Gooners, Perverts, and Porn: Two Writers Investigate the Internet’s Strangest Subculture

SUNDAY 4:05 PM DECEMBER 14, 2025 RED HOOK

Was 2025 the year of the goon? That question hung over a packed room at Pioneer Works: Press Play last Sunday, where writers Daniel Kolitz and Tony Tulathimutte joined panelist Elvia Wilk to unpack the sexual preoccupations of the internet’s most online men. For anyone who’s been living under a rock, Kolitz’s viral Harper’s report earlier this fall charted the ascent of gooning from niche fetish to full-blown social phenomenon, bringing together groups of men in pursuit of a transcendent, collective high.

Next to him sat Tulathimutte, another writer fixated on the feedback loop between sex, shame, and desire in a digital age. At the center of the conversation loomed an uneasy question: How much sympathy, exactly, do we reserve for the pervert? With Wilk steering them through the moral thicket, the two explored loserdom, taboo, and porn addiction. An exclusive, abridged version of their conversation appears below.

———

WILK: I want to start by asking both of you about your research methodology. It’s what we’re all thinking—how involved are you? Tony, you write fiction. Daniel, you wrote reportage in this instance. Do you think of your approach to internet subcultures, which may actually just be cultures at this point, as LARPing, or participant observation? 

KOLITZ: I mean, I started as an observer. I ended as a big time participant. [Laughs] A lot of that didn’t make it into the article, but I really was going at it with those guys for quite a while. But these are very seductive, interesting spaces once you get into them, although I don’t find them that personally compelling.

WILK: Seductive?

KOLITZ: Yeah. I mean, these are worlds of people who are having the time of their lives, however miserable they are in their personal lives. It was fascinating to hang out with them, even if they’re getting up to some bleak stuff.

TULATHIMUTTE: I made everything up.

WILK: [Laughs] People are going to be Googling what you’re writing about, and also Googling you guys. What is the relationship between the content, the readership, and imagery, and the expectation that readers are going to get into the content and get curious about you?

TULATHIMUTTE: I’ll say that the auto-complete for my name is an absolute fucking shambles. But, I think the only reason people are curious about this is because of the stigma that’s attached in general to the entire range of subject matter. And even the name of this event, Sympathy for the Perv—who is in a position to offer that sympathy? We are.

KOLITZ: We’re the two guys that are going out there.

WILK: But sympathy is a distancing word, no?

KOLITZ: It is, yeah. I mean, I feel like when we’re talking about the perv, we’re talking about people who are acting alone. I feel like it’s impossible to be a pervert with another person now, like in a physical space. 

TULATHIMUTTE: Who are you talking about? In your article, they have 20 guys in a room beating off together.

KOLITZ: Oh, I mean in a sexual context. If you’re talking about a bunch of guys meeting up in a room, yes, you can be a pervert. But I guess that’s the only context I can think of where they’re together. I feel like a pervert now is someone who is not having sex, and is sort of alone. Someone who can’t fulfill themselves, we would call a pervert.

TULATHIMUTTE: I noticed that many times in the article, there is this kind of recoil from the subject matter, and you’re sort of positing this alternative person that they could be if they weren’t gooners, right?

KOLITZ: Yes.

TULATHIMUTTE: They could be men in double-breasted suits who come home from work thinking about stocks and bonds. And I was thinking, “Is that better?” 

KOLITZ: No. I’m surprised by what a hard time I was given. There’s one line in the piece that describes how these gooners could have been dependable men in hats, going home to the suburbs, or whatever. But you don’t have to be like a family man. There are plenty of ways you can live a life. 

TULATHIMUTTE: Yeah. I mean, it’s just very easy to get pearl-clutchy about this stuff, because I don’t think the sexual revolution really undid any of the existing Puritanism. We’ve just sort of built on top of it, right?

KOLITZ: Yeah.

TULATHIMUTTE: I was really glad to see at the end of your article that you draw a parallel between gooning and the way that just people consume all media now. This morning I saw somebody do a fan edit of The Piano Teacher, and it’s like you can truly have a weird parasocial relationship to anything. And then what gooning adds—I’m not at all trying to make any sort of apologies for the unsavory content that the people you describe are consuming—but this might just be a difference of kind, and not degree?

KOLITZ: Yeah, sure. I did think in the beginning that it was about how porn was affecting young men’s sexuality, and ultimately it became about media consumption generally. There’s no moral valence to me around porn consumption, necessarily. I just think it’s probably a waste of time, but a waste of time in the same way that looking at your phone for eight hours would be a waste of time.

