Return to Pervert Ethnography Island: The Cuckold, The Gooner, The Fujoshi
A round table on virtuous gooning and erotic realism
Eli and Max are two guys I know from the internet.
The three of us most recently discussed gooning and sexual kayfabe back in October, after Harper’s Magazine published a very silly piece on the same subject.
Eli: 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…
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.
I’ve brought the band back together this week after The Cut published an article by E. Alex Jung (“Girls Who Love Boys Who Love Boys”: When did everyone start fujoing out?) about women1 who read and write slash fiction2, particularly as it relates to the recently popular Heated Rivalry book and TV series.
Danny: Hello again, fellas. In our last conversation, Max said he wished Kolitz had intervewed female gooners for the Harper’s 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.”
It seems like we got our wish! I’ve neither read nor seen HR, but I’m very interested in online subcultures that spring up around shared sexual fantasies, so I’m having a great time following the conversation. Part of me wishes we could throw a party to introduce some of the gooners and the fujoshis to one another. I think they’d have a really fun time comparing notes!
I apologize if that sounds like a fantasy of heterosexual reconstruction. I don’t mean that they ought to pair off. But I think there is a a fun overlap between certain popular fantasies like cuckolding, gooning, and fujoshis – a really intense sexual fantasy that involves a certain level of detachment and non-involvement.
None of them are quite pillow princesses, but they’re perhaps all pillow-princess adjacent? Let me lie back in a comfortable position [the cuck chair, the goon cave, the, I suppose, fujoshi futon?] and watch some hot people who aren’t me do all of the work.
I wonder if you both think, as I do, that the overlap between the gooning and the fujoshi subcultures is significant. I realize there are differences between watching pornography and writing/reading smut, but it seems to me that both are communities that exist primarily so people with similar sexual fantasies can share erotic material with their fellow masturbators.
Max: The press about why women like yaoi is driving me crazy. Imagine if there were a blitz of articles asking “Why do so many men like lesbian porn?” Who can say. World’s biggest mystery. People are so confused and scared by the idea that women could have a sex drive and a sexual imaginary.
There are also women who enjoy yaoi for different, more complex personal reasons. “It’s sexy” is an oversimplification. But I don’t really see that as a mystery that needs to be solved, either. Women like art about men all the time. That’s one of the most mainstream types of art that there is. We accept that it’s normal for women to enjoy art about straight men, including art that deals with their sexual and romantic lives, because straight men are “normal” and everyone is supposed to relate to them.
Must Masturbatory Material Be Liberating? Is It Not Enough To See Two Beautiful Faces, Masculine?
Danny: The article acknowledges that it’s not only women who produce and share this sort of thing, but it is primarily interested in the women who do it because there’s no identity-category justification for it. Which sometimes leads to a weird attempt to cobble together an after-the-fact justification like “It’s actually feminist of me” or “Stories about men having sex is an escape from misogyny,” which doesn’t make much sense to me. I suppose part of that has to do with the question of Well, what is this? Is it a hobby, is it a creative community, is it a sexual subculture? It’s hard to imagine gooners trying to furnish virtuous explanations for their own kinks in the same way, for example.
Max: “Edging for a long time is actually more respectful than busting right away, because of all the hard work performers put into doing porn.”
I think it does bug me inasmuch as I don’t think we need to explain why women get horny. It feels like it feeds into the stereotype that women naturally hate sex, that their fantasies are or should be romantic in nature, and revolve around heterosexual dating and marriage.
Danny: Yeah, a lot of my sexual fantasies over the years have looked really different from the kind of sex I’ve had in person. I’m not sure why it’s important for a person’s sexual fantasies to always align with the real or even the possible. Part of the fun of having an imagination is using it, no?
I agree that sort of justification often feels protective. Like it’s easier to say “I can only get off to stories of closeted men having intense sex and feelings for one another in order to escape sexism” than “I’m a pervert.”
And depending on how a person feels about this phenomenon, that’s how they’ll categorize the kind of women who participate in it. If they want to be mad about it, it’s straight women (who are therefore committing objectification, fetishization, appropriation), and if they want to defend it, it’s queer women (and therefore responding to trauma, surviving a sexist world, subverting something). But I don’t really see how having this sort of sexual fantasy is suspect if you’re straight but virtuous if you’re gay or bisexual.
