This story is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
I remember reading somewhere that pigs orgasm for an average of 30 minutes at a time. It’s a testament to my commitment to journalism that I verified this myself, despite “how long pigs orgasm” in my search history surely putting me on some sort of agricultural blacklist.
Up to 90 minutes, Google said.
When I first found this piece of information, it was threaded into a larger argument against eating pigs—something to do with their intelligence and, I suppose, enjoyment of life?
I’m not totally sure that argument worked on me, but I did find it kind of gross to think about, and I have eaten less pork since.
I first encountered gooning—at least, the word—in 2020. I’d been working on and off as a porn script writer since 2017, and to spice up the monotony of pizza guys and step brothers, I had started playing around with elements of more niche fetishes and subgenres.
Hypnosis pornography, my then-fetish of the moment, is a fun, often campy subgenre of domination. It uses on-screen effects and repetitive, soothing commands to “hypnotize” viewers into becoming mindless and slackjawed, ready to follow jerk-off instruction (JOI) videos to loyal completion. This was referred to, at the time, as “gooning.”
This man had options; he chose gooning
Nowadays, a lot of stuff is called gooning. Maybe it’s my algorithm or my friend circle (both likely), but I can’t flip through any media platform or comment section without seeing it referenced. Any and all jerking off is gooning, Olympic medalists are “goon-bait,” “gooner” has become general, derogative slang for loser or sex pest.
Oh and obviously, the cultural commentators have an opinion on “gooning” and what it means for society. I’m a cultural commentator too, I suppose—but I’ve been to a lot more porn parties than lit readings, and in this case, what I think people are missing is, well, the porn of it all. So admittedly, I accepted this project with a bit of a chip on my shoulder; eager to show all the Paris Review, J-school bitches who’s the real porn-brained dick-tugger in town.
So I took a short flight to really the only place I could go for a story like this: Las Vegas. I had been once before, for my parent’s (doomed) remarriage, but here in Vegas was the Adult Video Network Expo and Awards.
The AVN’s started as “the Oscars of porn” back in 1984, when the porn industry still worked roughly in tandem with the mainstream film industry. It goes without saying, but a lot has changed since then. I’ve never been to the Oscars, but I’m willing to bet they’re not handing out fuck chocolate samples and showcasing sex dolls with triple D breasts.
Now, AVN functions mostly as a fan show; an opportunity for the adult industry business to showcase their wares to eager audiences. Hot girls, medically questionable blood flow supplements, gelatinous orbs featuring labias and openings with extensive cleaning instructions, and so much more line the halls of the Virgin Las Vegas, accompanied by the dulcet sounds of the nearby lobby casino. The convention halls were stacked with booths, each decorated to varying degrees with banners, posters, and branded tchotchkes. Some vendors—agencies, studios, and the like—hire adult industry professionals to loiter around, luring in passers-by with offers of signatures and friendly smiles. Some booths boasted huge names, and had lines of people snaking through the rows, psyching themselves up to meet their private-browsing idol.
This space, too, has been overtaken with gooning. Mention of it was everywhere, with “gooner” pins, posters offering “goon-bait,” or gummies to “help goon longer.” Myself and Jamie, the photographer, circled around the event hall getting b-roll of its ubiquity. He focused in on one booth with a huge banner advertising the “original gooner” in gloopy white cum-font.
“Why don’t you interview him,” he nudged.
“That guy is not an original gooner,” I said. “I know that just from him claiming it.” I remember saying this and feeling smug.
Earlier that day, I had sat down with JV Marx, an actor, writer, and OnlyFans star who was described to me, multiple times, as “the most famous gooner.” Marx had been involved in the forums and at meetups long before he started his professional camming career—a long-standing community member turned hometown hero of the gooning community. He was friendly and effortless and funny, the kind of person who makes you feel like a greedy kid hungry for approval. I watched him model in a shoot for Paperboy, contorting his face into wild expressions of apparent ecstacy, something he had built a career out of.
“It’s really about the expression,” he told me. I nodded, though my own experience in the pro-gooning hypno-porn space wasn’t about faces at all.
On my way out I mentioned, for the purpose of the article, that I’m about to talk to one of his peers; a man iconically named “Big Dick Clark” (one of my favourite parts of this industry is the straightforward quality of the taxonomy). In response, JV told me—warned me, even—that he was a very good-looking man. Now, there’s something very good-looking people do, a game they all play with each other, where they toss compliments around between them like a game of hacky sack. I figured this moment was one of those, as I cannot stress enough that JV had literally just stepped off a shoot as a professional model.
But 12 hours later, I was sitting across from him, and I had to admit that Big Dick Clark (I could abbreviate here but I’m choosing not to) was really, genuinely, insanely good-looking. He had dark hair and perfectly symmetrical blue eyes, and even in the unflattering lighting of the hotel’s makeshift media room, he stood in eye-straining opposition to every stereotype of virgin gooners resorting to their hands but for no other options. This man had options; he chose gooning.
Like Marx, Big Dick Clark even made a career out of it. Known for putting on massive gooner meetups in New York City, his community reputation spawned a podcast called the Gooniversity.
Eager to prove myself to this beautiful masturbator, I name-dropped “babecocking,” a practice where a photo of a woman and a photo of an erect penis are held next to each other, the eye bouncing between the two until they merge into a beautiful Cronenbergian cockbeast. I hoped this would signal some inside baseball.
