This past January, a few dozen young men in hoodies and baggy jeans congregated outside a coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona, to mourn the death of a twenty-seven-year-old man named Nautica Malone. They arrived on foot and riding shotgun in parents’ cars; they carried flowers and votive candles, homemade placards and shirts printed with Malone’s smiling face. The café where they were gathered, Bikini Beans, was part of a chain whose baristas wear bikinis. Days earlier, Malone had pulled up to the drive-through window, nude from the waist down, a hand on his penis. The barista was already filming by the time the car reached her window. It’s hard to say why this particular sex crime went viral. Maybe it was something about Malone’s expression: he looked confident, even sultry, like he was hoping somehow to seduce the barista. Whatever the reason, the video was soon inescapable online. 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 asking for their forgiveness.
Malone’s death was covered widely in the tabloids and trended on social media, where it was described as the “Goonicide.” His vigil, meanwhile, was an ironic, livestreamed stunt that came to be known as the “Gooneral.” Remarkably, this language—Goonicide, Gooneral—was broadly legible to hundreds of thousands of people who engaged with it online. The implication, unmistakable, was that the verb “to goon,” the root of these terms, had broken containment. By the time you read this article, a full definition might be needless, but in the sincere hope that that day has yet to—will never—arrive, I will provide one.
Gooning is a new kind of masturbation. More precisely, a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime. The act itself resembles “edging”—repeatedly bringing oneself to the point of climax without actually climaxing. But gooning is more goal-oriented and more communal. The gooner goons to reach the “goonstate”: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time. The Gooneral’s attendees didn’t care that Malone was, from all available evidence, not a gooner at all but rather an unaffiliated, lone-wolf pervert. That he’d been, in their eyes, martyred for a form of self-expression was enough to make him a cause célèbre for what was increasingly coming to feel like a movement, a homegrown zoomer Tea Party that might one day produce its own gooner congressmen, gooner news networks, extremist gooner terror attacks.
The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption. You’d think a person, having just built a gooncave, would take every possible measure to conceal its existence, would bulk-purchase padlocks, price high-end CCTV systems, craft detailed alibis for every hour, every minute spent alone, and would still, after all that, bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding at the fear of discovery. Instead, the gooners bragged about them. They posted photos of their gooncaves to Reddit. And these photos, which circulated through the young-to-youngish internet as early as 2021, were astonishing. One of course noticed the screens, sometimes three or four of them, sometimes upwards of a dozen, each lit up with porn, but one especially noticed the gooners’ own erect penises, foregrounded in the frame like waggish thumbs-ups. These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.
harpers.org
