Do You Goon, Boo? Gooning Described
Recently while doing some “research” for a future piece on sissification, I kept running across a term I hadn’t heard before: “gooning.” One small internet search sent me down a rabbit hole of fascinating articles, reddit posts, and, well, pornography. So, if you haven’t heard of gooning, want to understand more about it, or even if you’re a dedicated gooner who loves to goon to blog posts about human sexuality, stick around so I can fill you in (no pun intended?) on this fascinating topic. Think you’re a sex nerd aficionado? Take the quiz and find out!
What is Gooning?
Gooning is part activity, part kink, and for some, part lifestyle. In its simplest form, to goon is to edge repeatedly with the goal of reaching a hypnotic state of mindless sexual ecstasy, or as some call it a “goon state.” Although you can goon for as long or as short of a period as you’d like, people tend to dedicate at least several hours to a gooning session and some have claimed to go for as long as 40 hours straight. Most of the time gooning involves extended porn viewership, and unsurprisingly gooning overlaps and connects with many other kinky interests. Gooning seems to currently occupy a bit of an awkward middleground when it comes to kink popularity. MEL Magazine published an article on gooning in 2020 and two pieces on the subject have been posted on Medium.com in 2022, but beyond that, most public discussion of the subject is limited to kink-negative YouTube channels that either create “NoFap Motivation” or bullying “comedy” videos that repost gooner content as cringe humor. That being said, there’s a fairly extensive community of gooners on Discord as well as subreddits like r/GOONED (which has over 677,000 members at time of posting) and r/GoonCaves (which has almost 30,000). Although people of any gender can and do goon, as it stands now the Gooning scene is mostly dominated by cisgender men. Arguably the practice itself can queer sexuality and gender in some ways, though.
The term goes back to at least 2005, although the earliest Urban Dictionary definition I could find only refers to being “so into masturbating” that you become a “total goon.” The activity of intentionally gooning (and centering edging and orgasm denial into the experience) seems to be a slightly more recent concept. The most popular definition (which was posted in 2012) states that “a gooning state can only be achieved after edging.”
How to look like a goon
The word gooning itself comes from the idea that, once you reach the desired goon headspace “you look like a goon.” This means that you’re so blissed out on sexual energy and pleasure that you’re no longer self conscious of your body language and facial expressions. Part of this is because the goon state is deeply pleasurable to the point of being intoxicating – putting gooners in an altered state in which they seem to lose motor function and cognitive ability. Another reason for this is that looking “like a goon” is, in itself, part of the kink. Although people like gooning for all sorts of reasons, for many a core component of the kink is the fantasy of losing control and losing mental faculties. This connects gooning to a network of similar kinks such as bimbofication, hypnosis, and submission more broadly. It can feel good to lose control – to imagine yourself helpless to sexual pleasure or “dumb enough” to dedicate yourself fully to masturbation instead of more serious socially accepted activities.
In the case of gooning, rather than being dominated by a partner or in-person sexworker, the gooner can be said to be submissive to the concept of pornography itself. Gooners will worship “porn mommies” and consume porn that breaks the fourth wall, addressing the viewer directly. Still-image gooner porn is usually in the form of photos with captions that, for example, command the viewer to melt their brain with porn, “keep masturbating, get dumb, not orgasm, and do any range of humiliating and degrading things.” Videos are also popular in the subculture, especially “hypno” videos with similar messaging, promising to transform the viewer into a permanent porn addict dedicated to gooning forever.
Gooning Explained
This is also where another core component of gooner culture comes in: addiction fetishism. For many, part of gooning is imagining that they’re addicted to porn. Gooning takes sex-negative myths about the damaging and polluting nature of porn and flips them on their heads. A gooner hears “porn will rot your brain and make you waste your life masturbating instead of being productive or having relationships with real people” and thinks “sounds pretty hot, I could masturbate to that.” It’s actually an interesting example, in my opinion, of what the queer theorist Michel Foucault described in his book The History Of Sexuality. Although porn and masturbation never rotted people’s minds to begin with, and masturbators were never an isolated type of person inherently different than others, that cultural myth and stigma itself inspired a group of people to emulate what the myth imagined, making it a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This fantasy of porn-induced brainwashing combined with the way cisgender men dominate this community gives the gooning subculture a complicated, unflattering relationship with trans women. On the one hand, popular subreddits for gooning are absolutely saturated by content made and posted by transfeminine people. At the time of writing this, the top two posts of all time on r/GOONED are feminine presenting people with penises, and many other top posts include trans women. On the other hand, so much of this porn buys into harmful tropes about transness that tend to color most porn for men featuring transfeminine folks. In r/GOONED, at least, much of the porn subtly (or not-so-subtly) reinforces the dangerously derogatory idea that trans women are secretly men who “trap” men into gay attraction. This is an unfortunately common theme in porn generally speaking, but in the gooning subculture it’s especially potent because so much of the fantasy of gooning surrounds the idea one is consciously subjecting oneself to “polluting” sexual influences. If you’re a cisgender man raised in a transphobic culture, it might be easy to imagine attraction to trans women as abnormal, embaressing, and a sexual deviation trained into you by porn. It’s extremely common for straight men to be attracted to transfeminine people (and obviously attraction to trans women is straight in itself) yet the stigma around that attraction fuels the fantasy that the gooner has fallen too far down the porn rabbit hole, so to speak.
