash came, not from people invested in gooning—which would make more sense to me, since they were being turned into a spectacle—but, seemingly, from people with investments in legacy media. What upset them wasn’t defending perversion. It was that a nice young man had written a long-form, literarily-styled, discourse-producing piece, reigniting some kind of faith in media and craft. As a result, even well-researched critiques are being perceived as killjoys: killing the joy of sex, and worse, killing the joy of media :)
i had already resigned myself to being annoyed by all subsequent discourse after the harpers piece dropped but your critique proved me wrong!
i spoke to kolitz about a year ago & im not sure how much of his bottom line was already written at that point, but given the venue i was expecting a critical piece. im more disappointed by what he didnt include. as you point out he barely mentions the o.g. gay branch of the gooning family tree, which is more embodied & emphasizes different elements, but whats also missing is the other sub-subculture of porn fetishism which does it with gusto & positive valence & at least makes a nod in the direction of sustainability. that cohort is also unbelievably trans, in fact >50% of the ppl i bump into regularly on twitter are, which i mentioned to kolitz. imo there is a much more interesting story in there about how & why ppl are exercising agency over their own sexuality via gooning.
contra whats in the piece i dont think rabbit & faproulette are of particular historical importance compared to tumblr & irc & jerk groups. its possible i communicated this poorly, but im surprised he didnt ask anyone else about it as they would have corrected him.
re: the epistemics of interviewing horny ppl, much of the negative-valence porn addition fetish subculture doesnt just fantasize about how self-destructive heavy porn consumption is for them personally, they also fantasize about it corrupting & taking over the world. a futuristic times square covered in porn billboards is a common motif. the latter parts of kolitz's piece felt almost directly lifted from their erotica & merely fit it into existing narratives of loneliness & social media (which those practitioners also fetishize), rather than assessing it more critically. in fact the word "roleplay" does not appear in the piece at all, which i think is revealing.
“This fantasy of broken blue-eyed lads recovering in mental hospitals, and dependable, slow-moving fathers in hats with perfumed thoughts…” This is Proust to me.
I’d like to recognize just how funny your feature image is with all the swords and the languishing women who are SO sad they could have had these men as HUSBANDS!
“But all these special symptoms, which we have tried to analyze in detail, give but a poor and inadequate picture of the confirmed masturbator. The confirmed masturbator is apt to be a physical coward, a man who will stand all sort of insult, who will run away rather than fight or stick up for his most obvious rights. All the spirit of manhood seems to be crushed out of him. He is very often praised for his gentleness, for his saintlike demeanor, his humility, etc., but if we carefully study the individual, if we dive into his thoughts and make a psychical study of them, we will find that these traits are not virtues. We will find that he feels his wrongs as keenly as another, that he makes plans of revenge in his mind which he would fain carry out, but which he has not the energy to undertake and is too much of a coward to attempt. He is good, not because of any virtue, but because he is too much of a coward to be bad. As before mentioned, the masturbator is essentially a dreamer, that is, he is very much occupied with his own thoughts and is very shy and bashful in his relationship with the outside world… And so he continues year after year”
I'm so glad to hear that! Just a mess of an article all around. In need of a firm hand at a stern wheel, setting course for a sexually terrifying horizon.
As I read the article, I just kept thinking it was crazy that he was accepting what all these online message board guys were saying as the honest truth, as if exaggerated, deliberately misleading lore isn’t a fundamental aspect of the online message board experience.
Was generally quite stunned at how many factual errors about demos/origins for the community (which seem to come from Kolitz’s questionnaire). Anybody can tell you that gooning was the purview gen x gay guys/cd’s in 2015!
The other thing that stands out to me about the article is that, based on his own description of it, the survey he performed sounds pretty poorly designed. Maxing out at a grand total of 107 respondents with around 80k words to sift through sounds like terrible survey design (and not a particularly large sample size). I'd love to know what actual questions he asked. Given how many assumptions he seems to have brought to the table, I bet they'd be ... interesting.
I couldn’t get past the intro of the Harper’s piece. It had this tone of him rubbing his palms together going “ooh I just gotta get my hands on some of these little freaks!” that I just couldn’t stand. Good to know my instincts were correct, thank you for absolving me of any guilt for closing that tab
Found it very interesting to read the comments here by Daniel's interviewees. I'm sorry, but not surprised, that he did you dirty.
