All Goon Things Must Cum to an End

Our porn predicts our future: how changes in our viewing habits taught us to accept less from our political news

Illustration by Blake Colquitt

June 2024, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Christmas came early in South Philly last election year — or at least, Gary Miles did. After being captured on camera walking into a Dollar Tree location wearing a T-shirt that read, “It’s not going to lick itself,” the thirty-five year old crept up behind a female store employee, ejaculated on her leg, and ran off into the night.

In the following days, as partial security camera footage of the incident trended on Twitter, rapper Meek Mill offered an open cash bounty for the man’s location. Within hours, Miles had voluntarily turned himself in to Philadelphia police department.

But this was far from the first incident of its kind — in fact, it’s actually just one instance of a trend known as “sharking,” or “tagging,” in which participants film themselves stalking, indecently exposing themselves to, and non-consensually assaulting women in public.

The people who engage with this content — usually young or middle-aged men — are a subset of the larger “gooner” subculture, wherein members masturbate compulsively for hours on end, becoming so fixated on pornography that they slip into a euphoric, transient state.

This concept may sound foreign as applied to compulsive masturbation — but dissociative, algorithmic, trance-like consumption for hours on end has actually become the basis for modern social media and political news consumption in 2026.

Which begs the question: in our modern world, are we all just gooning — all the time?

WHAT GOONS AROUND CUMS AROUND

While gooner culture became a borderline mainstream concept during the Covid-19 pandemic, its roots go much deeper than just a summer of sexual desperation.

Masturbation and addiction, of course, have existed even longer than human beings have.

The early precursors to gooners — namely, queer men that engaged in long mutual masturbation ‘cruising’ sessions at meet-up spots in large cities — were looking for a means to connect and have mutual sexual experiences with other consenting adults. With time, like in many niche interest communities, this dedication to extended masturbation and delayed gratification grew to become part of their shared identity.

And, as with so many other things, the rise of the internet — and therein, algorithm-based consumption — radically changed the nature of our relationship with pornography, distorting it via rampant availability and rapid pace.

By allowing users to access gigabytes of porn at a time — for free — the internet shifted the viewing habits of most, but it had an especially profound impact on the boys and young men who came of age with constant, unfettered access to it. Over time, masturbation as a hobby grew from something that was enjoyed by a select few into a semi-normal occurrence.

Instead of deliberately planning out masturbation sessions, the gooners of the internet age were faced with constant stimulation via algorithm. Like any other animal, given the choice, humans have a tendency to select stimulation of base pleasure receptors over even their own health, to the point of extreme neglect — and the internet provided a direct line to the underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes of young men and boys.

Like the rats in Olds & Milner’s famous mid-century study, these teens and young adults found themselves slaves to the algorithm, unable to resist compulsively gorging on hours upon hours of internet pornography at the expense of their nutrition, social lives, and hobbies.

TWO IN THE HAND IS WORTH ONE IN THE BUSH

Most gooners entered the movement not because they were trying to withdraw from real-life intimacy, but out of a desire for sexual fulfillment despite a lack of available sexual prospects. Effectively, goon sessions were an opportunity for them to enjoy a romantic evening of sex — without needing a partner.

Eventually, gooners’ hyper-focus on the activity would narrow to the point of overlooking actual romantic prospects. They needed constant, algorithmic variation, vibrating stimulation, and dissociative alone time in order to feel sexually fulfilled — things that are not common to find in sexual encounters with real human beings, especially not if you have no practice communicating your needs to others.

Importantly, when gooning becomes your normative mode of sexual release, the concept of fulfilling the needs of a partner becomes foreign — making it seem like an unnecessary chore. What started out as a reaction to a lack of sexual opportunities eventually blossomed into a complete departure from the traditional sexual marketplace — similar to that of incels, but without the same intensity of self-loathing.

“‘Gooner’ became a way to refer to an obsessive mentality toward any activity — be it video games, movies, anime, or otherwise — in a solipsistic, unhealthy way.”

Around 2018, gooning achieved recognition amongst mainstream pornography viewers, completing its transformation from a niche fetish into the subject of several subreddit communities — and a highly searched term on the internet (which is still true to this day). Suddenly, users were sharing techniques by which to prolong their masturbation sessions and photographs of their “goon caves” — complete with multiple monitors and elaborate seating arrangements. Gooners were finding camaraderie in online public spaces and reaching a level of acceptance that would soon lead to an escalation in their behavior.

Then, having already detached from traditional sexual relationships, and emboldened from the support of a like-minded community online, some gooners found themselves with the urge to raise the stakes of their antisocial behavior — thus, the rise of sharking.

Niche pornographic content creators in the space began to find followings by filming themselves ejaculating on women in public without their knowledge and uploading it to PornHub, OnlyFans, and other user-content-driven websites. Then, young men online began sharing their own stories of similarly harassing and assaulting women in public. Self-stimulation had become too tame — they needed something more to satisfy themselves.

