Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Gooning

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Today's episode is brought to you by Incognito Mode. This week, Amanda, Reese, and Iman descend into one of the internet's strangest corners: The Cult of Gooning. Joined by journalist Daniel Kolitz (@daniel.kolitz), author of Harper's viral feature The Goon Squad, the gang explores the bizarre online world where pornography has evolved into a full blown fandom complete with its own language, rituals, Discord servers, and the pursuit of the mythical "goon state." From goon babble to goon caves, we're unpacking how irony, loneliness, porn culture, and the algorithm collided to create one of the internet's strangest subcultures. Is this just an extremely niche fetish or proof that men will invent literally anything except therapy? Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube!Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles, @imanharirikia.  Pre-order Iman's new book, Once in a Timeline, here! Your pre-order helps make more books possible! Thank you to our sponsors! Join the loyalty program for renters at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://joinbilt.com/cult Go to https://MINTMOBILE.com/cult Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the producers of the horror classic Evil Dead. Our grandfather believed the devil would return if anyone read from the book of the dead. Kundal. We found you. On July 10th. What do we do to deserve this? Every family. We can all be reunited.

Has its demons. I can never have lived without you. I won't let you live without me. Evil Dead Burn. Only in theaters, July 10th. This episode is brought to you by Activia. You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are created equal. Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive.

When it comes to gut health, Activia is the number one family doctor-recommended probiotic yogurt brand. Choose Activia, feel good from the inside out. Visitactivia.ca for more details. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It is both a very communal and a very individual cult. I want to be clear, there's a lot of sweetness in this space. A lot of these people are looking out for each other. But basically they're all sort of masturbating in a Zoom call effect, essentially

where they're all watching the same porn and they're live streaming themselves getting off. And someone's DJing the porn. No, that's nice. Ew. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Amanda Montel, author of books including cultish, the language of fanaticism. I'm Reese Oliver, Sonsika Colts, resident rhetoric scholar. And I'm Yomann Riri Kea, author of female fantasy, and once in a timeline, which will hit bookshelves on October 13th. Every week on the show, we discuss a different fanatical fringe group or guru, something that puts the cult in culture from celebrity wellness brands to the Sims to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult. What is it really? And if so, which of our cult

categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watch your back, or a get the fuck out. After all, in 26, the year of our lord, cult-ish thinking and affiliation falls along a continuum. And not all cults are equally bad. For a lot of people, being in a cult of sort, could look as harmless as tuning into Love Island every single night, or being a little bit too involved in a Trader Joe's Facebook group. But for others, cultish behaviors take a turn for the more destructive and brain rot-inducing, like lurking on in-cell forums and living to looks max. Or possibly like members of today's cult who have taken a dive into an expansive digital vortex

urging you to shut out the world in favor of giving into your most carnal pleasures at all time. Today, we are getting hot and heavy as we drop into the Gooniverse, aka the cult of Gooning. Guys, what are your thoughts? I'm so happy we're doing this episode, honestly, because I have talked so much about gooning with people in my everyday life over the course of the last like six months. I first heard about gooning from a cosmopolitan article that talked about just like the general definition of gooning before the article that we're going to discuss later today went mega viral. But I really dove into the depths of gooning as a concept when I was driving back

from a wedding in a car with about five guys I knew from college. And we got into a long conversation about gooning, whether gooting works, whether all gooners were in cells. And we read the Wikipedia definition out loud, like word for word, and then had sort of like a round table discussion on this road trip. Oh, so you've already podcasted about gooning. Yeah, but with like five cis straight men, so this is a lot more interesting. Okay. Yeah, when I first heard the term goon, I imagined the goonies. I was like, oh, gooning. Like, people are larping as little gremlins. Like, that sounds nice. I was wrong. Weirdly, I heard about gooning, namely the viral article whose author were going to be interviewing in a bit from my literary agent who bless her heart, but she's not like the most

extremely online person in the world, but she was like, have you read the gooning piece? And I was like, the what? No. But yeah, last summer, I think it was this super viral piece from Harper's Magazine titled The Goon Squad, subtitle, Loneliness PornSquist. next frontier and the dream of endless masturbation really took the internet, even those who aren't super online by storm. And at first I was like really excited to learn more. But then I disappointed myself because I immediately got really grossed out and decided that this was not going to be my beat until today. That is so fair. I think I first learned of gooning because much like the author of the Goon Squad Daniel, my boyfriend came to me at some point and was like, dude, there's so

much porn on all of my social media feeds, and I don't know why. And it was definitely something that started happening after Elon bought Twitter. And there's always the argument. I feel like what normalizes this kind of thing is people saying that all of the content you consume is algorithmic. But I think people forget that there are larger forces at play that are doing things to these algorithms, such as, I don't know, making the decision to make all your Twitter likes private. So that way you can use the platform to your heart's content. That's an Elon move right there. So yeah, a few months ago I started seeing gooting pop up more and more. And then recently I read an essay about Britney Spears at a conference.

And my co-panelist had written about gooning and infinite jest. And he wrote about the infinite scroll of gooting and kind of the goon state that these gooners are hoping to achieve. So we had a really lovely conversation about pop and parisociality and sex media. Lovely. Yeah. Gorgeous. I will say, even though like my stomach. wouldn't allow me to dive as deep into gooning when the article was first recommended to me

as I thought I might be able to. I did immediately clock it as a cult and put it on our list of episodes for 2026. So like this was an inevitability and I'm excited to learn more today. Should we share some exposition for culties who like me might be on more, you know, wholesome sides of the internet? Yeah, for those of you using the internet for less nefarious purposes, is if the word goon to you is a mystery beyond like cheesy gangster movies, which was my original association of the word, don't fret. I'm here to help. So, gooning is essentially a specific way to masturbate, one that involves the practice of edging oneself, which is practice of bringing oneself almost, but not quite to climax repeatedly. That's only the first part of gooning. Really,

the other core component is that this must be done while consuming just absolutely copious amounts of pornography, as much as you possibly can. whatever suits your fancy, shove it into your eye holes. For gooners or gunnets, the female equivalent, the act of masturbating and consuming porn is the turn-on in itself. The content of the porn is all just like added layers of whatever fetish suits your fancy.

