Flight from the Gooncave

We're spending most of our lives living in a gooners’ paradise—and that's unfortunate. For those of you who have remained mercifully unfamiliar with the term up until this moment (like my elderly relatives who probably subscribe to this Substack) the term “gooning” refers to the act of spending hours and hours sitting alone mesmerized by pornography, sometimes on multiple screens. One who engages in such an activity is known as a “gooner.” The room in which this occurs is a “gooncave.” At this point in time, gooners are effectively a subculture, like Goths or Emos used to be. They are un-ashamed and unabashed. They walk among us, breathing the same air, sharing the same streets. Yet, mentally, they are miles away, lost in secret lurid carnivals of the imagination.

I remember realizing that I was living in an increasing goon-oriented society—though I hadn’t yet heard the term—when I went to a pizzeria after work with some colleagues in Chicago. I realized, strangely, that the evening at the pizzeria was being sponsored by Pornhub, the world’s leading pornography website. It was a trendy, somewhat influencer-oriented pizza place, and I don’t know why my DSA-adjacent co-workers wanted to go there in the first place, though they were unaware that there was some sort of Pornhub sponsorship happening. At least two of the bouncers and waiters were wearing Pornhub t-shirts and (if I recall correctly) Pornhub baseball caps. This could have been something they decided to coordinate themselves, but it felt like it had been ordered from higher up. I remember being disoriented by this, but none of my colleagues seemed at all perplexed. They simply carried on with their lives, ignoring the downfall of the West, like they always did.

This was a long time ago, five or six years back. Since then, the nature of the gooner culture we’re inhabiting has only intensified. Many of us, myself included, think that gooning is bad. Bad for society, bad for the individual. But making the rational case for this, in terms that gooners might accept, proves impossible. Gooners, you see, are utilitarians. If you were to make the case from a traditionalist position, taking certain spiritual presuppositions for granted, it would be relatively easy: “It’s wrong to commodify people for sexual purposes because they are made in the image of God. And, besides, relentless masturbation tends to drain the body of vril or ojas, a subtle substance necessary to maintain its physical integrity.”

But gooners, as I said, don’t share these presuppositions. They are utilitarians who hold to a debased philosophy of pleasure. All that adds pleasure to the world and diminishes pain is good. Hence, gooning is good. Actually, they argue, you are insane for not being a gooner. What they’re doing is completely normal. In fact, from a utilitarian perspective, you are morally obligated to goon. If you don’t, you’re extremely suspect. Like, a fascist maybe. (I remember my co-workers at my old office told some girl at work that the guy she was hooking up with was “probably a Nazi” because he didn’t masturbate. Not making this up! These were the breakroom conversations people had).

Recently, however, some thinkers and writers on the Left have tried to launch a critique of gooning on their own. For instance, the Pro-Palestinian activist and academic, Norman Finkelstein, commented on the youth of today he encountered at a Mars Review of Books party. He told some leftist podcast with Revolution in the title:

There is such a huge age gap, generation gap, and it’s very very alien and frankly disorienting to me… There’s an expression—I don’t know if they coined it or if it’s a commonplace in your generation—the expression is gooning, G-O-O-N-I-N-G. It means to basically be transfixed with porn for like 24-48 hours straight—if straight’s the right word there. And it struck me—and I know this is going to sound harsh—but it struck me that even though this crowd considers itself Bohemian, and even though this crowd considers itself anti-establishment, it struck me that this was exactly the crowd that would go over for fascism.

(As a Mars Review of Books reader and contributor, I found this amusing and signally unfair. I believe that the Mars Review of Books’ comment on gooning was a critical analysis of it as a social phenomenon, not advocacy.)

So, at any rate, Norman Finkelstein thinks that gooning is a pathway to fascism. The writer Magdalene Taylor assessed criticisms of gooning from the Left, quoting the comedian Demetrius Fields, whose own critique echoed Finkelstein’s: “There’s a direct pipeline from gooning, to conservative podcasts, to the Fourth Reich.” (Note that the left, per usual, can’t argue any position without attempting a reductio ad Hitlerum. Maybe there’s something wrong with gooning besides allegedly making you become a Nazi? What then? The leftist turns out both empty pockets, desperately searching for vocabulary.)

