Gooning, a kink now ascendant in the cultural milieu of the 2020s, is at its core a reinforcement of the consumerist ethic. Gooning seeks to blame market forces while fetishizing capitulation to those markets as a consumer. Gooning holds up isolation and individualized consumption of a product as a “happier” way to live. Gooning seeks to collapse segments of our lives into a singular and continuous consumption of a product. Gooners are urged to further atomize themselves from any possible community, abandon human connection in favor of isolated bodily pleasure, to consume the capitalist product that is modern pornography. Gooning is bourgeois. But what is it anyway? Gooning, to be a gooner, is to fetishize the practice of masturbating to porn, extending the duration of masturbation through edging (getting close to then subverting orgasm) and integrating porn and masturbation throughout one’s life. Perpetual horniness, community estrangement and self deprecation as a mindless consumer are all championed.
Gooning is part of a larger trend that seeks the total eradication of sexuality as identity. Through the commodification of sexual identity not as a community or individual way of engagement, but as a market to be catered to, gooning furthers the death of sexuality as identity and promotes sexuality as market. Are you a “interracial gangbang”, “anal” or “femdom sissy JOI (with countdown)” type of consumer? Your sexuality as gay, straight, bisexual or otherwise is erased as the capitalist superstructure subsumes who you love into what you consume. Before internet porn, sexuality was a massive dictator of who and how you connected with other people. Did you go to the gay or lesbian bar? Did you learn to exchange meaningful body language with other queers in public? Was there a whole world of language specific to our queer communities that have been systematically dismantled in favor of serviceable market populations that Jeff Bezos can goon over?
The gooning kink is actually just a fetishized submission to capital. We feel powerless next to the scope of the porn market and the absolute capture of sexuality. We blame the internet for constantly shoving a variety of sexual content in-front of us 24/7. Yet whether we caused our own gooning or not, we’re the only ones who can free ourselves to engage in a more liberated sexual expression. We’re sucked in on both sides of their equation, capitalist pressure makes us into content creators for gooners, even if our main production isn’t porn there’s an ever present pressure for (especially femmes) to produce pornographic content or self-sexualize. Conversely fascist forces in the US seek to ban pornography (read: make it accessible only for the wealthy and privileged) and in doing so threaten the financial independence provided through independent sex work. Police crack down on in-person sex work, stymieing an imperfect and commercial reproduction of the vital connection between human beings. The state endeavors in perpetuity to blockade human connection beyond the scope of corporate control.
An anti-capitalist kink seeks to transcend the market forces of capitalism, to create sexual identities that resist market capture. Queer has risen as an amorphous framework under which people broadly opposed to capitalist sexuality gather under, yet it’s not enough. Even now the hegemony seeks to redefine queerness solely as “not straight”, another market to categorize gay porn under. If we want a revolutionary sexuality, we have to reject the methods and frameworks created under capitalism. Incline towards kinks that are in their implementation, pro-social. For example, a sissy bimbo inclines towards community, a sexual servicing of their neighbors in real life, beyond the screen. A sissy bimbo kink inclines towards real and physical engagement with other human beings in a way that gooning actively discourages.
Therefore as sexual revolutionaries, the queer intifada if you will, we must embrace and further kinks that are founded in a pro-social and community ethic. We must push against the puritan ethic of sexual blaming and shaming, we must push against the cop in our head who says it’s better to get off alone. So, abandon your goon-sesh and go outside, proposition a hot trans guy and build connections within your local community. There can be no revolution without queer revolution and baby? The revolution is my mistress and she’s gunna cum inside.
This essay can be printed as a zine with the below file (duplex short edge), cover artwork by Ayko