The form factor, however, is what you are here for as a gooner. You are here for bright, flashing gifts, images flying past your eyes at light speed to too loud EDM beats while a spiral overlays the whole thing. Goon caps, which are essentially goon memes, are another huge part. of this Gooniverse, Goon caves where Gooners watch as many split screens of porn as they possibly can. Basically what I'm getting at here is that the goal is quantity, not necessarily quality.

Gooner porn is hyperbolic, very camp in every sense of the word. It is fully hedonistic and self-serving and dedicated to itself just for the sake of being porn. Some but not all Gooners even identify as pornosexual, a term meaning that they derive all of their sexual fulfillment from porn, self-pleasureing and feel essentially no need for IRL sexual contact with another human being. It's such a culture. It's such a culture. Like there's truly so many ways to engage. Today's guest, the author of the Goon Squad, Daniel Colitz, did a deep dive into the gooniverse for Harpers, which is what I based today's research on. And his words, the goal of the gooner is to reach the goon state. So with that, I think it's time we break down a little bit more of the origins of this cult.

What was the Big Bang here? Big Bang, buddy. The big non-bang. Truly. I'm gag talking about gooning with such an academic register. We need to take this seriously. We need to analyze this with integrity. Oh, God. No, I don't know.

I have a pretty strong stomach for like gross shit, kink stuff. But for some reason, I don't know. I guess because it's mostly dudes. And that just like sends me into a state, as you know. Well, and we talked a little bit about like the visceral. quality of the term. Like, it just, it feels very, I don't know, depraved is the right word for it, but there's something primitive about it. It feels a little cringeworthy. And I also just think knowing the state of like mainstream free online porn today, imagining what consuming hours upon

hours of that kind of pornography, which is usually like very, very sexist and definitely nonethical when it comes to the treatment of women, imagining how that brain rots people, is, I think, what makes it, at least for me, the ickyest. It's not even the act of, like, waiting for hours upon hours upon hours to orgasm and reach nirvana. It's the thought of consuming so much of that kind of tonal porn. For sure. And all in service of, like, to me, there's the sense that they're actually, like, making fun of sex. They're, like, taking all of the good parts of eroticism and kind of parodying it with something or, like, really perverted and,

clownish. And it's like we're living in a time when having a boyfriend is cringe. Connection is try hard. And so now we get this. I guess it doesn't just gross me out. It annoys me. Yeah. Last thing I'll say, for something so sex forward, gooting is the least sexy cult. I feel like we've covered. And that's saying a lot. Even less sexy than American girl to all. Yeah. So true. Anyway, let's get into the origin. of the cult of gooning. There is surprisingly contention about where gooning began.

Various goon-like practices popped up in different areas at relatively similar times. So one gooner interviewed for the Harper's piece likened the fractured movement to MAGA in its inability to pin down a linear fashion.

Wow. Cult of Maga. Cult of gooning. Kiss. Photos of Gooncave. began populating the internet in 2021. Nothing like a global pandemic to spur droves into internet porn addictions. Gooners live on internet forums like Reddit, but Discord really seems to be where the party is at.

The Goonverse, one Discord server, has over 50k users. These servers are online hubs, where Gooners can chat, but more importantly, to swap and stream porn to masturbate to asynchronously. though often with the camera on. Okay, so 50K, like, I'm relieved to hear that there aren't like millions of people in these discords. I mean, it's more than I wish there were, but I don't know. There are what, like almost 9 billion people on the planet at this point? I'm just trying to like determine how big a threat this is to the general culture.

I think especially it gets kind of troubling when the whole thesis of gooning is turning your whole world into porn. And it's like how many people are walking around thinking like that? And is that good? Who even has the time? How do you prioritize like that? I can't. How do you prioritize gooting under late stage capitalism?

It's really the struggle of the modern man. For sure. Yeah, exactly. Now, one thing that really sticks out to me that gooners have in common with the in-cell community is their love of lingo. Good God. Gooners are obsessed with their little terms for masturbating or genitalia. And that culty lingo really unites them as silly as it sounds.

For example, in reaching the goon state, one might begin by speaking in what is called goon babble, a nonsensical spew of made up words, noises, etc. Here are a few that we've encountered in our research, wobble meat, pump sluts, baiter. I didn't want to listen more than that. Now, the word gooning itself has escaped the gooniverse, and entered gay lexicon as a word to essentially mean gagging, living, loving.

For example, oh my fucking God, your outfit, I'm gungening. And if you want to hear an example, you can just Google the drag queen Katya and she will demonstrate. But yeah, it kind of reminds me of how a few key pieces of in-cell terminology have infiltrated the mainstream in kind of like a silly way. Like I am always talking about how I'm jester maxing. Also, mauging. I feel like I hear mocking constantly now in New York. But now I'm going to say sounds like a cult. I'm gooning. Sounds like a cult, I'm gooning. And we're all sounds like a cult pilled. We are so slack pills. Slack pills, slack for slack maxing. And what do we do? That sounds like a cult? We cult max. We're cult maxing right now. We mug various cultural cults. My question, though, and I ponder this on a daily basis, but do you think that the infiltration of some of this terminology, that has really problematic origins into the mainstream is purely innocent and silly in a way of

kind of defanging it? Or do you think there's a risk that it's actually perpetuating the problematic ideas that originally came with it? Because I think it can be kind of both sometimes. I think it can be both, but I do think most people that are using language that got its start in cell communities have no idea about the origins of what they're talking about. Of course. I'm just wondering, like, if you've heard gooning from a drag queen or from us in a fun way at brunch, then when you hear about what gooning really is, are you going to be more desensitized to it and be like, oh my God, you, me, we're gooning. Yeah. Like, I don't know. That's a good question. I think perhaps. I think you might be less incentivized to take it seriously.

