Anyone who has allowed themselves to spend time on TikTok – to say nothing of those who have ever looked at porn on the internet – will have an inkling of the vortex that lurks. Even for those of us who have so far resisted full-blown internet addiction, the ever growing appetite can never be satisfied for more than a second or two.
Gen Z, as we know, has been more shaped by these dynamics than anyone else. This has produced well-documented traits such as extreme sensitivity and apparent inability to cope with criticism or challenge; social anxiety leading to a lack of interest in spending time with others in person, ready hostility, a failure to mature emotionally and economically, and a complete estrangement from the old go-to escapist pastime of reading printed words. Some people also find their raised rates of virginity particularly depressing.
There are dark patterns, akin to collective movements, that emerge from this great online sea of darkness. Incels are a prime example, who in their most awry form have killed dozens. As with the rest of recorded history, the darkness pools around young men. I wonder if perhaps we are reaching peak horror. The forces of porn, solipsism, nihilism, narcissism, sensualism, atomisation, unemployment and loserdom have come to a head in the very, very male, very, very online and very, very horrible rise of gooning.
A recent Harper’s essay on the phenomenon makes for some of the most chilling cultural reading you can find. We learn both more than we ever wanted about gooners and what drives them, and are left with that dreadful sense of deep unsurprise, a kind of always-already familiarity born of also living in the very online age.
Gooning is a frenzied internet subculture where young men – most of whom have been immersed in hardcore porn since they were 12 – masturbate alone in chatrooms, and thus also together, in the most disgusting, unnatural, taboo-murdering way. Their penises make proudly waggling shadows at the bottom of the screen as the action unfurls above: fast-moving multiple channels of porn. The goal of gooning is to attain the ‘goonstate’, a kind of nirvana-like ‘zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation’. To get there you have to wank for hours or even days at a time. When one of their number shot himself in the head after pulling up to a drive-through naked from the waist down, hand on member, the goons talked of a ‘goonicide’ and of attending a ‘gooneral’. There are uncomfortable moments of recognition for non-gooners.
Reading this article confirmed that I am about 1,000 times too ‘sex-negative’ for a world as soused in hardcore porn montages as ours – not to mention that new, hellish-sounding creation: the porn music video or PMV. The creation of the PMVs serves the sensibility of anyone used to scrolling TikTok or even Instagram; the gooners themselves refer to TikTok in explaining the format of the content they consume. PMVs are:
They love the shame. That’s as much the fetish as the feeling of being in a state of constant hyper-arousal
Porn purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to the brain. These are schizophrenic porn mosaics of often staggering density: hundreds of clips sourced from existing online porn and spliced into productions of just a few minutes’ length, soundtracked by the kind of ludicrous, pounding techno more often associated with unlicensed weed stores. Some contain seizure warnings.
It’s hard to know whether the disturbing, death-courting psycho-sexual void that gooning represents offers anything worth probing from a social or psychological perspective. Perhaps it does. The author of this essay tracked down some guys in the goonosphere. They were insightful about their motives. There was frankness about the hassle and anxiety associated with sexual performance in real life. But there was also the terror of being lied to: or rather, of not having immediate access to the inner workings of the other person. ‘What a zip file… can’t do is lie to you,’ notes the author. It’s a very weird thing to worry about, not having total purchase on what your sexual partner is really thinking. Most people in older generations would never even think to list that as a downside to sex.
There is also something here for the person interested in the mindset of kink – and especially of people who are into masochism. Goon porn’s slogans include ‘ruin your mind’, ‘go deeper’ and ‘give up on life’. Gooners get off on the stinking mess this part of their life represents. They love the shame. That’s as much the fetish as the feeling of being in a state of constant hyper-arousal. In one video, a woman whispers, as she leads the masturbator through whatever it is that he is watching, ‘Over two hundred and ten million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You are one of those people. Keep scrolling. Further. Deeper. For ever. And ever. Submit. To porn. You can’t. Turn back.’
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