Gooning’s relationship with transfemininity gets even more complicated when it comes to the kink’s overlap with Alpha/Beta hierarchy fantasies, feminization, and sissy porn. We don’t have time to get too deep into this at the moment, but rest assured: an article on sissification is coming. For now, suffice it to say that there’s a popular constellation of interconnected kinks that focus on the idea of people who were assigned male at birth beginning to occupy a feminine body or social role for horny rather than explicitly gender-identity related reasons. Often this fantasy involves being “brainwashed into being a dumb slut dedicated to sexual pleasure.” This bit makes the overlap with gooning obvious. Much gooning porn not only promises to rot your brain but also to hypnotize you (who it presumes are a cisgender heterosexual man, sorry about that) into becoming *gasp* a feminized bisexual – or possibly even a pornstar who’ll then help to hypnotize others into gooning. The fantasy is that gooning porn and gooning itself will transform you into a humiliated slut who’ll dedicate themselves endlessly to porn and pornstars.
Gooning’s connection to sissification might mostly exist because of the hypnotism overlap. I believe there’s a more subtle connection between gooning and fetishized feminization, though. The gooning trance, the main goal of gooning to begin with, allows gooners to lose control specifically in ways which are linked to women generally. Part of this is just the kink’s connection to submission. Becoming dumb and obedient is, unfortunately, stereotypically connected to femininity culturally. Beyond that though, Gooning includes an element of active expression of pleasure which is generally excluded from the heteronormative male sexual role. Gooners allow and even encourage themselves to make intense expressions of pleasure and plenty of noise which is usually typical of women in porn but is often not exhibited by men in the same media. There’s also a trend of gooners making the “ahegao face” of exaggerated sexual pleasure which was popularized by hentai and is most commonly seen on women. Gooning doesn’t fall inside of the typical matrix of masculinity. Male masturbation is frequently imagined as a swift task towards orgasm, not a long erotic session of solo sex. Much of stereotypical masculinity is about showing self control, practicing stoicism, mastering logic and dedicating energy to work, sports, and pursuing women. Gooning is incompatible with these qualities – it's almost a reversal of them. Gooning is about losing control and mental faculties. It’s about dedicating time to self-pleasure and pornography rather than picking up women for partnered sex. Because these things exclude gooners from idealized masculinity, gooning is perfectly designed to work hand-in-hand with feminization fantasies.
How to become a Gooner with a guide
If you’re interested in getting into gooning, Catherine Duffy of whoreuro.com has written a good guide for getting started. Although people typically goon alone, there’s also mutual gooning which can involve partners, friends, or even strangers that meet up through connections in subreddits, discord servers, or through dating/hookup apps. The most important things to remember, as usual, are consent and safety. In the case of gooning, especially solo, these two elements are very connected. Although porn addiction per se does not exist, problematic porn usage does. You can learn more about Problem Sexual Behavior through SHA’s special certification program. If you begin to feel that your masturbation or porn consumption is causing you problems yet you are unable to stop, it’s important to reach out to a sex positive mental health professional who can help you. The fantasy of dedicating yourself brainlessly to porn is great, but if you’re truly neglecting your physical, emotional, social and/or financial needs because of out-of-control masturbation, that won’t be fun for anyone in the long run. Beyond that, just remember to use lube to avoid chafing and pay for your porn for goodness sake! What’s the point of worshiping your porn mommy if she never sees any profits from it, huh?
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By Aiden/Estelle Garrett
Written with consultation from Sophie R Galarneau and Helmcue Clamwax