Exactly. I'm just trying to understand the risks of how this, like, very niche cold. who's like biggest sub-discord has 50K people in it. I want to know how it might be slithering into the mainstream. Yeah, I think it's just that like even if in a small gross bubble that we're all cringing at, this is a type of person that exists that we are normalizing more and more. And the degree to which it is role play within its own universe, I don't think that that part is necessarily making it into the mainstream. And I think maybe that's where some of the danger lies.

But I think it's time to get into some rituals. So what does actually being a gooner? look like, right? What is your goal? What are you doing? What's the vibes? So oftentimes, gooners see completing the cycle and becoming porn as part of the journey towards reaching goon state, which is what brings those from silent consumers of gooner content to posters themselves of said gunner content. This is kind of the cult recruitment aspect, how you go from inductee to inductee to inductor. There are as many pockets of the internet to goon in as there are sexual tastes, that is to say, infinite. That's another reason why I think this cult is

really hard to pin down in terms of how dangerous it is because, you know, there are a lot of really healthy, beautiful community-building ways to engage with sexuality, and there are also a lot of really dangerous, scary ways that shouldn't be spoken about on the internet, and both of them, unfortunately, do interact under this umbrella, which is definitely something to be wary of. It can be really difficult to pin down a stereotypical gooner the way you can and in-cell. Their only uniting quality is the love of, like, way too much porn. What that porn is and how you present yourself in everyday life, how much of an impact that has in your everyday life. That's totally up to you.

Gooning does not discriminate. From finance bros to trans e-girls, there is a place for you somewhere on this side of the internet. I promise someone wants to see a goon, baby. This is also another weirdly wholesome reason. I think gooning is popular amongst straight men. It's often a space for men to engage in homosocial or even homosexual behavior with each other in ways that they can still kind of construe as straight due to the nature of the porn. We'll talk about this later with Daniel. This is especially prevalent in phenomena such as the wank battle. And that sort of suspension of disbelief is really what I want to emphasize here. Gooning for a lot of people is about role play.

Most gooners are not actually porn addicted, letting their lives dissolve into nothingness. They are turned on by the idea of devoting their lives to porn, but like they've still got to pay the bills. Goon state is a fleeting ideal, and that is what makes it so special. If transcendence were available to everyone, the cult would crumble because there would be no real life to avoid, because everybody would just be sitting around jacking off all day. I think if people were going broke because of their dedication to getting themselves off, we would be hearing about this more than we already are. But that isn't to say that there is not some damaging IRL stuff happening that is being

tied to the Gooniverse in one way or another. It is so funny to me that men could be just learning to meditate in groups in order to see and reach Nirvana or some sort of inner peace. Like they could be sitting in a circle and meditating together. But instead, they're on online forums and virtual. rooms jacking off for hours in order to reach Nirvana. Anyway, just pointing that out. No, thank you for pointing that out. And it's really reflective of these times. It's the late stage cultiverse of the internet age. Just super quick. I want to say, I think it's really funny that jacking off in an internet

room full of your closest bros, your goon buds is not gay, but being nice to women oftentimes is construed as gay nowadays. Like, that's the whole joke. Like, fellas is having a girlfriend gay, but like this shit isn't. And I think that that's funny. No, 100%. It's like, I can, easily see someone thinking meditating was gayer than jerking off in a group chat with a bunch of men. Yeah, something to unpack in the cult of masculinity episode. Okay, so how bad can this goon shit really get? Like, where does this cult go at its worst? Well, Amanda, let me clue you into some of the worst case scenarios.

In January of 2025, several dozen young men who aligned themselves with the gooning community. rallied themselves around the recently deceased Nautica Malone. Malone was a 27-year-old man who patronized a coffee shop called Bikini Beans. Maybe you've heard of bikini baristas on TikTok, if not pretty self-explanatory. Days prior to his death, Malone had assaulted a barista at this establishment by masturbating as he pulled up to the window, nude from the waist down. Disgusting. She was filming, and this, of course,

went viral. Daniel writes, the view count was still climbing when Malone drove a few towns over and shot himself in the head in the front seat of his Dodge Challenger, leaving a note to his wife and young children to ask for their forgiveness. He had a wife and young children. I'm sorry to draw the wrong conclusion from that paragraph. Holy shit. And your daily coffee shop is bikini beans. Men make me sick. The aftermath of Malone's death was in Genzi, chronically. online nihilistic dumer fashion, an explosion of meme-worthy, semi-ironic morning dubbed the gooneral. Stop. As much as I love a portmanteau. That stopped me in my tracks. I have chills. A live-streamed event, despite Malone having no association with the gooning community whatsoever.