That said, as an online sex worker, I do encounter a lot of people presenting in the way that Daniel describes. Is a lot of it sexual kayfabe? Sure. They don't break it while talking to me, so I can't fucking tell when it is. But sometimes, I can tell when it's not. I've encountered gooners in the "taboo" or "no limits" corners of the fetish, who are aroused by becoming so "corrupt" that they "need" CP. I always block these guys. You can't really call that kayfabe. I think even jerking off about the IDEA of that is crossing a fucking line.
I can't know what all my clients do in their off time, but I do know how much time and money some of them spend on me, and in some cases, how much poppers they do. My attitude, like HumiliationPOV's in this article, is very "buy the ticket, take the ride." I maybe trust my clients to be adults making their own decisions more than she does, but I also see a lot of decisions get made that I, personally, would really regret.
As a veteran of the BDSM scene (got into it back in 2007, so almost twenty years) I do think that the way kink and sexuality has been approached since lock-down is less grounded, less healthy, and involves less out-of-character communication than what I saw ten or fifteen years ago. The fantasy/reality lines are less discussed and more blurred, sometimes in troubling ways.
Anyway, I understand many critiques of the Goon Squad piece, but I do think Daniel's critique of how capitalist interests motivate platforms upon which video is viewed-- be it tiktok, netflix, or pornhub-- to try to create perfect consumers who never do ANYTHING but watch, is the heart of this piece. I think when he says, in essence, that maybe we're all gooners now, that's what we need to pay attention to. I have been fighting for my life to spend less time with screens lately, or at least less time using screens in ways that make me numb. And to be quite honest, sometimes, during periods of intense screen addiction, having sexual intercourse with another human being has been the ONLY time I really put my phone down and unplug. So yeah, the idea of not even doing that kinda freaks me out, for myself.
No, gooning is not as serious a problem as AI slop, or 764, or conspiracy theorism, or the government spreading right-wing misinfo. But it is the fetishization of anti-intellectualism. All the kinks I see from my clients connect in some way or another to the problems of the world-- BBC fetishization and raceplay, bimboification, "forced" fem, "forced" bi, and the gag-inducing fetish for MAGA domination all reflect the racism, transphobia, homophobia, anti-intellectualism and rising fascism around us. That doesn't make the fetishes themselves bad, necessarily. But they point at bad things. They're copes for bad things. And I think gooning, too, points towards real problems-- some of which Daniel did a good job diagnosing, and some of which he didn't.
Writing here as one of the people Daniel interviewed for the article - I really enjoyed this conversation and I think it makes some great points. Here's my thoughts on the original article.
I'm personally, as you can imagine, pretty deeply involved in the gooning space even though I don't really do it myself. What's really interesting to see is that some people 'get it', and some people just don't. As open-minded as Daniel was, especially during the interviewing process (he genuinely seemed really interested in all the intricacies of the space), I'd put him in the latter group. I think if he wrote an article about sounding, swinger clubs or CBT, he'd hit a lot of the same notes.
You mentioned he makes a lot of assumptions, which I agree with. I think before he even started writing this article, he already has a bunch of presuppositions, and didn't explicitly set out to get them proven wrong - but rather to see how the reality confirms them. For example, he seems adamant that being into gooning and having a 'normal' family are mutually exclusive. He conveniently left out that I met my wife in my own gooning Discord server. I'm fairly certain he also briefly talked to one of my mods, who a) is a woman with a child and b) who's husband is also in my server.
As much as I like Daniel, and I genuinely enjoyed talking to him, it very much feels like a 75-year-old politician trying to understand blockchain technology. I'm sure he's genuinely curious, but all of it is just a little beyond him.
as I was reading the Harper's piece, I was thinking something similar about the author - I felt like he just didn't understand, like, anything about these communities and it was really frustrating seeing people who enjoyed the article get upset with any sort of push back - regardless how mild. Thanks for sharing some of your experience.
Leaving out that you're married, in context, much less *married to someone also involved in this culture*, seems a bit, uhhh, journalistic malpractice. At the very least, I really feel like someone whose goal is to make up a world in their head and get paid for it should be submitting to fiction markets and letting the journalism space belong to people who want to report on reality without conveniently editing it.
