Gooning: The New Religious Movement of the Future
The ongoing transformation of gooning from a fetish into a bona fide new religious movement, and what the future may hold for the gooners
Gooning is truly a new religious movement - one that could only exist in the 21st century. People love to say that everything is like religion - fandom, sports, celebrity culture - blah blah blah it’s been done to death. But I believe gooning is not only like a religion but genuinely, concretely developing into a new religious movement in its own right. Leaderless and structureless, yes, but a religious movement nonetheless. A “cult” does not necessarily need a leader. And why would you need one when you are already led by porn itself - thousands hypnotized into ego death, all in the name of gooning. Maybe the charismatic cult leader is a figure that is no longer necessary.
* I don’t like using the word cult. I find it… annoying? Reductionist and a bit condescending. I much prefer new religious movement (commonly shortened to NRM). For the remainder of this article, I will be using NRM instead.
Gooning is not about jacking off. The most serious gooners don’t even do that anymore. They have moved far, far beyond it in their journeys. And I can’t wait for more and more gooners to leave jacking off behind as they transcend beyond their bodies and into a deeply zen meditative state. People want to ban porn but look at what it has done for the gooners. It has given their life meaning, finally allowing them to become one with the cosmos!
A long time ago, I posted on X the Everything App that I wanted to see a gooning architectural style, a thousand-year reign of the gooning empire (and we will get more into what this could look like further into the article). Ever since, I sometimes get DMs from random gooners looking for wisdom, advice, leadership. Before I go any further, let me be clear: I am not a gooner. Clearly, I am doing my own thing when it comes to spirituality. I don’t think I have the ability to lead this movement. I actually do think it’s best if the leader is not a gooner, but I don’t have the time to commit to that. To be honest, I’m really busy with other things. I’d rather watch this take shape from the sidelines, occasionally checking in to see what my gooner friends are up to. I’ve told all of them who come to me for advice that they are looking in the wrong place. I cannot teach them anything. But they keep asking. There is, clearly, a hunger to take the spiritual aspects of gooning to the next level. However, to any gooners who may have found this randomly while searching for guidance: I do not have the answers you seek.
Obviously, Gooning is a spirituality produced by the hyper availability of digital pornography. And it is fascinating that it only took what … 15, 20 years to develop? From the beginning of streaming pornography? And it is so radically different from any spiritual system that has come before because it needs many screens, and hopefully an internet connection, to exist and function.
Now, let’s look at some similarities between gooners and more traditional NRMs:
Gooners practice prolonged, disciplined self-denial of regular life in pursuit of transcendent states - mirroring monastic traditions.
They have a total commitment to the practice - sometimes described as 24/7 or life-destroying - going on multi-day gooning benders, which echoes religious asceticism.
The state of nirvana achieved by entering a gooning flow state is often described in language akin to mystical religious experiences: ego dissolution, oneness, and trance-like submission to sensory overload. Leaving the body behind. Zooming in on the body to transcend it. The self has died and now you are nothing but a spectre floating above the pornography.
Gooners speak of time differently than regular people - losing hours, days, or entire weeks in altered states. This creates a separation between profane (regular) time and sacred (gooning) time, similar to how religious rituals carve out holy time.
Gooners seek out spiritual leadership from those who have achieved deeper states of goon, suggesting the development of a clergy or guru figure. There is obviously a hierarchy in the gooning community, also people “goon together” quite frequently - I would assume with more advanced practitioners leading the charge.
Unlike the self-loathing narratives often attached to pornography addiction, gooning reclaims the practice as sacred - radical inversion of guilt into divine submission. The shame is transformed, reinforced through mantras like Porn owns you, Porn controls you and Porn has ruined your life flashing across the screen in sissy hypno videos, turning degradation into ecstatic devotion.
Chanting and mantras. Here, a quote from a gooning related subreddit: “My mind turn blank and my eyes move like crazy while I chant how much I adore pornographic content I feel over power by my atraction to porn. It is really weird it feels like I am going insane.” The gooners are speaking in tongues like Pentecostals.
For their privacy, I won’t cite their profiles here, but the other day I received a message like the ones I mentioned earlier. A gooner reached out seeking guidance, and as I skimmed their X the everything app page, I noticed a fascinating development I hadn’t seen before.