Oh my God, he became a martyr. Saint Goon. Yeah, St. Goon. The sheer audacious and Exhibitionist nature of Malone's assault was enough for Gooners to latch on and martyr him as one of their own. But this is where Gooner meets in cell. The message behind gathering around Malone seems to be, my lack of sexual fulfillment is the world's problem. And I am a victim because the world won't pornify itself for me. Wow. Okay. I can see why this wouldn't catch on the same way the Manosphere has, that's a high demand. Like, for the world to pornify itself for you. Geez, Louise, the evangelicals would never allow that. And ultimately, like, they have the power. This is horrifying, though, all jokes aside. It's just so crazy to me that he had no association

with these people whatsoever. And just in his death, they were like, oh, here's somebody else who's also obsessed with getting off. But again, I think it's also like, he was interacting with this in real life in a way that I think these gooners don't, which I think is why they idolat. him so much. And I don't know what to make of that conclusion, but yeah. Well, it was kind of like how later in our interview we'll talk about how gooning is sort of a type of porn fandom fanfic community. And one of the key rules of fanfic is that you're not supposed to take your fanfic ships to real living people living out in real world communities. And St. Goon broke the number one rule of Goon fandom. Yeah. And I actually, I take back what I

said about wanting the world to pornify itself for you being like a high demand because actually the world at least so many so many corners of social media not even corners the middle of the room that is social media is pornifying itself you know like we are living in an increasingly pornified world and I don't mean to sound like a fucking nun about it like I would sell nudes but that's not what we're talking about I think that

ranch culture is upswinging in tandem with conservatism. I think the pendulum be swinging. That's what it is. Yeah, it's, ooh. And now I'm thinking of like other things swinging and it's a gross episode. Yeah, it's ew. We were talking about the power of ooh being a complete sentence before and just like live your life, watch your back, get the fuck out. I don't know. Ew. There's a fourth option. This just dropped on sounds like a cult. Ewe being a full culty analysis. Yeah. Now that we have got you all now. and edged, it is time that we brought on none other than the iconic Daniel Collitz to finish you all off. Reese.

Finish you all off. That is exactly how I introduced my conference paper. No. Oh my God. Because the guy who presented on Gooning presented first. Yeah. Okay. See, and now your life is pornified.

God damn it. For real. And with that, Daniel Collitz. What happens when two people who grew up in a very? very strange corner of Los Angeles, look back and realize just how bizarre their upbringings really were. They start a podcast, of course. I'm Ashley Johnson. And I'm Talison Jaffe. Before we became the internet people we are today, we spent our childhoods as working actors, appearing in shows like growing pains and films like Mr. Mom. And our podcast, Weird Kids,

we're diving deep into our unique upbringings, our friendship with each other, and all the delightfully odd interests we still carry with us today. In each episode we get to share stories of our youth, the things that bring us joy, the problems that we face, and occasionally the friends we've collected along the way. If you're a misfit, an outcast, or just a weirdo who loves all things nostalgic and unconventional, come take a seat at our table. Each week, we'll be releasing previously members-only episodes on YouTube and all major podcast platforms, with new episodes dropping exclusively and ad-free on beacon.tv. Hey, I'm Mike Berenholz. On my new show, Funny You Ask, Trivia starts the conversation, and then things immediately go off the rails. I ask a question.

My guests think they know the answer. Sometimes they do. More often, they do not. And then the conversation takes a turn. One trivia question turns into stories about career highs, painful bombs, and behind-the-scenes moments that probably should have remained private. You'll hear confidence, misplace confidence, bold guesses, wrong answers, quick laughs and the slow realization that maybe this was a bad idea to say out loud. If you like smart comedy, sharp conversations, and trivia that exists purely to melt people's

brains, this is Funny You Ask with me, Ike Barrenholz. Follow Funny You Ask with Ike Barrenholz on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Daniel, welcome to Sounds Like a Colt. Could you introduce yourself to the listeners and explain a bit about your relationship to the cult of Gooning, please? Sure. Hi, I'm Daniel Colitz. I'm a writer. My relationship to the cult of gooning is that I spent a long time among them coming

to know their ways, coming to know how they feel about the world and their lives and returned to tell their story. Sounds gross. What are you doing to protect your sense of self? I love these guys. I'd have any of them at my house. You're living in your life. Right now? Yeah, sure. Oh, you have them all in your house. No, I would have them in my house if they needed it. I mean, Currently, my house is gooner-free. Oh, got it. Okay, gooner. It's important to establish that we're going to be calling them gooners,

as opposed to gunists. You have to get a PhD for that. Okay. So there's a lot going on with these gooners. But viewing them through a cult lens, what do you think is the single cult-iest thing about them, their behaviors, their rituals, their community? It's a good question.

I mean, I think in a weird way, they're a kind of ironic cult, meaning I don't think any of them are actually slaves to masturbation in quite the way that they would perhaps like people to believe. I mean, they are masturbating many of them for four, six hours at a stretch every day, every other day. But a lot of them are claiming that they are going for weeks at a time, that all they care about and think about is porn, that they have no life outside of it. They're quitting their job to masturbate.

And that would be the cultiest extreme of it. And there are isolated cases who do live that way. What's interesting to me about this subculture is that they are turned on by the idea of being a cult member, by the idea of surrendering their life to this higher cause of pornography. They are getting off on it. So in a way, they are in a pornography cult, but it's just, I would venture most of them, because we're talking millions here maybe. I'm completely making that number up, but it does not seem plausible to me.

Various degrees of guder that we're talking about that wouldn't it be so insanely hot if I was, in every sense, and through all the pornography. Pranography controlled my life. And if me and, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand other guys did nothing but venerate various pornography goddesses who ran our lives. So that's like the mainstream of it. And then you have sort of fringier cases, but we are entering sort of more straightforwardly cult-like territory.

But that's what I got there. Wait. Can you talk about the more straightforwardly cult like territory? Sure. I mean, you know, you would hear about people doing these elaborate tributes where, you know, I think a part of the erotic appeal is a eroticization of objection and the idea that the people you're masturbating to would never dain to look at you in real life, would never talk to you. And getting off on that degradation, like I'm disgusting. So at the most extreme men, you know, you would have people that are

essentially making shrines to their favorite porn stars and doing what they would call like a daily ritual or whatever where you're kind of reciting a prayer to that porn star. I mean, other ways, you know, I've reported on cults, like real cults in my life. I mean, there definitely are parallels. I mean, what I think was interesting. One of them is a disdain for people who leave the community, people who try to break away from the cults, if we want to call this a cult.