WILK: I also wanted to ask about how much people are consuming in general, and the term “normal” that comes up a couple times in your piece. Are we talking about normal lives, or are we talking about normal in terms of how many people are actually doing this? Because the numbers are pretty staggering. At what point does it become a problem? Who decides when it’s a problem?

TULATHIMUTTE: I think that anytime you try to get a bellwether read of how prevalent it is, there’s going to be a lot of self-reporting bias, right? Any gooners here? Hands up. [Laughs] But that’s, again, because of the stigma.

KOLITZ: What’s interesting is that the kink of gooning is sort of exaggerating how much porn you’re watching, and getting off on the idea of how disgusting you are. When I was doing my statistical reporting, I could tell when someone was really lying in their self-reporting. They’re like, “I haven’t left my house in two years. I’ve just been watching porn continuously that whole time.” There were people who were saying, “Yes, I’ve watched porn for 12 hours a day.” 

TULATHIMUTTE: I mean, if they get off on the idea of being demeaned, and completely taken over by porn, wouldn’t that extend maybe to the way that they’re reporting it, or describing it to you?

KOLITZ: Exactly. I had to filter around to see who was telling me the truth.

TULATHIMUTTE: What kind of rubric did you use to filter it out?

KOLITZ: I got so much data. I didn’t think the gooners would be so down to talk to me. I thought they would be embarrassed, or think I was trying to get one over on them. But they were ecstatic, and they came to me in droves. 

TULATHIMUTTE: They tend to.

KOLITZ: No, they don’t cum. They’re not cumming. [Laughs] But yeah, there were tons of them, and I did start to feel a kind of tenderness towards them. I feel like once I really started digging into it, I could tell who was being real with me, especially the ones I spoke to because they were pretty sincere.

WILK: What about the community? You get at this pseudo-community in your piece, where people seem to be having relationships where they discuss things that are not only related to their mutual porn consumption, and there’s some other relationship-building going on.

KOLITZ: I think it’s just something to bond over, like you would bond over anything else. Like you would bond over Civil War memorabilia or something. It’s just another niche online space where you have the thing that you’re all interested in, and it’s just a way of socializing.

TULATHIMUTTE: And there’s the added contingency here that you know this group of people you’re doing it with are not going to be judgmental of you.

KOLITZ: Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of them feel a real degree of acceptance in that space. And that’s what I found moving about it, genuinely. There are people there that really cannot find that degree of acceptance in their day-to-day lives, and go in there and feel legitimately embraced.

WILK: Maybe back to the idea of the participant observer, Daniel, I heard that you had to cut several thousand words from your piece due to it being, I guess, too much of a real-time—

KOLITZ: Yeah, the editor said that the less the reader can picture you masturbating, the better. [Laughs] I went really detailed. They made the right decision, fundamentally.

WILK: Tony, I also remember you saying at one point to me that you had to cut a lot of description. One character is ordering a kind of mail-order porn through an itemized list that you had to cut some of.

TULATHIMUTTE: Oh, yeah. You’re talking about the end of a story called “Ahegao,” which ends with this incredibly long, detailed order form for a custom-order porn video. I had to cut it down because I really wanted it to not be just “The Aristocrats.” If it’s just a joke of pure prurience, then it’s not really doing any work for the story. It’s sort of hijacking it instead, right? So, I tried to make sure that the material that remained there is referring back to earlier stuff in the story, and sort of in a weird way, closing it off.

KOLITZ: That’s some of the best porn writing of all time, I will say. The conclusion of Tony’s story is fucking amazing. I’ve seen you read it with such relish… Where were we, sorry?

WILK: Well, it sounds like Tony’s saying that curtailing that was a literary craft question, and not a censorship issue.

TULATHIMUTTE: It got published in The Paris Review, and they cut down everything, most of the editing there because I think the idea was like, “Okay, it’s enough. We get it ” And they did indeed get complaint letters, even with the cleaner version.

KOLITZ: What were the complaints? 

TULATHIMUTTE: Actually, I don’t know if I can talk about this. But I do think people react really strongly to prurience because it is violating a perceived taboo around this stuff, especially in something like The Paris Review, which is supposed to be high-minded, right?

KOLITZ: Yeah. Even though porn is so sort of pervasive, I’m surprised to the degree that it is still so titillating to people, and it’s still viewed outside the bounds of normal human interaction. These are some very popular websites. These are the most popular websites.

