Most of Reddit will tell you that edging is fantastic, but the real hardcore ’baters level up from there. The ones who travel furthest for self-pleasure say that, if they edge long enough, they fall into a mind-numbing trance where nothing matters but nutting. Only then can an edger truly claim to be “gooning.”
“Gooning is a sort of modernized version of tantric sex/masturbation without the spiritual aspects that have been traditionally associated with it in the past,” says Christfister, who moderates two of the many subreddits dedicated to the topic. “It’s an almost hypnotic, semi-meditative mental state a person can enter after prolonged masturbation.”
Michael Stahl, “The Psychedelic Science of ‘Gooning’ — Or Masturbating Into a Trance.”
When you get rid of religion, people will still find something to worship. A growing number of young men have decided that the most important thing in their lives is masturbation. Their holy sacraments are porn videos and hand lotion. Their church is the basements and bedrooms they have transformed into “goon caves.” They deny themselves immediate pleasure in search of a mystical experience that brings them to Oneness with their orgasm. They are the monks of the Sexual Revolution, turning away from the world and its earthly pleasures in search of joys that they can only provide to themselves.
Today 63% of American men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age group. Of those men, 57% say they have no interest in dating or relationships. The drive to mate and procreate once fueled our society. Today many use that drive to isolate themselves in Plato’s Gooncave, where they bide away their days staring at shadows on their screens.
To counter this trend, former porn addicts have started a #nofap movement that encourages young men to abstain from pornography and masturbation. Active porn fans are mocked as slovenly “coomers” who live only for the next ejaculation. But these efforts have received critical scrutiny from some unlikely corners.
In a 2019 Rolling Stone article about “the Far-Right Roots of #NoNutNovember,” journalist EJ Dickson complained:
The irony of this strain of the anti-masturbation movement is that, while it’s ostensibly intended to fight the larger porn industry’s attempts to brainwash and emasculate white men, anti-masturbation ideology has historically been used as a tool by fascist figures to gain social control.
Dickson relied on several porn industry insiders for her hit piece. Dr. David Ley, a California sexologist and paid employee of xHamster subsidy Stripchat, told Dickson that #nofap was “a creepy little smorgasbord of insecurity-driven hate with anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia all rolled up in one.” Dickson also provided a copy of xHamster’s November 2, 2019 Tweet reminding its customers:
The best argument against #NoNutNovember? Jerking off 21 times for @Movember! (Clinical research says frequent masturbation may reduce the risk of prostate cancer by a third.)
By contrast, the #nofap movement was tarred by association with bad people like Gavin McInnes, David Duke, Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones. We even get a reference from Ley noting that the National Socialists “strongly discouraged Hitler Youth members from engaging in masturbation.”
We can safely dismiss many of Dickson’s concerns with the same skepticism we would give to any PR hack handing out talking points. But her ideas about sexual repression and fascism come not from contemporary wanking apologists but from one of the Sexual Revolution’s most notorious Founding Fathers.
Perhaps my own morality objects to it. However, from my own experience, and from observation of myself and others, I have become convinced that sexuality is the center around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual.
Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, 4.
For Reich, mental and physical health depended on satisfactory orgasms. The energy which gives us life and vitality (he called it “orgone”) was released and regulated through orgasms. Without that release, physical and mental difficulties were sure to follow. But our learned experiences lead us to create “armoring” that stops us from reaching our orgasmic potential.
Freud saw the ego was the “reality principle” that helps us check our desires for pleasure. It is the layer that mediates the id’s satisfaction-seeking “pleasure principle” and the internalized social standards of the superego’s “morality principle.” For Reich the ego was the “character armor” we build to protect ourselves from emotional pain. But this armor ultimately stops us from experiencing our emotions and shuts us off from our true selves.
Where Freud saw the unconscious as a dark place filled with unwholesome desires, Reich saw it as naturally loving, accepting and happy. Through repressions, these wholesome instincts are perverted into the dark morass Freud catalogued. By helping his patients shed their character armor, Reich could not only help them achieve sexual fulfillment. He could revitalize their creative capacity and spontaneity and free us from aches, pains, and other symptoms of suppressed orgasmic energy.