And so I remember looking, trying to find people who had left the community. I'd never, I'd struggled to do so. And eventually I came to learn that was because all of these sort of quitting, gooning groups have to be conducted in secret. I have to be kind of like very private discords because if they aren't, than active gooners, people still, let's say, live in the lifestyle, will essentially infiltrate them, perhaps pretend to be people trying to quit porn, and then we'll flood the groups with, quote-unquote, triggering pornography to try to get people that, again, quote-unquote, relapse.

Yeah, that's a whole avenue of content I found was like fake recovery content, and I was like, what the fuck is this? So we should distinguish that from a kind of erotic roleplay in which you pretend that you're quitting, gooning, and then another gooner pretends that he's making you relapse. as with so much on the internet, there's so many layers of irony at play, right, that it can be kind of hard to parse what's surreal and was fake. I do think it is the case that, you know, there are people who perceive themselves as having a problem with pornography and masturbation try to quit. People will hound them and try to get them back. But then, yes, you do have this

weird simulation of that same phenomenon. So it's like worlds within worlds play acting in the Gouning community. Yeah. Well, Gouning was a big topic of conversation. I'd say in the last six months, what do you think the culty factors within the cultural zeitgeist or things that generally happened in the past few months contributed to the rise of gooning in both popularity, but also just general conversation? Well, I mean, I don't know if the act itself has grown more popular in recent months. I mean, I would say it's been a pretty steady increase over the last few years, and that would have to do with things like pandemic, driving people inside. That would have to do with things like the rise of kind of more private social media like discord that would have to do with

maybe just like the maturation of the online pornography space is like a fact of life and what that has sort of done to people's psyches for better for worse over time recently to the extent there's more interest in the subject I think that it probably has to do with this kind of escalation of general dating discourses and discourses about men and discourse about the male loneliness crisis and discourse about third spaces disappearing and discourse about just maledged adjusted masculinity, I guess, seems to be a perennially buzzy topic the last few years, and I would guess that interest in Gooning would tie into that because this would seem like the most extreme extension of one more corrosive kind of masculinity, I guess.

Something that I find really intriguing about gooning is that it is both a very communal and a very individual cult. It doesn't necessarily require the communal aspect, but that's definitely, I think, how you get into the cultiest side of it. But then it's also very much about building your independent relationship with your own personal porn star. So I'm wondering if you are seeing one kind of cult leader in the midst of all of this, or if you think it's different for every gooner? I would guess it's different for every goon. I will actually, yes, no, I'm completely wrong. Sorry, Alice Delish. I would say the mainstream

gooner, the average gooner, which I'm going to posit as someone, maybe a male between the ages of 22 and 26 or something, although there's a wide range, is vastly more interested in like e-girls than they are in what you would think of as. a conventional, like, studio, hardcore porn star. A lot of these e-girls don't even really do porn in a conventional sense, and I think that's part of the appeal. I think a lot of these guys, for lack of a better word, like to be teased. I like to surprisingly leave something to the imagination a little bit

and sort of look at these, like, they're often treating like, you know, sort of like lewd imagery, but not straight and porn. But anyway, this woman, Alistlish is, I believe, Russian, and has this kind of, like, plastic doll look, sort of like hyper-artificial. It's almost like she's using digital effects to make her skin actually doll-like. And, you know, again, being cognizant that there are layers of irony to play here, you know, you find discords that are like tribute all day to Alice Dlish or whatever,

and people saying I did my daily prayer to Alice and being obsessed with Alice. And she does have a Patreon where she posts more graphic content, although not that graphic to my knowledge. But, I mean, what's interesting is that really, I don't think it's an individual porn star or e-girl who is the cult leader here. I think it is the concept of pornography itself, who's the cult leader. Now, if you look at the kind of like crazy content, these people consume these porn music videos, which are these like flash guts, strobe-like porn compilations,

you notice that they don't really focus on one particular person. It's a succession of thousands of interchangeable bodies. And if you look at the kinds of things these people talk about, they talk about like the goddess pornography, they conceive it as a kind of entity that is dominating them. So it's not one person. It is really the idea of media, being dominated by media that I think is foremost at play here. if that makes sense. Unfortunately, it does.

I have just been so distracted by thinking about what Mormons would think of this cult, because, like, we did an episode at the end of last year on the cult of Mormon therapists. The mental illness that plagues Mormons, according to their doctrine, is masturbation. They're, like, obsessed with it. I guess I'm wondering, who's more obsessed with masturbating? Gooners or Mormons? Well, first of all, I'm sure there is vast overlap. me in those two categories. But like, I think a lot of the gooners I spoke to were people that were

like raised super religious and sort of pornography was turned into this super forbidden thing. And I think that when masturbation is viewed not as perhaps a healthful part of a person's life, but a kind of evil, sinful activity, it takes on an outsized importance and then it becomes maybe the focal point of your life in the way that it wouldn't otherwise. Okay, totally. So ex-mormons either become reality TV stars, gooners. I mean, I don't want to limit them. Why not both, Amanda? Why not both?

Or why not both? Okay, so, like, you were talking about the layers of irony, but ultimately, when you are participating for hours a day doing a thing, it doesn't matter if you're doing it ironically or not, because you are doing it. And I think one of the, like, cultural pieces that makes a cult so fun to participate in, whether you're doing it ironically or not, is the lingo. So we were wondering if you could goon babble for us a bit and pick a favorite term or two from the gooner community to define and kind of help us understand what makes a good goon babble word and why. Sure. I mean, you can put goon in front of anything and it kind of becomes pleasurable to say, to think about.

