my girlfriend read this article - the response to This article - and shared it with me, saying it made her "pro-gooner." i was never anti-gooner, but i was interested in what this had to say.

the original article....look. i didn't go to school for journalism, but there's just no way this piece followed what i assume to be journalistic best practices. the article begins with kolitz' heavily judgemental preconceived notions regarding gooners.....after discussing the "goonicide," an event in which a sex pest whose hobby was to expose himself to women at their jobs was posted doing so online and killed himself shortly after. to start, equating his actions to "gooning" is not only inaccurate, but is disproved again and again throughout the article, but i'll come back to this.

kolitz seems to begin his research with a disgusted intrigue, shittily disguised as a "concern" for the gen z and a product of both online pornography accessibility as well as the pandemic. kids just don't fuck enough these days like they used to! everyone's just jerking it, all the time!

toward the beginning of the article, he states his intentions: "Some part of me, I’m saying, was convinced that these gooners were human. Almost certainly they had, in their lives, hugged grandparents, cuddled pets. Bundled in winter coats, they had sled down snowy inclines, secure in a legal guardian’s love. None of them had thought, When I grow up, I want to consume pornography in such immense quantities that strangers will fear for my sanity. None of them had lovingly sketched, on the backs of geometry worksheets, the gooncaves where they would one day jerk off, should life go according to plan. I wanted to find these people. I wanted to talk to them. They were, I had come to feel, emissaries of a future I could just barely glimpse. I figured they might have something to teach me."

he seems to take completely literally the concept of a "goon cave," assuming every person on every gooning-oriented discord server has dedicated their room to what he deems as filth, with up to dozens of screens displaying assorted porn as this person pictured in his mind (cis straight male) jacks it until their penis is permanently disabled. because famously, no one on the internet has ever lied, joked, or exaggerated.

look. i don't know kolitz, but he gives major boomer energy. and what i mean by that in this case is not only doing the typical thing of blaming everything he deems wrong with the world on the upcoming generation of adults, but blaming why gen z is "abnormal" on the pandemic: "...this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history." -- everyone is too socially anxious to leave their house, fall in heterosexual love, get heterosexual married, have tons of procreative heterosexual sex, and have heterosexual children. they just stay in their piss-and-cum-infested goon caves and jerk it for 8-12 hours a day until they reach a trance-like goon-state of bliss. he calls gooners an "international pornography cult," which....i don't even know where to begin there, i'll just leave it as "nobody knows what a fucking cult is anymore." the following quote seems to demonstrate his idea for what these gooners should be doing: "In a best-case scenario, a pornosexual like Spishak would get a girlfriend and spend the rest of his life fighting gooncave flashbacks at doctor’s appointments and children’s piano recitals. Maybe he can change his name or something. Until then, there is porn’s unconditional embrace."

He claims to be searching for a humanity in gooners. and yet, throughout the article, he is proven time and time again, gooner after gooner, that gooners are extremely normal people. he finds it shocking that their discord servers don't allow bigotry and have zero tolerance for child pornography or pedophilia, he's flabbergasted that in a survey of 107 people he organized, 47 of them are sexually active, saying it's "roughly 47 more than [he'd] expected." in describing his conversation with a self-proclaimed 'gooner,' he writes: "When I asked Gooncultist to describe the average gooner, he insisted that such a person is a “statistical fiction.” The community is too vast, composed of too many distinct and overlapping spheres. Gooncultist himself is fairly ecumenical, as far as gooners go—he has his niche fixations, which I won’t ruin your day by describing, but he seems to dabble in much of what the space has to offer." and i think this paragraph sums up the entirety of his article: he has a conversation with a gooner, allegedly to try to better understand the lifestyle and culture and challenge his preconceived notions. he is instantly proven wrong and shown that nothing he perceives as extreme is too out of the ordinary, and yet, as he writes about it in this article, passes heavy moral judgement on the interviewee, assumedly someone who wants to educate the public on this subculture and break the stigma surrounding it - yet kolitz thinks that the sexual interests of such gooners would "ruin your day" if he shared them with you.

this reminds me a lot of david cronenberg's 1996 film crash, in which an already kinky man in an already kinky open bdsm-positive relationship gets involved with a small group of individuals who, to put it crudely, get off to car crashes. the way they engage with this kink is with extreme admiration for famous crashes of the past, immense care and love for each other, and trying to balance the duality of relative safety with autonomy and satisfaction. while not quite the same, the gooning community he speaks of reminds me of this community in crash in that a) their sexual interests are heavily stigmatized, and b) their community cares less for the stigma surrounding their kink and has almost a network of (emotional and/or physical) care for each other. (i'd also like to apologize for anything i got wrong, i've only seen the movie once)

the final paragraph of the article reads: "This isn’t to suggest that we aren’t enthusiastic collaborators in the progressive annihilation of our brains. Nor is it to suggest that, absent attention-shattering social platforms, we’d use the internet solely to keep up with friends and engage in improving hobbies. Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself. Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults? I find it hard to imagine. In the case of the gooners, one can hope—and in more cheerful moments, I do think it’s possible—that sustained overexposure to porn will dampen the medium’s effectiveness as a numbing agent. That at a certain point, the gooner will open his eyes, find himself in a room filled with lube but void of love, and decide that the boredom of staying in that room outweighs the fear of whatever lies beyond it." after being proven time and time again that the people he's interviewing are human, his initial claim to want to see the humanity in these people is completely and utterly refuted by his chosen ignorance and better-than-thou attitude towards a widespread, diverse group of people with a kink. that's fucking embarrassing for him.

there's dozens more flaws in this article i could point out but ah fuck it. yet another antagonistic writer who thinks he's better than everyone else and that fear of today is the reason for humanity's downfall and can't be bothered to do a crumb of introspection. as a queer person i'm quite accustomed to the fact that for a lot of the cishet world, the worst thing you can be in their eyes is someone who does sex "wrong" - these days meaning in a way that doesn't or cannot procreate. and as someone in gen z, i've seen my generation have the most access of probably any generation to ideas like feminism, consent, and safe sex, as well as the gradual and continual destigmatization of both queerness, kink, and their intersections.

anyways i'm pro gooner. they seem chill