Also, as someone who also met their life partner in a creative sexuality space - isn't it wonderful? Isn't it grand? We have the coolest relationship ever, because we got to meet each other id-first and work out from there. We never have to sacrifice or "pre-compromise" our deepest weirdest desires for the other person because we already know those parts of ourselves exist in harmony.
It feels like a perfect one-in-a-million lightning strike event, but also I wish our social culture embraced and encouraged this possibility rather than trying to stifle it.
Also, PornosexualGooner101 is the most Law and Order-ass fake screen name I’ve ever heard. How do you, as a journalist, hear that and not realize you’re being fucked with?
The general squeamishness around any queerness in the space - an inability to reckon with the fact that this both somehow not queer and also profoundly defined by the ways in which queerness is (or can never be) absent - is telling. As are the ways it takes fantasy language at face-value. Reminds me of mid-century BDSM pearl-clutching.
What’s also interesting is that the most fervent backlash to the backlash came, not from people invested in gooning—which would make more sense to me, since they were being turned into a spectacle—but, seemingly, from people with investments in legacy media. What upset them wasn’t defending perversion. It was that a nice young man had written a long-form, literarily-styled, discourse-producing piece, reigniting some kind of faith in media and craft. As a result, even well-researched critiques are being perceived as killjoys: killing the joy of sex, and worse, killing the joy of media :)
Charlie!!!!!!
Daniel!!!!!
i had already resigned myself to being annoyed by all subsequent discourse after the harpers piece dropped but your critique proved me wrong!
i spoke to kolitz about a year ago & im not sure how much of his bottom line was already written at that point, but given the venue i was expecting a critical piece. im more disappointed by what he didnt include. as you point out he barely mentions the o.g. gay branch of the gooning family tree, which is more embodied & emphasizes different elements, but whats also missing is the other sub-subculture of porn fetishism which does it with gusto & positive valence & at least makes a nod in the direction of sustainability. that cohort is also unbelievably trans, in fact >50% of the ppl i bump into regularly on twitter are, which i mentioned to kolitz. imo there is a much more interesting story in there about how & why ppl are exercising agency over their own sexuality via gooning.
contra whats in the piece i dont think rabbit & faproulette are of particular historical importance compared to tumblr & irc & jerk groups. its possible i communicated this poorly, but im surprised he didnt ask anyone else about it as they would have corrected him.
re: the epistemics of interviewing horny ppl, much of the negative-valence porn addition fetish subculture doesnt just fantasize about how self-destructive heavy porn consumption is for them personally, they also fantasize about it corrupting & taking over the world. a futuristic times square covered in porn billboards is a common motif. the latter parts of kolitz's piece felt almost directly lifted from their erotica & merely fit it into existing narratives of loneliness & social media (which those practitioners also fetishize), rather than assessing it more critically. in fact the word "roleplay" does not appear in the piece at all, which i think is revealing.
“This fantasy of broken blue-eyed lads recovering in mental hospitals, and dependable, slow-moving fathers in hats with perfumed thoughts…” This is Proust to me.
I’d like to recognize just how funny your feature image is with all the swords and the languishing women who are SO sad they could have had these men as HUSBANDS!
Also, the article is without any self awareness quite similar to this Victorian “medical” treatise on masturbation https://archive.org/details/practicaltreatis00huhn/page/25/mode/1up.
for instance:
“But all these special symptoms, which we have tried to analyze in detail, give but a poor and inadequate picture of the confirmed masturbator. The confirmed masturbator is apt to be a physical coward, a man who will stand all sort of insult, who will run away rather than fight or stick up for his most obvious rights. All the spirit of manhood seems to be crushed out of him. He is very often praised for his gentleness, for his saintlike demeanor, his humility, etc., but if we carefully study the individual, if we dive into his thoughts and make a psychical study of them, we will find that these traits are not virtues. We will find that he feels his wrongs as keenly as another, that he makes plans of revenge in his mind which he would fain carry out, but which he has not the energy to undertake and is too much of a coward to attempt. He is good, not because of any virtue, but because he is too much of a coward to be bad. As before mentioned, the masturbator is essentially a dreamer, that is, he is very much occupied with his own thoughts and is very shy and bashful in his relationship with the outside world… And so he continues year after year”
I’m haven’t read the article and don’t feel the need to, but this conversation was a delight!