But I think that goon fuel, that's a classic one. And that would just be sort of pornographic clips or gifts that a few gooners would share amongst each other. A goon cap, which is a kind of pornographic meme that can often be very elaborate. And again, talks about porn dominating you. It kind of reminds me of like in pitch perfect, how the acapella girls put the term ACA in front of everything to signal that they're a part of Aalachaca. Well, I think the language does play a significant role in making this like a less depressing activity for a lot of people because it's like if you can make it kind of jokey and ironic and goofy in that way, you perhaps distance yourself from the reality of what it is that you are

getting up to. Totally. And the word goon is so goofy. I mean, it shares three letters with word goof. And it has the phonetic qualities of like baby babbling, like go-go-go-gag. Well, it sounds like goo. Goo itself is inherently kind of amorphous and, you know. And there's a lot of goo in the porn that they're watching.

Yeah, I was going to say goo and goon have a lot of overlap. A lot of overlap. Daniel, towards the end of your piece, you compare gooning to gambling expertly at that. What is the jackpot, would you say, that gooning content sells you? Is there one like unifying belief that all cult gooners can agree on? It's amazing that I forgot this key gooning term, which is the goon state. And that is, I mean, I say this with all seriousness. That is the blissful state of masturbation, Nirvana, that all.

gunners aspire to. And you know, I conducted this fairly rigorous scientific jacking off survey, gooning survey, about a hundred people. And I asked them, A, do you believe in the gun state? And then B, have you overtained it? Now, I'm going to pause to better define the gun state. The gun state is like, you have been sitting in front of the laptop, masturbating to e-girls and flashed up pornography for four hours, five hours, six hours, and you enter a total trans state. You enter a state where the world falls away. You're at peace. I think someone described it as being high while high, perfect, back in the womb. Odd as that association may be.

Just like, no better feeling. And I would say no more than perhaps 30% claimed to have reached it. Who knows what percentage of them were lying. But nobody just believed it. Nobody was like, I don't think that's real. They all believed that they were pumping towards some definite goal. And I think that by the end, I was inclined to believe that some version of it was real. and so far as if you blast yourself with stimulating media while stimulating yourself,

you can enter a kind of, you know, I've entered a flow state reading a great book, you know. And I mean, it hasn't been quite the goon state, but I do see there being something possible. I mean, probably not like you're entering some kind of fourth dimension of pleasure. Daniel, what book do you think helped you enter the closest to the goon state you've ever experienced? That's an amazing question. Well, honestly, I was thinking a lot about one book that has done that for me, which is William Gaddis's JR, which is this famously forbidding, like, 800-page postmodernist novel that is composed entirely in sort of garbled fragments of dialogue with no sort of character tags or the very limited

description. The reason I was thinking about it was because, I mean, obviously, at no point in American history were tons of people reading difficult experimental novels. But I was just, the gooning seemed like the end of reading to me and the end of a culture in which such, the production and consumption of such works was plausible because it was sort of the furthest extension of like short form video content culture. I don't want to sound like a moralizer. I don't want to sound like pedantic.

But that book was definitely on my mind. And also that book happens to be about the sort of deterioration of U.S. culture at the hands of media technology, primarily finance in the case of that book. So that would, and I have entered a kind of goon's day. reading the Great Late Blame goddess. So that would be my answer. Thank you. And if any listeners are still here,

we have a few more questions. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if.

Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.com.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. Avengers Doomsday is going to be the biggest Marvel movie. since Endgame, and we are so hyped for it. New Rockstar's latest podcast, Road to Dumesday, is our way to share that hype with the new Marvel fans, the old Marvel fans, and everybody in between. Every episode of Road to Dumesday digs into a movie or TV series that helped get Marvel Studios to where it is now. There's so much fascinating on screen and behind-the-scenes

lore that led from Blade to Doomsday, and we're here to map every twist and turn on that journey for you. Join the hosts of New Rock Stars, as we put collective lifetimes of obsession, fandom, and industry experience to productive use on the Road to Doomsday. Road to Doomsday is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Okay. Earlier we spoke a little bit about ritual as it pertains to the Gooner. I'm wanting to hear a little bit more about that, about the importance of ritual in a gooner's daily routine, if you will.

I mean, well, there are a lot of, like, sort of games and practices, you know, like, I don't if you guys have ever, the wank battling is one of those terms. I think I get into that in the article. And that is sort of like going back and forth with porn and trying to get each other off by learning each other's preferences and trying to send the best porn. The porn you think they'll like the most, basically. Boys can be sweet. I know there's, you know, I want to be clear, there's a lot of sweetness in this space.

A lot of these people are looking out for each other. And I mean, just the streaming. So I would guess that this is a fairly small percentage of the community. but a lot of this stuff happens in stream rooms. So, like, imagine, like, a Zoom call like we're in right now, but every person is, this is actually I'm going to end this analogy. I give up on that one.

I think we're going. Yeah, yeah. But basically, they're all sort of masturbating in a Zoom call effect, essentially where they're all watching the same porn and they're live streaming themselves getting off. And someone's DJing the porn. You know, you've got someone. who's got a good porn music video playlist or something, who's on OX.

No, that's nice. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff like that. I think I also think about like the setting up and the dismantling of the Goon Cave, especially for the Gooner who still lives with their parent. Or even for the Gooner who doesn't, like, I think that says something different about their ritual and their level of commitment if it's just a permanent fixture in their home. Is that something you encountered? Yeah, I spoke to people with, let's say, permanent setups for sure.