But Taylor’s article is good, and Taylor herself is skeptical that gooning is a rightwing phenomenon. (It seems insane to argue that the side that generally wants to ban porn is the pro-gooning side, though I guess I see how a certain period spent locked in the gooncave would lead one to react against it—or become so debauched that you’d want to convert women into a weird trad Amish harem). She sees it more as something pushed by our tech overlords, the same people who use the algorithm to promote Gender Wars content on Youtube. The idea, probably not explicitly articulated in the tech overlords’ minds, is to push men and women further away from each other and into unreachable packets of atomization. Every man will be isolated in his gooncave, and every woman will be isolated in her Tik Tok creator pod or Only Fans bedroom studio or will be going full hermetic grandma-mode and pickling every conceivable kind of vegetable. Thus, the human race ends—certainly with a whimper and not a bang.

These are the first and only critiques of gooning from the left I’ve ever seen, since I feel like being pro-gooner is an extension of the left’s dominant “let people enjoy things” mentality. It’ll be hard to change. I feel like the traditionalist objections to porn are easier to understand. The left agrees with them on the “people shouldn’t be commodified” part but runs into a major issue when people start commodifying themselves, as in the case of Only Fans girls, and can claim they’ve chosen to do this freely and that it’s an authentic expression of themselves, regardless of how they’ve been manipulated by market forces or affected by dysfunctional family lives. The left prizes autonomy, even when such claimed autonomy is delusional.

From the traditionalist perspective, individual whim doesn’t matter, and from an Old Left perspective you can say to Only Fans girls and their fans, “You’re being manipulated by the market.” But “lived experience” matters too much to the modern left. They place an excessive premium on people’s accounts of their own motives (well, as long as they’re on the left), which poses a serious, likely insurmountable issue. We’re not going to be able to change the course of human desire by waiting for a leftist mass movement to overturn all the tech companies and suddenly re-orient all the algorithms to some universally agreed upon notion of the common good. We need a more potent fusion of the traditionalist spiritual critique with the leftist material critique.

I think the only way to stop gooning from engulfing the world is to mercilessly mock gooners from all sides, politically. I don’t mean targeting specific people. I just mean creating a caricature of the gooner, like this picture of an “onanist” from a 1918 Swedish medical textbook:

(The fact that this is literally what they end up looking like doesn’t hurt.)

They need to be memed into compliance with the wisdom of the universe. We must dare to, in the cringeworthy phrase, “yuck someone’s yum.” After all, it’s inherently pathetic. It’s something people barely want to be. The fact that they’re willing to cop to it is because the social prohibitions against such a self-identification have just barely cracked. If we patch them up quickly with sarcasm and ridicule—but sarcasm and ridicule ultimately offered out of universal love—we might be able to literally save lives. (Magdalene Taylor’s article discusses the connection between gooning and suicide—or “goonicide.)

Barring widespread cultural derision, I have no idea what else would work. Giving out… free hugs??

One has to wonder, how does the gooner feel when he pulls his head up and looks at the desolation surrounding him? When he surveys that bleak landscape of used tissues, brittle bedsheets, and ossified gym socks? In that burned out socket of a brain, is there still a spark of humanity? Can we awaken it? Should we even care to? Why waste our time and energy? If the gooner is going to die then he better do it and decrease the surplus population!

Well, I’m not going to give up on them so easily. Like Rhett Butler says in Gone with the Wind, “Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes, once they’re really lost.” Against my better judgments and sharpest instincts, I believe that no one is beyond salvation, and I believe in the potential of the gooner to change. If you are a gooner, taking a momentary break from draining your vril to read Substack, I want you to know: I believe in you. You may be a dopamine-addicted victim of your own lack of self-control and a debauched Redditor utilitarian, but you are also being manipulated (as we all are) by social and technological forces beyond your control. But you can’t wait for some hero to stop the goon-tide from rolling in. Only you can pull the sword from the stone, so to speak, and embrace the hero’s journey yourself. And I and many others will relentlessly mock you until you accept this challenge.