Of all the niche communities birthed by the modern internet, “gooners” might be the most alien, and to many, the most repellent. Gooning, writes Daniel Kolitz in the November issue, is “a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime.” The gooner, unlike most masturbators, seeks to defer climax in order to attain the “goonstate,” “a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation.” In their quest for never-ending masturbation, some gooners have constructed elaborate “gooncaves” to refine their practice, and have even adopted new forms of pornography to meet their peculiar needs.

Seeking out gooners in the far-flung corners of the internet where they gather, Kolitz offers a compelling if often stomach-churning ethnographic portrait of the gooners, remaining sympathetic to the ways that the all-consuming world of the internet and the isolating effects of the pandemic made a practice like gooning seem inevitable.

I spoke to Kolitz about the challenges of reporting on the grotesque, his inventive journalistic approach, and the psychic toll of spending too much time in the GoonVerse.

Matthew Sherrill: Given the nature of this particular subculture, I was surprised at just how many gooners were willing to discuss their, well, habits. Did you find that most of the gooners you approached were ashamed or embarrassed of this identity, or eager to talk about it?

Daniel Kolitz: The shame thing is interesting because, to at least some of gooning’s practitioners, the self-evidently depraved nature of the act is a massive part of its appeal. They are getting off on the idea that if their friends or colleagues knew they were up to, they’d be horrified. (Though the way things are trending, those friends or colleagues might very well be closet gooners themselves by now.) Meta-humiliation kinks aside, though, I detected very little actual embarrassment on the gooners’ end. Part of this probably had to do with the anonymous nature of these conversations—in some cases, I didn’t even know the real first names of the people I was talking to. But what it mostly came down to, I think, is that gooning is fundamentally a hobby, and people like to talk about their hobbies, and these particular hobbyists, for understandable reasons, have precious few opportunities to discuss their hobby in day-to-day life. In a way they were like masturbation geeks—thrilled that anyone would take an active interest in their weird little pastime.

MS: You write that when you embarked upon this piece, there was, perhaps unsurprisingly, little to no academic literature on gooning. So you took it upon yourself to work up a thirty-three–question “Gooning Questionnaire” that you actually distributed to over one thousand gooners online. Can you talk about where you got this idea, what sort of questions you were asking, and what kind of responses you got?

DK: When I first started hanging around the gooners’ online spaces, I was daunted by just how many of them there were. I knew I wanted to get to know some of them on an individual level, but I also wanted a sense of the average gooner, if such a person can be said to exist. The questions addressed as many aspects of the lifestyle as I could think to ask about, everything from, “What was your relationship to porn throughout your life, before you started properly gooning?” to, “Did you engage in any physical training while learning how to goon? If so, what techniques did you use?” The responses I got were remarkably candid, and in the end the whole thing nearly drove me insane, insofar as it seemed impossible to adequately convey even an ounce of the gooners’ human oddity, comedy, and despair without literally porting all eighty thousand words of their answers into the text. Hopefully some of that flavor came through in the finished article.

MS: One of the more interesting aspects of gooning, to my mind, is that the gooners’ quest for never-ending masturbation has actually in itself given rise to new forms of pornography. To put it charitably, there’s a way in which gooners have been serious aesthetic innovators in the porn realm. Tell me a little about these experiments.

DK: Conventional studio porn has obviously changed a lot since the Seventies, but its fundamental form has stayed the same: two or more people in a room having sex in something like real time. Beginning, middle, climax. In this sense, inventiveness or stamina of its performers notwithstanding, porn sex at least sort of resembles real-life sex. The kinds of porn the gooners are making are different. For one thing, they aren’t “making” it at all—instead, they’re remixing existing pornography into what they call “porn music videos,” any one of which might contain hundreds of separate porn clips. A lot of these porn music videos address the viewer directly, calling them porn addicts, pathetic gooners, and so on. At their most extreme, they can verge on something like abstract video art. What it seems like to me is porn fully and finally detached from any real-world, extra-pornographic referent: porn for people whose primary frame of reference for sex is online porn.

MS: I think we’re accustomed to thinking about people with internet or pornography consumption issues as lonely, isolated individuals, locked away in their parents’ basements or the like. But as you note, one of the things that distinguishes gooning is its “communal” aspects. Can gooning really offer anything like a meaningful sense of community?

DK: To be clear, many if not most gooners really are lonely, isolated individuals. But Goonworld, for some of them, is definitely providing a twisted sort of community. For some that just means trading porn back and forth and talking shop (favorite e-girls, preferred app-controlled male masturbators, et cetera). Others of course masturbate together in “stream rooms” to DJ’d porn playlists. Many are simply there to get off, but from my conversations it’s clear that some deeper needs are being met as well. I think, for instance, of the gooner I met who’d been effectively housebound with extreme anxiety for twenty years, and who told me that gooning “puts me in a sexually excited state where I’m able to talk and connect with other people.” That’s an extreme case, but not entirely unrepresentative.

MS: To report this piece, you spent several months in daily communication with young men who spend their lives immersed in pornography, filming themselves masturbating and watching other gooners masturbate, not to mention all the time you spent sifting through endless responses to the Questionnaire. As an editor, I admire your exhaustive commitment to the subject matter, but I also worried about your psychological health. How did you manage to hold up?

DK: There definitely came a point, somewhere in the middle of the reporting process, when I grew fairly demoralized by what I was witnessing in Goonworld. This coincided with my introduction to a gooning sub-subculture so vile and life-despising that I cannot bring myself to even talk about it, except to say that I hope that certain kinds of self-administered penis damage are reversible. For the most part though, and I feel a little guilty admitting this, what I otherwise felt was a kind of perverse exhilaration. Not because I liked what I was encountering or saw anything redeeming in it—on the contrary, it seemed to me that gooning, and the social tendencies it represents, would come in time to destroy many of the things I hold valuable in this life. But there was something undeniably thrilling about staring straight on at what felt to me like the leading edge of the present moment, which is usually concealed from me in my fairly analog, paper-book-centered life.

MS: It’s easy to imagine coming away from that whole reporting experience with a feeling of disgust, but the piece expresses a real sense of concern and compassion for your subjects. Can you talk about how your attitude toward the gooners evolved over the course of your reporting?

DK: Before I’d actually met any gooners, back when I was just stunned that they existed at all, I figured that most of them would be maladjusted incel types, casualties real or perceived of this or that newsy male-oriented social epidemic. And let me tell you: many were! And yet so many—most—were almost distressingly normal. What started for me as a story about porn and its effects on the sex lives of young men gradually transformed into a story about the deleterious effects of hyperstimulating technology in general, and my feeling that these bright, often disarmingly sincere young men were above all wasting their time—obsessively watching porn and gaming and scrolling TikTok (often in search of porn) when they could’ve been, you know, reading or hanging out with friends.

**MS: Do you have a message for any young gooners out there, on the off chance any are reading this? **

DK: As no gooner wants advice from a moralizing outsider, I’ll turn instead to a porn music-video maker named Evelynnngggh, whose productions were some of the most transfixingly grotesque I encountered in my reporting process. Evelynnngggh, I came to learn, is a twenty-year-old German interior design student, and a few weeks after we started talking he messaged to let me know he’d be deleting his account. He wrote: “I always knew that watching a lot of porn will most certainly lead to some biological health problems. And I just don’t want to spend so much time on something I know is generally not good for me. I have better things to do.”