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ooning is a sexual fetish and internet subculture focused on extended edging and maximizing porn consumption. Only a few years ago “Gooning” was an internet half-joke and underground porn scene. Now, it’s hugely a popular meme internationally and the fastest growing kink worldwide, skyrocketing into the mainstream. It’s Clips4Sale’s 2026 Fetish of the Year and so well known that even my own mother asked me about it sheepishly during her Christmas visit. Well here it is mom: everything you need to know about what gooning is: popular meme, kink, and subculture. (Don’t worry, you can keep reading even if you’re not my mother.)
What Is Gooning? Here’s The Basics
In its most basic form, to goon is to edge repeatedly with the goal of reaching a hypnotic state of mindless ecstasy, or as some call it a “goon state.” People tend to dedicate at least several hours to a gooning session and some have claimed to go for as long as 40 hours straight. Most of the time gooning involves extended porn viewership, often with an element of sensory overload: multiple monitors, an erotic audio track, and simultaneous phone scroll. It’s a funny enough concept that, like edging before it, it’s caught on as the punchline of many a meme and been diluted to frequently just mean jerking off. For gooners themselves though, the practice is far from that simplified mainstream joke. It’s not even just extended edging.
What’s A Gooner?
A gooner is someone who goons, at least on a basic level. Female gooners might be called “goonettes” and there’s plenty of those, too. “Gooner culture” places a heavy emphasis on self-degradation, entrancement, and dedication to pornography itself, so the fantastical platonic ideal of a gooner doesn't simply edge for hours, they dedicate themselves entirely to porn: No friends. No lovers. No religion. Only porn. They spend all their waking time rubbing themselves into a haze in a dimly lit “goon cave.” What’s a goon cave? It’s the perfect setting for gooning: a room plastered with hentai posters and overloaded with multiple monitors full of humiliating porn. If the platonic gooner works at all it’s in sexwork– making themselves into the porn they worship. It’s a fantasy of decadent self-destruction through hypersexual media consumption, with the operative word being “fantasy.” Although there might be some hardcore gooners out there that emulate that image, it’s generally just a fantasy and not literally embodied.
Where Do Gooners Come From? (Gooning History)
The term “goon” used in a sexual or masturbatory context goes back to at least 2005, although the earliest Urban Dictionary definition I could find only refers to being “so into masturbating” that you become a “total goon.” The activity of intentionally gooning (and centering edging and orgasm denial into the experience) seems to be a slightly more recent concept. The most popular definition of gooning (which was posted in 2012) states that “a gooning state can only be achieved after edging.”
Gooning’s Rise In Popularity
Still, gooning was extremely underground until the recent past. Even the first years of the 2020s had very little gooning going on, at least by that name. Yet, through some mix of meme culture and masterbatory event-horizon-crossing, the term has climbed its way into the mainstream, with google trends showing its peak right over Christmas 2025. Now, the internet’s stuffed full of “gooning explained” videos by incredulous youtubers who ‘can’t believe it’s real.’ More than that, though, the community of gooners themselves has increased significantly.
Gooner community and content are more popular than ever. Reddit’s r/GOONED shot up in membership from around 677,000 in late 2022 to over 7.8 Million at time of writing. Disboard shows dozens if not hundreds of semi-public Discord servers dedicated to the practice. Clips4Sale reports gooning content sales skyrocketing in recent years after being nonexistent in 2020.
Why Do People Find Gooning Appealing?
Obviously, edging feels good. Gooning feels overwhelmingly good. The word gooning itself comes from the idea that, once you reach the desired goon headspace “you look like a goon.” This means that you’re so blissed out on sexual energy and pleasure that you’re no longer self conscious of your body language and facial expressions. Part of this is because the goon state is deeply pleasurable to the point of being intoxicating – putting gooners in an altered state in which they seem to lose motor function and cognitive ability. But gooning’s appeal isn’t just that it feels good.
Looking “like a goon” is, in itself, part of the kink. Although people like gooning for all sorts of reasons, for many a core component of the kink is the fantasy of losing control and mental faculties. It’s an escapist fantasy that connects gooning to a network of similar kinks such as bimbofication, hypnosis, and submission more broadly. It can feel good to lose control – to imagine yourself helpless to sexual pleasure or “dumb enough” to dedicate yourself fully to masturbation instead of more serious socially accepted activities.
Gooning: Get Dominated Without A Dom
As Clips4Sale’s stats show (and most sexworkers know from experience) there is a huge market for consensually degrading kink content. Contrary to popular belief, a massive amount of porn consumers and sexwork clients crave a loss of control and gooning scratches that itch. In the case of gooning, rather than being dominated by a partner or in-person sexworker, the gooner can be said to be submissive to the concept of pornography itself. Gooners will worship “porn mommies” and consume porn that breaks the fourth wall, addressing the viewer directly. Still-image gooner porn is usually in the form of photos with captions that, for example, command the viewer to melt their brain with porn, “keep masturbating, get dumb, not orgasm, and do any range of humiliating and degrading things.” Videos are also popular in the subculture, especially “hypno” videos with similar messaging, promising to transform the viewer into a permanent porn addict dedicated to gooning forever.
Is Gooning Bad For You?
No, gooning Gooning is not inherently bad for you. Anything can be a problem to some people sometimes, but gooning is like any other hobby. Serious sex educators agree that masturbation is, generally speaking, good for you. Porn, like any media, can contain harmful messaging or affect how you view yourself or others. Repetitive movements can cause stress injuries. So, one could say gooning has the same risks as gaming or scrolling on Tiktok.
Masturbation is good for you and porn addiction per se does not exist, but problematic porn usage does. If you begin to feel that your masturbation or porn consumption is causing you problems yet you are unable to stop, it’s important to reach out to a sex positive mental health professional who can help you. The fantasy of dedicating yourself brainlessly to porn is great, but if you’re truly neglecting your physical, emotional, social and/or financial needs because of out-of-control masturbation, that won’t be fun for anyone in the long run.
Are Gooners Addicted To Porn?
So porn addiction per se doesn’t exist…but all these gooners keep calling themselves porn addicts. What’s up with that? Well, it’s best understood as being part of the kink narrative. Many kinksters will describe being addicted to women’s feet or addicted to sniffing panties, and gooning is the same sort of thing. It’s hot to imagine oneself entirely enslaved by sexual pleasure. Gooners take that same concept and hone in on adult media specifically.
Gooning takes sex-negative myths about the damaging and polluting nature of porn and flips them on their heads. A gooner hears “porn will rot your brain and make you waste your life masturbating instead of being productive or having relationships with real people” and thinks “sounds pretty hot, I could masturbate to that.” It’s an interesting example of what the queer theorist Michel Foucault described in his book The History Of Sexuality. Although porn and masturbation never rotted people’s minds to begin with, and masturbators were never an isolated type of person inherently different than others, that cultural myth and stigma itself inspired a group of people to emulate what the myth imagined, making it a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Go Forth And Goon
If you’re interested in getting into gooning, Catherine Duffy of whoreuro.com has written a good guide for getting started. Although people typically goon alone, there’s also mutual gooning which can involve partners, friends, or even strangers that meet up through connections in subreddits, discord servers, or through dating/hookup apps.
The most important things to remember, as usual, are consent and safety. In the case of gooning, especially solo, these two elements are very connected. Keep an eye on your mental health and don’t forget to give your arm a break. Beyond that, just remember to use lube to avoid chafing. Also, pay for your porn for goodness sake! What’s the point of worshiping your sex worker porn mommy if she never sees any profits from it, huh?
(This article was adapted from the Sexual Health Alliances’ 2022 blog post “Do You Goon, Boo? Gooning Described”)