In his 1945 book The Sexual Revolution Reich described some of the pathologies he associated with sexual repression and character armoring:
general sexual inhibition
the compulsive character of the moral demands
the inability to conceive of the compatibility of sexual gratification and achievement in work
the peculiar belief that the sexuality of children and adolescents is a pathological aberration
the inability to think of any other form of sexuality than lifelong monogamy
the lack of confidence in one’s own strength and judgment, with a consequent longing for an omniscient, guiding father-figure
Reich noted that after a brief period of increased anti-social and perverse impulses (followed by social anxiety and moral pressure), the patient would release more energy to the genital system. This resulted in a greater capacity for direct contact with their impulses and their environment. With this, the patient would shed many unnatural and artificial behaviors, including inclinations to mysticism and religiosity. When their energy flows properly to the genitals, the individual self-regulates and antisocial behaviors like sadism, incest fantasies, pedophilia and other aberrations fade away.
Reich felt that moralism could only suppress these natural instincts and thereby reinforce the antisocial behaviors it sought to correct. As he put it,
The existence of severe moral tenets always proves, and always has, that the biological needs, particularly the sexual needs, are not being gratified. Every kind of moral regulation is per se sex-negative, condemns or denies the natural sexual needs. Any kind of moralism is life-negative, and the most important task of a free society is that of making possible for its members the satisfaction of their natural needs.
Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure. 25.
The key to a political revolution, for Reich, lay in a sexual revolution. And the sexually repressed child was at the center of his efforts. Punished for masturbation and sex play with other children, their innocent sensuality and sociability was brutally repressed into neuroses and self-loathing. When you look at the contemporary push for Drag Queen Story Hours and anal sex guides in children’s libraries, you see Reich’s influence in action. (They conveniently miss that Reich considered homosexuality, transvestitism and deviant sex as a sign of orgasmic blockage and assumed it would disappear as humanity shed its character armor).
Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control.
Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law.
Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae 3.17 (1968)
Paul VI’s July 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae received a lukewarm reception from Catholics and open hostility from secular thinkers. To them, his condemnation was the dying gasp of a patriarchal fascist fighting to keep women barefoot and pregnant. The Sexual Revolution’s promises of a better, more peaceful world were much easier to swallow than complaints from some celibate old man in a dress. In hindsight, Pope Paul VI’s predictions proved far more accurate than Wilhelm Reich’s. But given the time, it’s not surprising that Paul encountered skepticism.
In 1960 Enovid, the first Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill, arrived on the market. Women celebrated “the Pill” because it gave them the freedom to choose pregnancy rather than having it thrust upon them. Working women no longer needed to fear that an unexpected pregnancy would leave them unable to care for the children they already had. And the Pill also allowed them to enjoy casual sex without worries they might be saddled with the responsibilities of child-rearing.
But while horny Americans reaped the benefits of non-procreative sex, there were significant issues with the first generation of contraceptives. Doctors working for pharmaceutical companies downplayed the risks of blood clots and hormonal side effects. The pill was around 99.3% effective if taken daily at the same time. But if your schedule was more irregular or you occasionally miss a pill, its efficacy drops to 91%.
Oral contraceptives freed women from the tyranny of unwanted pregnancy. But in doing so, it created several generations that decided to skip pregnancy altogether. In 1960 America was at the tail end of the postwar Baby Boom, and the fertility rate stood 3.582 births per woman. In 2024 it is 1.786, well below the 2.1 replacement rate. But oral contraceptives were hardly the sole demographic issue.
The last year America births were above the replacement rate was 1972. On January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v Wade that Texas abortion laws were unconstitutional. Abortion became legal across the United States. States that had formerly banned abortions experienced a 5% decline in births. Births among teens, women over 35, and nonwhite women dropped by 13%, 8%, and 12% respectively.
While it can prevent pregnancy, no formulation of the Pill protects against sexually transmitted diseases. This led to a sharp spike in gonorrhea and syphilis infections, not to mention genital herpes, genital warts, and other unpleasant venereal diseases. And while these were an embarrassing but largely treatable issue among heterosexuals, homosexual and bisexual men found themselves facing a new and deadly plague.
Can't wait to read this book. That was very interesting stuff.
Imagine a Pope who made sense. I am a lapsed Catholic but I can imagine listening to a guy like that on occasion. He would still seem Christian.
Pornography is a nation destroyer. Added to everything else, the communists were right to use it as a tool wherever they go.
Heh. I'm going to save this. That start was already unfathomably vile.
Free porn and it's consequences have been a disaster for the westernised world.