“Well, do you know about monkey-gooning?” he asked.
(I did not know about “monkey-gooning.”)
He explained that sometimes, men get so taken by their masturbation experience that they hop around and make monkey noises, their animalistic lusts fully overpowering any semblance of humanity. Arguably, this is “about the expression,” too, but it didn’t resemble what I saw JV do in his glossy photoshoot.
Gooners have, it seems, become the fairy-tale bogeymen of the loneliness crisis
The next day, I did what any enterprising journalist would, and met a guy off Reddit in the park. I had spent about a week furiously messaging dozens of guys off the r/goonedmeetup subreddit; one of the last pages standing after a series of culls saw the lion’s share of them, including r/gooncaves, removed due to “content violations.” Understandably, most were hesitant to be filmed talking about their habits.
But one agreed. A good-natured, polite man in his early twenties sat across from me and described frequenting the subreddits more when his life got stressful.
“It’s an escape,” he said, describing relief in being able to roleplay someone more sexual, more domineering online. He didn’t make goon caves, but he did dedicate hours to a practice that, listening to him, sounded more like embodied meditation than the shock-jock jokes I see on social media.
He didn’t mention facial expression, nor did he mention hypnosis, or monkey-gooning. The difference in talking to someone who is both a gooner and a professional hottie, and someone who checked three times to make sure they were sufficiently anonymous, was noticeable—and, admittedly, a much-needed reality check. I am surrounded by people who are given the space to explore every corner of their sexuality, and have been for over a decade. Sexual exploration is the water my tank is filled with. Sometimes, I need to be reminded that there is any other way to live; and that, for the most part, masturbators aren’t financially or socially rewarded for it. My new friend described feeling self-conscious about his porn consumption habits; echoed by another redditor I interviewed a few weeks later. They both said that the explosion of “gooning” terminology (something that I had openly admonished) was helpful, and made it easier to talk about.
On one of our last days at the con, Jamie convinced me to interview “the original gooner.” The man behind the booth—a porn star by any measure—excitedly described his studio work, saying he only fucks “the hottest girls” in the studio he built himself. When pressed for what makes it “gooning,” he described oiling up the women and editing the clips into slow-motion.
Walking away, I dismissed him to Jamie as a regular gonzo porn producer cashing in on the gooning craze.
In hindsight, and reviewing my interviews, I’m not totally sure what I was gatekeeping there, or why. Sure, as a porn nerd with a vocab kink, it’s annoying that “gooning” has become shorthand for such a huge swathe of near-unrelated experience and community. And I disagree with the effort to one-to-one this aspect of porn culture with something mainstream, like phone addiction and doomscrolling. Gooners have, it seems, become the fairy-tale bogeymen of the loneliness crisis, the birthrate decline, the red-pill male-on-male rat king.
I did what any enterprising journalist would do, and met a guy off Reddit in the park
I’m going to go on a slight tangent here, but I need you to stay with me. There’s a criticised phenomenon in environmentalism (I have interests outside of depravity, for the record), where nature and conservationist writers will attempt to directly apply human experience to something they’re trying to educate around. In The Hidden Life of Trees, for example, writer Peter Wohlleben describes dense tree networks as friendship, and their ability to detect airborne defense chemicals as adjacent to human smell and taste. Elsewhere in environmental journalism, octopi lovingly caress documentary filmmakers, elephants are described as hosting funerals, and chimpanzees are considered “Machiavellian.” This is ostensibly so people can “relate” to whatever is being explored, to make it more accessible or understandable to a wider audience.
This habit, though I find it charming and occasionally effective, is a pet peeve of mine. Tree networks could be like human friendship, but in all likelihood they are more like… tree networks. And with all due respect to Wohlleben (whose book I did enjoy), if I wanted to read a book about human friendship there are a thousand and one masterpieces of nearly every genre covering it. I don’t need to relate to something to find it interesting and worth learning about. In fact, I think it’s important to maintain “relatability” as independent from “value.”
Porn culture, similarly, is complex. The AVNs alone have been going for over 50 years, and in that time the porn industry—and its fans—have been fostering its own customs, traditions, norms, and subcultures. I myself am within this world in a way that makes me blind to other elements of it. This entire time, I’ve been focused on isolating what gooning really is, to separate the true gooners from the posers, man. But there are a thousand and one ways people experience and relate to jerking it, and “gooning” as a term is the first time I’ve seen anything crack meaningfully into talking about it. The novelty boom of “gooning” being silly and crass is to be expected, and its ubiquity makes it difficult to define or use thoughtfully in cultural analysis or critique.
But I encourage people to try, at least a little, to let gooning be… gooning. To not immediately jump to apply something more relatable, or introduce moralizations and assumptions. I thought I had a clear understanding of “gooning” coming into this, and as is so often the case, the more I learned the more I knew how much I didn’t know. This is a wide, weird world, and you don’t have to relate to all of it. If you do relate, though, JV Marx recommended trying to cross your eyes and hold your tongue out as long as it will go.
Watch Noelle’s new VICE documentary The Wild Goon Chase on YouTube—it’s age-restricted.
Follow Noelle Perdue on Instagram @all_day_breakfast_
Follow Jamie Lee Taete on Instagram @jamieleecurtistaete
This story is from THE SELF-DESTRUCTION ISSUE of VICE magazine. Find it in a store near you, or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
The post The Wild Goon Chase: In Search of Masturbation Cultists at AVN appeared first on VICE.