Frequently targeting low-income areas and establishments, sharkers seemed to be interested in more than just sexual attention. Years of isolation from women — and regular, hypnotic consumption of porn featuring prominent themes of degradation, erotic humiliation, novelty seeking, and parasocial intimacy — led to general female dehumanization amongst gooners.

Illustration by Blake Colquitt

PRIDE CUMS BEFORE A FALL

Finally, during the pandemic, gooning became understood and accepted among general internet audiences — if only as a meme or joke. On the one hand, gooning converts certainly rose during the pandemic, while populations were confined mostly to their homes and forced to become creative with satisfying their sexual needs.

On the other, awareness of gooners as a demographic greatly outpaced this sudden increase in enthusiastic participants, leading to a copious increase in the circulation of gooner memes. Magazines, traditional publications, and online news outlets began to report heavily on the phenomenon.

One of the driving forces behind this heightened awareness was the rise of gooner self-awareness. They began to publicly identify themselves on websites like Reddit and Twitter, participating in memes that poke fun at the hobby, and using heavily exaggerated language to blur the line between irony and sincerity — making outsiders question whether they’re joking.

Like Nick Fuentes’ Groypers, by refusing to clarify the ambiguity of their identity, gooners were able to soften the harsh and depraved reality of their views and behaviors — effectively creating a bridge from ironic participation to sincere, unmitigated gooning.

The internet, if nothing else, is consistent. It has proven time and time again to be more than willing to reward this type of behavior. Gooning (and gooner-adjacent behavior) went through a rapid period of hyper-normalization. By late 2022, the term “gooning” began to be used dominantly to refer to non-pornographic phenomena, completing the word’s transformation into common parlance. ‘Gooner’ became a way to refer to an obsessive mentality toward any activity — be it video games, movies, anime, or otherwise — in a solipsistic, unhealthy way.

NOTHING GOON CUMS EASY

Now, in 2026, gooning is everywhere you look.

The doomscrolling, high-stimulation environment meant to drive long-term numbness and dissociation in the gooning world is now present in every type of social and traditional media. Outlets are pursuing continuous viewer engagement and providing the resources to facilitate it — in effect, creating myriad perpetual arousal machines.

Wine moms, college students, and working professionals alike are haplessly addicted to TikTok and Instagram Reels, losing afternoons — and even entire days — rotting in bed. Finance bros are compulsively gambling on new and increasingly addictive day-trading markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. Online shopping has become gamified and algorithmic. You can even date your AI chatbot for instant fulfillment!

“Today, most everyone is in a trance-like state: constantly upset, worked-up, dissociated, and stimulated, all at the same time — and somehow, clamoring for more.”

American politics have been hit especially hard — likely because of the extent to which corporations stand to gain by facilitating the passage of beneficial legislation and helping to elect candidates friendly to their interests.

Fox News viewers are sitting in their own goon-caves, frothing at the mouth for xenophobia, horny for war, and edging themselves with segment after segment on culture-war issues like transgender bathroom use, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s use of the Fifth Amendment, DEI, and the ghost of communism. Every headline is a scandal that confirms what viewers already think about liberals and progressives. The audience is offered endless algorithmic variation and novelty, and thereby, infinite outrage.

Conservative political news has successfully separated politics from people just like gooning separates sexuality from interpersonal relationships. In the same way gooners are detached from the sexual marketplace, Fox News viewers are detached from the political square. They don’t talk to neighbors with differing political opinions, read legislation, or attend town halls or city council meetings. Instead, their entire political identity has become centered on the consumption of Greg Gutfeld’s and Jesse Watters’ commentary.

And Donald Trump is to American conversatives what a sharker porn star is to gooners.

He regularly broadcasts himself to the nation — degrading and debasing political opponents, women, veterans, and anyone else who deserves a modicum of respect. He seems intensely interested in boundary violation as spectacle and and the evisceration of social norms as a means to political clout. His intrusions on the American way of life have been largely non-consensual. His fans do their best to emulate his behavior in their own lives, leading to social rejection and, in the most extreme cases, legal troubles.

Even the Democratic Party — what used to be the party of the working class — is now prioritizing algorithmic consumption over meaningful action, pushing fervor over niche issues as a distraction from its blatant corruption, corporate-worship, and cronyism.

THE MONEY (UP)SHOT

Today, most everyone is in a trance-like state: constantly upset, worked-up, dissociated, and stimulated, all at the same time — and somehow, clamoring for more. American society is a neon-bikini-clad, binky-sucking festival-goer, high on ecstasy, cocaine, weed, and ketamine, fueling her set-to-set zombie crawl with nothing but animal instinct and white Monster Energy drinks.

If we keep going this way, like the humans in WALL-E, we’ll be trapped in a cycle of passive consumption, void of any real relationships, unaware of the outside world; victims of own media addiction — captives in our own goon caves.

“Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space!”

---

Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and share this post if you enjoyed it. If you’re feeling particularly generous, consider buying us a coffee. This publication depends entirely on reader support.

---