I mean, there was like Ice Sweatjack I spoke to who kind of has to spin it up and disassemble it every time because he lives with his parents. But I think there's a wide range. I mean, again, I would guess as far as like a full-fledged cave, that's probably a smaller percentage, just because it's a real financial investment, you know, all those screens and lights and toys and things of that nature. But everyone's got their own little set up, little ritual. And even within, you can get a goon cave going on a single laptop screen if you open up enough boxes of porn, you know, enough tabs. You can get that going. So it's a cheap boon cage. there's nothing stopping you. Yeah, it's about being resourceful and visionary. I'm trying to understand,

like, is someone nefarious secretly benefiting from this whole thing? Like, in order to understand it as a cult, I get the Alice Delish thing of it all, but like, I wish her the very best. Are there any pernicious figures who are, like, secretly laughing all the way to the bank here? I wouldn't say so. I mean, if anything, this is a kind of, to the extent that there's something like, I don't want to say hopeful here, but it is kind of taking people. place outside of systems of kind of financial exchange. I mean, to the extent that there is anyone taking advantage of anyone, I mean, there are a lot of sort of like guys that will pose as women and wank battle with other guys, or feed them rather. So they're just feeding them porn. But

some exchange here are pretty small. And also, I think a lot of the times the people involved aren't even being diluted and they're paying for the humiliation of pretending to be diluted or hoodwinked. So it's happening on Discord. I mean, what's interesting is like, I think we ascribe a lot of social maladies to the algorithm to Instagram, TikTok, short form video. This stuff can't exist on those platforms because you can't have porn on Instagram and TikTok. And so while there's definitely people like feeding performers or whatever to OnlyFans, primarily this is taking place for better, for worse, mostly for worse, in private

telegram channels and on Discord where people are sharing pirated content. I mean, if there are any victims, it's the people having their pornographic content stolen frankly, but I don't think anyone is profiting to a large degree off of, off of these guys, you know? It is, it's sort of a pure kind of cult, if it is indeed one. Yeah. I'm curious, like, are there more or less culty ways of engaging with gooning or the goon space, if you will, like what's kind of like the worst of the worst? And then, you know, if someone is like goon curious, is there a way to be that healthily? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I mean, Gune Curious, you know, a lot of people may be, actually, a lot of people I spoke to were like, you know, I was engaged in a kind of Gooning before I even knew what Gooning was, you know, meaning like they were masturbating for like six hours at a time and using multiple screens and not even realizing that this had a name, that they were part of a community.

I mean, there are plenty of people who are not even engaging with the community aspect of this who might still identify that way and who are just scrolling Twitter and scrolling the major porn aggregators and watching stuff. So maybe that's playing a little too loose with the terminology here, but you could, if you wanted to, call just a run-of-the-mill pornography addict to Guna. And then, I mean, at the most extreme ends, I mean, you know, I write in the article about someone encountering a Gooner who had blacked out their windows and was pissing on the floor and had the ambition of just jacking off continuously. I mean, there were people who drugs play a big role. I mean, sort of crystal meth binges and things of that nature and just going really hard

on stimulants and porn. I mean, I met a guy named White Boy Jacker who had some very troubling opinions in ways. of behaving in the world. He was part of something called the Black New World Order, which is his own troubling quasi-racist, gooning cult of people who perceive, I guess, in their kind of erotic world, the idea is that white women are goddesses who should only have sex with black men, and white men should castrate them. I mean, it's a weird, it's like race play and a pretty troubling kind of thing and pretty racist, I think. But they will, to achieve their weird white supremacist's mooning ends will damage their own genitals,

will sort of make it so that they cannot get. And actually, I don't know how many people are doing this. I was sent something called the Beta Mail Handbook, which is a fairly detailed 20 to 30 page guide that gets into some of the stuff, how you would kind of break into the Black New World or slash Beta Mail Cuck space. There's a lot of stuff going on here, I would say. There's a lot of in-cell overlap. Aside from some of these more extreme racist and incelly subgroups within the gooning community,

Can you talk about some of the more popular subcults you encountered while reporting on this? I mean, one of the biggest gooning communities is organized under the Noodle Dude umbrella. And Noodle Dude is kind of an innovator in the porn music video space. He was the first one that synced the thrust to the music. Innovation that excites. Yeah, and people go crazy when this guy drops his latest supercut. And they are insanely involved. He spends days and days, hours and hours working on them.

And so you'll have people congregated in his community, and a lot of them will volunteer for him. You know, they'll pretty troublingly go through his content to make sure underage people aren't slipping through, which apparently they have in the past and it's horrifying. They will help him sort of share his content, get the word out. But that's one notable one that comes to my. I don't know why I didn't ask this question earlier. It sounds like the masturbation part of this cult is kind of like neither here nor there. for a lot of people.

Like, why aren't some of these gooners, like ravers, you know? It's much more convenient to do this stuff than it is to go out. Find a rave. I mean, well, also, I mean, the same way that we can have foreplay and sort of human, regular sexual encounters. You could be edging. You could be edging. Well, not even, like, touching yourself, just, like, organizing your porn folder

and, like, going through it and tagging everything, like, perfectly and making sure that everything, like, lines up and, like, you know, folders with them folders and, like, DMing your friend and being. you're going to any new clips for me. Like, that's, that's kind of foreplay to the solo act of masturbation. It's a different kind of edging. You're not even, like, touching yourself, you know. So just, like, porn is there.

It's like people who, I don't know, like, collect old audio equipment. Oh, for sure. It's like porn fandom. It's porn fandom. Yes. Okay. It's like nasty Comic-Con. Nasty Comic-Con.

The Gooniverse is just grooty Comic-Con. We figured it out. Got it. Okay. Ew. So now we're going to play a game. Now we're going to play a game. This is a game called Colty or Just Cringe. It is a game we play often on this show.