TULATHIMUTTE: To go even a little further, beyond the general stigma, I think what makes it feel so tense, and uncomfortable, and also interesting to read or write about this stuff is that it plays at people’s anxieties about to what degree, if any, they resemble the people that are being written about.

KOLITZ: Yes. I mean, that’s why I love your books, and I love any writing about sex. And I think it’s why people go to this writing because it’s like, “How much of a freak am I? How does my experience comport with others?” The huge popularity of any first person writing about sex is like, “Am I normal?” Because you don’t really have any reference point for your own behavior. That is the value I find in this stuff.

WILK: I guess part of the question is, when you cross over as authors into writing porn, at what point are you now writing pornographic material yourselves? 

TULATHIMUTTE: There’s no crossover. It is just part of it, right? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, is it aestheticized, or is it just doing the same thing that porn does? Is there an aesthetic on top of the aesthetic?

KOLITZ: I mean, when I was going at it with these guys in there, and I was listening to them basically talk shit on each other as if they were gaming, I was like, “What am I doing?” I wasn’t sure if it was that redemptive, but it is useful to cross that line, and see what’s going on on the other side.

WILK: I remember this being talked about a lot several years ago, that it’s very hard to write “the internet novel.” I never understood why people would expect stories to have nothing to do with the internet in the first place, or that the internet hasn’t changed the way we write in general, but is there some kind of tension I’m not seeing between the narrative arc of a story and the narrative arc of scrolling the internet? 

TULATHIMUTTE: No, I mean, you can write about anything in fiction. It’s just that if you write about the internet it’s particularly susceptible to feeling dated, because it progresses a lot more quickly. Back in the ’90s, we would get one meme a year, and it would usually be in the form of a beer commercial. And now, if you’re trying to hold up something as novel in a novel, it’s going to come out in two years, because that’s usually how long the production process takes. So, usually by the time it goes out, it’s going to feel a little musty if the main purpose was to feel cutting edge. But the other kind of datedness, which I think is a fair critique, is when it really easily portrays the biases of its own time as immortal, or timeless. I’m sure you all remember the rhetoric of the early internet where it was like, “It’s the information super highway. We’ll be able to connect with people all over the world from Shanghai to Toronto, and it’ll be this universal love, peace, and brotherhood.” It was supposing a kind of universality that reality contradicted very quickly. So, I think that the mistake for people who are trying to go about capturing the internet is just sort of an unwillingness to be honest about how people are using it right now, because they want to overgeneralize, right?

KOLITZ: But I do think you have to do it. I mean, I think people who are completely resistant in their fiction, or in any other kind of writing to incorporating this stuff are limiting themselves, because this stuff is clearly pervasive. I also feel like the internet has reached a point, maybe from 2000 to 2012, where things have kind of coalesced. The internet seems to have slowed down for me in a way whereI feel like it hasn’t changed that much in a little while.

WILK: I kind of agree with that. I was thinking about the phrase “History has losers,” and how loserdom seems almost impossible to limit to one kind of character or imaginary demographic anymore. Everyone imagines this figure of the white male loser in the basement. But is that a real person or even the primary loser at this point?

KOLITZ: They exist. There are plenty of guys in their basements, yeah. I mean, my feeling is that a lot of it is their own perception of themselves that is keeping them in those basements, and feeling like they’re losers, and can’t go out. I mean, Tony’s more of the incel writer. I’m the gooner writer. 

WILK: Daniel is the volcel, and Tony is the incel writer?

TULATHIMUTTE: Are we doing the Chad virgin meme here?

KOLITZ: No, no, the gooner is a Chad. No, they’re both… What’s the other one? Chad incel? But, yeah, a lot of them are putting that on themselves, and refusing to go outside. 

TULATHIMUTTE: The way I see it is, right now, who isn’t a loser? There’s like 80 guys who have all the money. In the long view of things, everyone is a loser. The difference is between people who’ve internalized that idea of themselves to a point where they almost identify themselves by it, and that almost becomes their epistemology. But it’s almost like group therapy when people are like, “What are we going to do about those guys over there? They’re not like us.” And it ends up being sort of implicitly placing yourself above them in a pecking order. But again, who isn’t a loser?

