Gooners (ft. Daniel Kolitz)

Rehash

Society & Culture

4.5 • 611 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2026

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine: a reality where p*rn becomes so ubiquitous it invents its own sexuality. Just kidding, you’re living it. If you live under a rock and haven’t stumbled across Daniel Kolitz’s groundbreaking Harper’s piece, “The Goon Squad,” it’s time to catch you up. Gooners are a niche subculture inhabiting the internet’s moist-est corners, who have surrendered themselves to the art of m*asturbating. They make their own folk art called goonfuel and dwell in their own little gooncaves. Many gooners also allegedly enter the community straight, but unlock a “latent queerness within” through communal phallus worship and tender homosocial encouragement. In this episode, Hannah and Maia, joined by Daniel, ask whether gooning is something to nervously laugh at and move on, or take seriously as a symptom of the times. Through the sweet pain of total self-debasement and chasing the ecstatic abyss, gooners organize themselves around a digital New Religion. They also, however, press a frightening question: is the internet simply a seductive Siren, calling us all to go spiralling down the pleasure pit of self-annihilation? Tangents include: Hannah and Maia’s friend Jojo’s really good cooking, American Love Story, and women in GOON.

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Sources:

Samantha Cole, “Enter the Goon Cave, Where Porn and Masturbation Is All That Exists,” Vice (2023).

Jacques Cordina, “Limbic Capitalism and Technology,” 3CL (2025).

Daniel Dashnaw, “Gooning: How Porn-Induced Trance States Are Changing Masturbation, Intimacy, and the Erotic Brain,” Daniel Dashnaw Couples Therapy (2025).

Daniel Kolitz, “The Goon Squad,” Harpers (2025).

Monea et al, “Sex As/And/On Social Media,” Selected Papers of #AoIR2024:

The 25th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers Sheffield (2024).

Ashwin Rodrigues, “A Tale Of Two Gooners,” Defector (2025).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm in a TV renaissance right now.
0:02.5	Like, I went a long time without watching TV.
0:05.1	I was like, I need to catch up on all the film classics. Like, you know, to be a bit of a film critic, you have to have, like, an encyclopedic knowledge of film that I do not yet have. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not, I would not call myself a centophile. So I've been trying to catch up on that. And in doing so, I have really abandoned my love for TV, but recently I've tried to get back into it.
0:22.9	So right now I'm watching Mad Men, which I never... to catch up on that. And in doing so, I have really abandoned my love for TV, but recently
0:21.8	I've tried to get back into it. So right now I'm watching Mad Men, which I never got into. Have you seen it? I've seen the first season of Mad Men and I was like, this is really good, but I did what I do with all TV shows. And I went, this is really good, never picked it up again. So I get the hype, but I've yet to, you know, see it through. It's good. But yeah,
0:39.6	I'm not gripped yet. I'm excited to be gripped. Yeah. But I'm also watching Love Story,
0:48.1	the new Ryan Murphy show, which at this point of publication of this episode will probably
0:53.1	be done in old news. But I'm a huge fan of
0:56.3	American Crime Story Season 1, The People versus O.J. Simpson. I think it's actually a masterpiece.
1:01.7	And I haven't watched any of his other stuff because I hear it's bad in terms of the story shows.
1:07.2	Yeah. I mean, he's hit and miss. I think there's some really good American Horror Story seasons.
1:11.6	And then there's some really stupid ones.
1:13.0	True.
1:13.3	But, like, the first season's quite good.
1:15.2	I think the first few seasons are quite good and fucking scary.
1:18.5	Like, I don't know.
1:19.5	I think Ryan Murphy is complicated in that, like, he has the capacity for greatness,
1:25.5	but also, like, he loses focus. Yeah, he gets a little lazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm a huge defender of the first couple seasons of glee. Like, I think they're incredible. And I think the public has misunderstood them vastly. Like, that is camp. The first eight episodes of glee are fucking genius. Yeah. There's like a type of normie that's like, you know the kind of normie that's like you make a joke and they're like, what? And they look at you really weird. It's like all the housewife kids on next gen talking to the New York kids where they're like these really basic suburban normie kids who just like do not get the joke and are always looking at you like you're the crazy one like that is how people approach glee in a way that I'm like you just don't
2:04.3	get it babe like go live in a city you don't understand it's funny yeah it's like a very funny show
2:10.7	I mean like not all of it it gets really stupid but like it gets bad was quite funny so American love
2:17.0	story is just an interesting case because unfortunately, like, I do have a
2:22.2	fascination with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and JFK Jr.
	...

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