The Gooneral’s attendees didn’t care that Malone was, from all available evidence, not a gooner at all but rather an unaffiliated, lone-wolf pervert. That he’d been, in their eyes, martyred for a form of self-expression was enough to make him a cause célèbre for what was increasingly coming to feel like a movement, a homegrown zoomer Tea Party that might one day produce its own gooner congressmen, gooner news networks, extremist gooner terror attacks.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Reared on the tube sites, where a user might skim ten or more clips in the course of a given session, they have grown accustomed to a degree of stimulation that most porn isn’t equipped to satisfy. Hence their adoption of a new form, one that enshrines this rapid-fire mode of porn consumption as a compositional principle: the “porn music video,” or PMV.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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I’m not trying to spoil anyone’s fun. And I’m aware that the desire to be erotically humiliated has been hardwired into certain psyches since the dawn of time. But it seems to me troubling that so very many people are discovering in themselves an appetite for this particular strain of virtual degradation.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Gooning is a new kind of masturbation. More precisely, a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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