KOLITZ: Yeah. I didn’t want my article to provide an opportunity for people to be like, “I’m better than these people are.” I wanted to gradually make them realize that they’re on a continuum because yes, we’re all losers. I feel like a loser all the time, genuinely. It’s also very easy as a loser online to find other people who identify as losers, and to really embrace that sense of self. And that can either go in the direction of collectively talking about shooting up schools, or it can go in what might be the more productive direction of jacking off together. I mean, to any extent that I thought goonerdom is valuable, they’re masturbating together, and in that sense are productively having a good time, which is the most you can hope for.

WILK: The thing that I liked most in the gooning article was this idea that they’re aiming to achieve a spiritual state, the goonstate. It’s where you add on, and add on, and add on, more and more porn forever, in the pursuit to achieve oneness—with God—knowing you can never get there. I’m fascinated by this idea of just adding more porn forever in pursuit of some kind of ecstasis. Is that what they’re going for?

KOLITZ: Yeah, they’re trying to consume such massive content that they enter a trance state, basically. And the reason that’s possible is that there’s now more pornography than has ever existed. They’re often watching it on multiple screens, and watching three seconds of a clip followed by three seconds of a clip. It’s not that different from, I guess, just being online generally. I’m not usually entering a trance, but I definitely spend a long time looking at my phone, losing half the day. I’m wasting my time constantly. I don’t feel ecstatic about it, so it’s almost better in a sense to enter some kind of masturbation ecstasy than looking at Twitter for eight hours.

TULATHIMUTTE: I mean, if we’re going to locate the sort of pearl clutching, moral judgment anywhere, it’s not about them having a good time, and certainly not about the idea of them being unproductive. There are a lot of things that are worthwhile and unproductive. I think that there are valid criticisms to make of the nature of the media, and what kind of ideological effect it has on the person consuming it in this specific case. 

KOLITZ: There are elements of the community that generally are ideologically repulsive. There’s something called the Black New World Order, which I won’t even get into. What’s interesting is there’s this dialectic between people who are active gooners in the community and the NoFap community, and you have traffic between these two worlds, but they both exist in response to this massive pornographic content. But the NoFap people are equally obsessed with the idea that porn has this unbelievable transforming force. 

WILK: It’s interesting how the puritanical right and the Goon Squad both believe in the transformative power of porn.

KOLITZ: Exactly. This article has been taken up by the far right as well as the left. Everyone has their own kind of attitude towards this stuff, but everyone does seem to believe that it is this overwhelming force.

TULATHIMUTTE: Maybe it’s not something that we need to draw a dichotomy between—the puritanical right and the people extremely preoccupied with masturbation. I think I read something that the people who are the most susceptible to what’s called porn addiction are people who have the most struggle in terms of a clash with their beliefs. It throws them into a shame spiral for having violated their own taboo, which ends up sort of drawing them back to it.

KOLITZ: Yeah. There is crazy debate about the porn nation thing. The academic community basically says that porn addiction is not considered to be a real clinically diagnosable phenomenon, but that your own perception of shame would make you a porn addict.

TULATHIMUTTE: Yeah. But then gambling is a recognized addiction.

KOLITZ: Exactly. But what’s interesting is the NoFap people, and the people that do think masturbation is a real problem, is that they’re engaged in warfare. Someone died in the middle of 10 lawsuits fighting that porn addiction isn’t a real community.

TULATHIMUTTE: Yeah. At a certain point, if compulsion is really intense, who cares whether or not your brain looks different under an MRI?

KOLITZ: Yes, exactly.

WILK: Would you guys delete the internet if you could?

KOLITZ: That’s a question I ask myself a lot. Towards the end of reporting this piece I came across—does anyone in the audience know about the 764 cult, which is like goonerism gone really bad? It’s really not that gooning-related, but it’s this horrific world of guys from all over the world making teenagers self-harm, and kill their pets, and some of the most horrific stuff you’ve ever heard. And you hear that, and you’re like, “We should get rid of the internet.” If this is the logical endpoint of all of this, if this is where this is going, is there any compensatory benefit? Why is the internet good? 

TULATHIMUTTE: I mean, is it that it has made us worse, or is it that what has always been bad about it us more visible?

KOLITZ: No, I think the latter. But it’s given the means of expression to that kind of primitive awful part of ourself.

WILK: Yeah, maybe it’s a self-reinforcing cycle, and feedback loop. Last question. Are you perverts for making us read about it?

KOLITZ: Sure.

TULATHIMUTTE: [Laughs] I didn’t make anyone fucking read about it.