Like runner’s high, or epiphany in prayer, the goonstate is not the point of the practice, but rather its occasional and unbidden reward. You’ll never get there if you don’t put in the work.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible advances in the world of pornography. When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror. But by the time I started college, in the late Aughts, the foundations of our present porn environment were firmly established.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

I had occasion to witness one of NoodleDude’s productions in the wild. It was the kind of January afternoon that makes life seem completely pointless, just one miserable thing after another, and I was on the seventh floor of a hotel room in Jersey City, watching a fiftysomething man known as WristbandGuy energetically lay the groundwork for a communal, in-the-flesh porn-watching party—the thirty-fifth installment of a series called Real Porn Meets.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

In other words, the goonstate, so central to the subculture’s branding and self-conception, is only rarely attained. (A sizable minority of respondents claimed never to have reached it, although none doubted its existence.)
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

None, besides maybe Neil Postman, could have predicted the formation of an international pornography cult. But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

It is the contention of NoodleDude and other PMV artists I spoke with that their craft is not unlike that of early hip-hop artists, twisting existing material into novel shapes. Aware that he and his peers are profiting off others’ labor—and spooked as well by some angry emails and a few threats of legal action—NoodleDude has recently begun to credit each woman who appears in his videos, and has used his outsized influence over the board of the World PMV Games to insist on mandating the same from entrants.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

I’d figured that the gooners would need some coaxing, some assurance that I wasn’t setting them up to be ridiculed. But it was like they’d been waiting to hear from me; they flocked to the Questionnaire in droves. I had to cap it at around a hundred respondents. Within a few days, I had more raw data than I could ever hope to parse.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

If you find yourself watching dozens upon dozens of PMVs for putatively professional purposes, you will come to notice that, much of the time, the sucking and/or thrusting in each clip is synced to the beat. That was NoodleDude’s innovation. NoodleDude is a twenty-eight-year-old Dutch web designer whose roughly thrice-yearly video drops are received with Swiftie-like enthusiasm among the terminal-porn-addict cognoscenti.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::

Over hours of focused trawling, I couldn’t identify a single rigorous study of gooning culture; cybersexologists, having quantified every twitch and spasm of the online erotic imaginary, had overlooked the gooners almost entirely.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine

:::