What binds these disparate masturbators together, then, are the communal rituals surrounding the goonstate: 70 percent of Questionnaire respondents claimed to engage in one or more of them. By far the most popular of these rituals is “feeding,” a sort of porn-mediated cybersex in which one gooner sustains another’s session by sending them curated porn from their private collection. (This, apparently, is what is meant by “goonfuel.”) Sometimes they send short clips, sometimes they send GIFs, but more often than not they send what are known as “gooncaps”—essentially, pornographic memes. (A lively economy surrounds the production of gooncaps: one Bulgarian teen I spoke with—who took pains to distinguish himself from a real gooner—told me that he and his friends earn a modest living churning out customized gooncaps part-time. He agreed to talk to me because, in his words, “I would like to shed some light on how the moral systems are failing some of the younger people.”)
Other gooners engage in “wankbattling,” a kind of competitive feeding in which players rate one another’s porn selections on a ten-point scale. I learned all about it from Fuji, as he called himself, a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian gooner I met while conducting supplementary fieldwork in a wankbattling server on Discord. Many things about Fuji were compelling—for instance, he’d spent months training his pubococcygeus muscle in order to climax without ejaculating and thus to spend even more time masturbating to porn based on his favorite video-game characters. But I was particularly intrigued by his relationships with his fellow wankbattlers. There appeared to be real tenderness there, as in this exchange Fuji showed me between himself and a fellow gooner