Great read and listen!

As someone who has been a big gooner for the past couple of years, I wish there was more open discussion about the kink/subculture. And I know there are many ways that gooning is unhealthy, especially when it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism to deal with our pain and inadequacies, I know because it has been my cope to sedate myself. But I have since developed a better relationship to gooning with good old moderation, lol. But what you talk about—gooning, taking on toxic masculinity—is so true! In many of these spaces are a lot of Bi men who learned about their queerness through wanting to connect over masturbation and porn.

Gooning is an overly hedonistic practice, and in some ways I dunno how to feel about it. The time sink it can become, with sessions lasting for hours, getting deep into a pleasure-filled limbo, where time absolutely stops, where you do not notice 5,6,7 hours passing. It’s a quiet, dissociating experience, but it's also highly somatic. Like getting lost in a flow pleasure state, singularly focused on edging hijacking your dopamine receptor in ways that evolution never intended. In some ways all this technology has created an onslaught of digital drugs, making us feel good without chemicals. It's a weird but fascinating time to be a human.