We are going to describe you a gooner behavior. You are going to tell us if said behavior is culty or just plain cringe. Beginning with writing a love letter to your favorite porn star. That is so hard. I mean, the question of relationship is it cringe, culty, or culty and cringe? I'm going to say cringe because guys have been doing that for 50 years, you know? That's been happening for a long time. Spending 30% of your income on sex toys for solo use.

Cringe because you're alone. And that doesn't necessarily imply that you're part of some kind of culty jacking off community. A stute. Next one, having a masturbation schedule. Again, could just show that you have great planning skills, that you like a routine. And again, we're dealing with kind of a solo activity purely. So I'm going to say cringe. Yeah, it's like Pomodoro method.

It's very, it's just organizing. It's efficient, especially when usually the goal is to spend as much time as possible. I see this as a healthier way to engage. Anyway, listening to audio porn in the grocery store with headphones. Again, these are all kind of solos. I'm going to say, that almost seems innocent to me. That seems nice. I think that's cringe.

It does. Well, I mean, audio porn, when you say audio porn, I'm imagining like an e-book or something. I'm not imagining like, I didn't think you're, are you saying like the sounds of porn? Or are you saying someone listening to like a Romantacy novel? Tomato tomato Tomatoes Whatever is Bringing up tomatoes

I would say Okay If you're listening To the actual sounds of porn I don't know if that's cringe or coldly That's insane I don't think

That anybody should be doing that I don't think anyone should be up that I actually think a lot of women Are listening to audio erotica In the grocery store Yeah and again That seems to me

I mean it's not something I've ever done You know But I There's nothing wrong with it I mean maybe there is No There's nothing wrong with it

I'm sticking to that Okay Leting Reddit decide how many times a year you orgasm? We're in cult territory. We're in cult territory. We found it. Glad we agree.

Feeling around in the dark and we found it. That's cold territory for sure. Last one. Turning your spare bedroom into your permanent goon cave. You know, it would depend what your sideline and goon activities is if you're big in the wank battling, if you are doing tributes Dallas Delish or whatever. I would say that could go either way. It would just depend on the kind of masturbator you happen to be.

But also depends on the intensiveness of your cave. Because if you have tributes to individual performers, if you have sort of goon caps on the wall, saying keep pumping goon pig, something like that, I mean, you see stuff like that a lot. Then we might be virgin cult territory. So it could go out of the way. Daniel, thank you for taking this game as seriously as it is. It was really informative. And thank you so much for joining us today.

If our listeners want to follow you and join your cult, where can they do that? I am Daniel Colitz on both Instagram and Twitter. Actually, Instagram, Daniel dot Colitz. Switching it up. Can't forget the dot. Incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you.

This is great. I really wish I asked Colitz if the DJ who creates the perfect drops for Goon Squad's, if the point is they try to time finishing with the beat drop so that they all enter nirvana. Well, the point is to never finish. Right. But eventually you do, isn't it? No, the goon state is a state of edging bliss. You still have not yet come. The goal is to forever be in anticipation of this gratification. By denying yourself coming forever, you are forever in a state of pleasure and bliss, is the thesis. Wow, I, this entire time thought that there was eventually one very, very intense orgasm. I think it kind of varies. I think that. I think

think some gooners, I think that is part of it for them. I think for some communities, cumunities, eventually finishing is the goal. Oh, I thought you were saying communities. Oh, that's also good. Yeah, I think it depends on the gooner, but generally, to my understanding, the goon state is a just pre-orgasmic state. Wow. I really thought that Nirvana was tied to finally finishing, but guess not. You know, I actually do understand how this is like meditation now. It really kind of is. It's like, it's like, it's. overly sexualized meditate. It's crazy to me. Men love to make things more complicated. So true. So true. It's like an analogy that I learned from an allegory that my elementary school librarian read when I was

in fourth grade that I bring up all the time is it's like trying to pop a bubble with an axe. You know, you don't need an axe. Just touch it very gently. The bubble will pop. So with that, I'm going to ask you both out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back and get the fuck out. Which does the cult of gooning fall into? I'm kind of torn. Between. For me, it's get the fuck out and watch your back. What about you guys? Yeah. I'm kind of teetering on that same line. I think this is not all of the gooniverse, but a big tenet of it that I discovered was the sexualization of clothed women, like Ecolitz was talking about ludes being a big part of it. And that is actually like a pretty big part of the community is not just porn itself.

but turning things that are not porn into porn. And I think that the implications of that for just like interacting with women, I think men already don't know how to interact with women. I think telling them to look at like influencers on TikTok that aren't even making porn and treating that like porn, I think is teaching men something very scary and dangerous. And for that reason, I think I'm leaning towards get the fuck out. But the fact that so much of it is role play ultimately for a lot of people, that almost makes me think like, I don't know,

in the same way as kink, this is a relatively healthier space to have that exist. But I still think I might lean get the fuck out, honestly. I think the overconsumption of pornography and the over-sexualization of women, especially real-life women, without their consent, I think that even if right now some gunners are behaving harmlessly, it's going to devolve into something really nefarious. That's a really good point. For that reason, I'm going to get a,

ahead of the curve and I'm going to say this is a get the fuck out while you still can. I love that summation. I'm going to agree with that and just once again emphasize, Ew. Ew. Ew. Wait, final verdict? Ew. Ew. Well, that's our show. Thank you so much for listening. Join us for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay Colty. But not too, Colty. Sounds like a cult was created by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of the Pod Cabin. This episode was hosted by Amanda Montel, Reese Oliver, and Amon Harrier Kia. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Coltish,

language of fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Oversthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality, and Wordslut, a Feminist Guide to to Taking Back the English Language. Thanks as well to our network studio 71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds Like a Cult pod, or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad-free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult.