The Case for Gooning, from a Gooner

In this edition of the Secret Lives of Men, we talked to Chad*, who is a virgin and a gooner. A gooner is someone who regularly masturbates to porn for hours at a time, often with others online. The 36-year-old from Hawaii has no desire to date or get married. He’s an introvert, and his solo sex life satisfies him. He wants other guys to know it’s okay to get sexual pleasure from yourself.

*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect anonymity.

From a young age, I was driven to masturbate frequently. Once I found porn, I fell in love. It was magazines at first, then pictures and videos. Porn was evolving alongside technology, and I happily ate it up.

My family is super religious, so I was very sexually repressed as a teen. Porn has always been something I had to hide. But I knew my friends in high school were watching porn and jacking off because we would share porn clips and DVDs. We’d never talk about masturbating to porn, though. That was too awkward.

I felt isolated in my porn watching. Then, in 2020, during Covid, I found the gooner community on Reddit. I was 30. I’d never heard the term before. But when I heard the word, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s me. I’m a gooner.” I realized that porn can be something that’s fun, silly, and social. I felt less stigmatized. I learned to accept that I was a gooner, and that allowed me to live pretty peacefully.

I goon about three hours a day during weekdays. On weekends and holidays, I sometimes go all day. Almost every night, after work, I go online and chat with my “goonbuds,” whom I’ve known for eight years. We pick a porn video and watch it for an hour to two. We chat on X, which is the most porn-friendly platform. There are real porn stars on the site. The stars share their clips, and we can interact with them.

My setup is pretty simple. I have a laptop plugged into a 27-inch computer monitor and an 11-inch Galaxy tablet on the side. I used to have three big monitors, but I found that it was too many screens to manage. I have 11 Fleshlights—tubelike masturbation sleeves—because I subscribed to a special monthly box for a little while.

I don’t just watch online porn. I also watch on DVD and VHS. I have a pretty large collection of vintage porn from as far back as the 1980s. I really like the traditional, long-form porn, the high-quality stuff. I’ve always wanted the latest releases from mainstream studios like Brazzers and Vixen.

A big appeal of porn to me is the porn stars and the studios and the celebrity aspect of it. I feel like that part is becoming less of an emphasis with AI and OnlyFans. The kind of celebrity that porn stars used to have is really hard to build now unless you do some extreme stunts, like Bonnie Blue, who had a 1,000-person gangbang. I know I’m going to be catered to less and less as AI gets more ubiquitous.

When I first embraced being a gooner, I was like, This should just be normal. I shouldn’t have to hide my gooning. But then reality sets in when friends come to visit. I put my porn away before they get here, just out of respect for them, because as much as porn culture is growing, it’s still not widely accepted.

This is my sex life. It’s how I get my satisfaction. It works for me and has kept me happy. It’s perfectly compatible with modern life. I have my goonbuds, and I have an intimate relationship with them in a way. It’s kind of an alternate lifestyle.

There are benefits to being a gooner too. I never have to worry about getting an STI or getting someone pregnant. Gooning is also really compatible with my introversion and social anxieties.

I’m moving to a two-bedroom apartment later in the year. I’m going to make one of the bedrooms a goon cave. I’ll display my Fleshlights and signed porn-star pictures that I now keep in boxes under my bed. I’ll put up a big screen for my projector and have a bed in there. It’ll be like a little sanctuary.

I can keep the door to my goon cave locked. Then, if the landlord or a friend comes over, I don’t need to feel self-conscious. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it. It’s just that I don’t want people to have to see porn if they’re not prepared for it.

People think gooners are all creeps or pervs. But most of us are just normal people with everyday jobs and everyday lives, from working class to upper class. There are married people who goon as couples and people like me who are virgins. Recently I’ve seen a lot more goonnettes, women who goon. It’s a really diverse community of regular people pursuing sexual pleasure and satisfaction and exploring our fantasies.

My parents used to ask me about dating and marriage, but now they just don’t. Society pressures people to get married and have kids, but I wish people realized they can have another type of sex life. We don’t shame people who have sex multiple times a day while in a relationship. We think that’s a really good thing. So why do we shame single people who have the same sex drive but turn to porn and sex toys?