Danny, I hope you get to be a little mean to some gooners and they have a great time.
Amazing and cathartic summation of my feelings on the subject
I'm so glad to hear that! Just a mess of an article all around. In need of a firm hand at a stern wheel, setting course for a sexually terrifying horizon.
As I read the article, I just kept thinking it was crazy that he was accepting what all these online message board guys were saying as the honest truth, as if exaggerated, deliberately misleading lore isn’t a fundamental aspect of the online message board experience.
Was generally quite stunned at how many factual errors about demos/origins for the community (which seem to come from Kolitz’s questionnaire). Anybody can tell you that gooning was the purview gen x gay guys/cd’s in 2015!
When I read "But PornosexualGooner101 Died 35 Years Ago...This Very Night!" I immediately thought of Large Marge from PeeWee's Big Adventure.
The other thing that stands out to me about the article is that, based on his own description of it, the survey he performed sounds pretty poorly designed. Maxing out at a grand total of 107 respondents with around 80k words to sift through sounds like terrible survey design (and not a particularly large sample size). I'd love to know what actual questions he asked. Given how many assumptions he seems to have brought to the table, I bet they'd be ... interesting.
The editor who originally commissioned the goon piece for Harper's now works for the NYT :)
I couldn’t get past the intro of the Harper’s piece. It had this tone of him rubbing his palms together going “ooh I just gotta get my hands on some of these little freaks!” that I just couldn’t stand. Good to know my instincts were correct, thank you for absolving me of any guilt for closing that tab
Found it very interesting to read the comments here by Daniel's interviewees. I'm sorry, but not surprised, that he did you dirty.
That said, as an online sex worker, I do encounter a lot of people presenting in the way that Daniel describes. Is a lot of it sexual kayfabe? Sure. They don't break it while talking to me, so I can't fucking tell when it is. But sometimes, I can tell when it's not. I've encountered gooners in the "taboo" or "no limits" corners of the fetish, who are aroused by becoming so "corrupt" that they "need" CP. I always block these guys. You can't really call that kayfabe. I think even jerking off about the IDEA of that is crossing a fucking line.
I can't know what all my clients do in their off time, but I do know how much time and money some of them spend on me, and in some cases, how much poppers they do. My attitude, like HumiliationPOV's in this article, is very "buy the ticket, take the ride." I maybe trust my clients to be adults making their own decisions more than she does, but I also see a lot of decisions get made that I, personally, would really regret.
As a veteran of the BDSM scene (got into it back in 2007, so almost twenty years) I do think that the way kink and sexuality has been approached since lock-down is less grounded, less healthy, and involves less out-of-character communication than what I saw ten or fifteen years ago. The fantasy/reality lines are less discussed and more blurred, sometimes in troubling ways.
Anyway, I understand many critiques of the Goon Squad piece, but I do think Daniel's critique of how capitalist interests motivate platforms upon which video is viewed-- be it tiktok, netflix, or pornhub-- to try to create perfect consumers who never do ANYTHING but watch, is the heart of this piece. I think when he says, in essence, that maybe we're all gooners now, that's what we need to pay attention to. I have been fighting for my life to spend less time with screens lately, or at least less time using screens in ways that make me numb. And to be quite honest, sometimes, during periods of intense screen addiction, having sexual intercourse with another human being has been the ONLY time I really put my phone down and unplug. So yeah, the idea of not even doing that kinda freaks me out, for myself.
No, gooning is not as serious a problem as AI slop, or 764, or conspiracy theorism, or the government spreading right-wing misinfo. But it is the fetishization of anti-intellectualism. All the kinks I see from my clients connect in some way or another to the problems of the world-- BBC fetishization and raceplay, bimboification, "forced" fem, "forced" bi, and the gag-inducing fetish for MAGA domination all reflect the racism, transphobia, homophobia, anti-intellectualism and rising fascism around us. That doesn't make the fetishes themselves bad, necessarily. But they point at bad things. They're copes for bad things. And I think gooning, too, points towards real problems-- some of which Daniel did a good job diagnosing, and some of which he didn't.
Omg thank you for covering this I needed more discourse on this article