The gooners were gooning to women in burqas and niqabs. Additionally, they were wearing them themselves and posting photos of it. This is likely a common fetish, but through the lens of the gooner, it takes on a new dimension. Paraphrasing their captions, they described how years of exposure to the most extreme pornography, boiled down into split-second flashes of the most graphic moments, had left them numb to the naked body. Nudity was no longer sexual. They had seen it all. Now, the only thing that could stimulate them was the absence of the naked body. Modesty itself became the ultimate erotic object. I suppose this is just one of many paths the ascetic gooner could take. And like any religious movement, once it grows large enough, it will inevitably branch into different sects.
Perhaps, in time, the traditional gooner will develop a distinct mode of dress - flowing robes that cover the entire body. Imagine them marching down the streets in a procession, carrying incense billowing smoke, throwing crushed flowers on the ground, chanting their endless chants of devotion - Porn owns you, porn controls you. I love pornography. etc
The persecuted gooner
Pretty much every other religion on earth would oppose worshipping porn as a god, I think. Major conflict is inevitable. Already, gooners are subject to algorithmic persecution - social media platforms and content moderation systems actively suppress gooner content. But like the early Christians, this will only solidify their devotion. Conservative anti-porn movements view gooners as the ultimate example of degeneracy and actively campaign against their existence, equating their practices with sin or moral collapse. This is unfortunate—they are simply creating a new morality right in front of our eyes. The psychiatric establishment categorizes compulsive porn use as an addiction, framing gooning as a disorder rather than a spiritual or transcendent practice. Gooners seeking legitimacy are dismissed as mentally ill. Many sacrifice careers, relationships, and social standing in pursuit of their practice. Their devotion renders them unemployable in traditional workplaces, leaving them isolated and financially unstable. A more organized, centralized gooner religion could provide them with the financial support needed to continue their practice.
Gooner army, look at what they are doing to you, to your holy book of r/GoonerWorshipService, a community of almost 50,000 devoted gooners.
The gooner wars, the gooner architectural style
I imagine the Gooner warriors as something like the war boys from Fury Road, ready to sacrifice themselves for their cause at any moment. They launch themselves into Gooner Valhalla, their final vision a perfect mandala of breasts, asses, cocks, pussies - completely decontextualized, desexualized. The Gooner conquests. What part of the world will they take first? Probably America. The country is ripe for something like this to take off. Why tend to the body’s needs when you can exit it entirely through disciplined pornography consumption?
And the Gooner Cathedral - what would it look like? A fusion of body and mind, perhaps a biomechanical megastructure. A field of screens, thousands of them, each displaying fragmented split seconds of pornography, pulsating with algorithmic loops, synchronized to create a trance-inducing effect. A vaulted ceiling covered in fractal projections of decontextualized erotic forms, abstracted into a sacred geometry. A central altar, glowing with shifting light patterns, where gooners gather for ritualistic edging, eyes locked on sacred loops of sensory overload. I could see them taking over the Vatican and redesigning it to fit their vision.
A Gooner bishop stands at the altar, with devotees gooning in the pews. But maybe this is too Catholic. Perhaps it should feel more Buddhist, given the strong themes of meditation. The floors are padded for long sessions of kneeling, rocking, ecstatic trance. The air hums with a constant, low-frequency binaural beat, tuned for hypnosis. Whispered mantras reinforcing total surrender to the screen - Porn owns you. Porn controls you.
The most devoted gooners eventually go blind from staring at the screens. Their bodies are adorned with decorative wreaths, offerings left behind by Gooners in the earlier stages of the journey. Gooner saints. Their blind eyes see only an endless, fractalized collage of erotic imagery beyond human comprehension. Gooners of course don’t eat or drink except minimal amounts when absolutely necessary, so their bodies are very thin, with loose stretchy and wrinkled skin. Their hair is long and wild and prematurely white. Perhaps they could practice self mummification in the gooner cathedral, truly becoming one with the pornography.
I recently watched the movie Aniara and then read the epic poem it was adapted from. It tells the story of a spaceship transporting human colonists to Mars that gets knocked off course, loses all its fuel, and becomes unable to stop or turn. The thousands of people on board are stranded, drifting endlessly into the void, moving farther and farther away from their destination at an unstoppable speed. Surrounded by nothing but the infinite darkness of space for years and years, they descend into despair. Cults form, suicide becomes endemic, and strange rituals emerge as the passengers try to cope with their fate. For some reason, this story made me think of the gooners. Sealed in a black tomb, with no stimuli, they exist at the farthest reaches of sensory experience. They have reached such a level of overstimulation that it is indistinguishable from total sensory deprivation.
Listened to while writing this article: Death of Samantha by Yoko Ono