“Is everybody gooning,” Katya Zamolodchikova tweeted, and the answer is we still don’t know. But if you’re gay and online, it certainly seems that way. Queer Twitter is using the phrase “goon” with reckless abandon, but what’s unclear is where the term comes from, what people mean when they say it, and, most importantly, if people are actually gooning.
It’s a fun and silly phrase, but what are you really saying when you’re, in the poignant words of Trixie Mattel, “gooning and bating with buds on main”? Let’s discuss.
While its entrance into popular vernacular is somewhat new, gooning has a rich internet history that stretches far beyond early 2020s online slang. If you want to learn more about what gooning is, who is a gooner, and how people have transformed it into a queer colloquiallism, you’ve come to the right place.
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What is gooning?
Gooning, at its most basic definition, means acting completely uninhibited while you masturbate, or perform pleasure, seemingly losing yourself in the moment and going cross-eyed, often without orgasming at the end.
“Most identify gooning with totally uninhibited vocal expression,” JV Marx, a performer, writer, and sex worker, tells Them. “A lot of gooners let primal feelings of pleasure take over and ‘dumb down’ or get ‘drunk on dick’ — taking off their human suit and just allowing their inner masturbator animal to come through.”
Gooning can be similar to edging in the sense that many gooners (or people who goon) often don’t come. But unlike edging, which broadly refers to delaying an orgasm so it feels more intense, gooning is considered a kink specifically about loudly losing control during pleasure and masturbation, which is sometimes shortened to “bating.”
Gooners will masturbate for hours or even days on end, reaching meditative levels of sexual euphoria often referred to as a “goon state.” It’s also an entire genre of porn, with performers, adult websites, and Discord servers all dedicated to gooning content.
What makes someone a gooner?
Now that we’ve established the action (“gooning”), we need to understand the actor (“goon” or “gooner”). To be a goon or gooner is to be an exaggerator of pleasure, but whether that sensual rapture is a performance or something done sincerely without inhibition can vary between gooners. Sex workers, such as cam boys, girls, and theys, use gooning as a method of servicing their clients. That’s why gooning, at least on the internet, is often considered fake or pretend — but not all gooners are performing. Gooning can have an intoxicating quality for the people doing it, which has helped it spawn an entire internet subculture, with Discord servers and other online infrastructure built to connect gooners to one another. But the question of whether or not this kind of “true gooner” is commonplace lies at the heart of much online discussion about gooning.
Gooning porn can feature a range of signature bodily displays, with performers crossing their eyes, sticking out their tongues, or even drooling because they’ve lost control of their body. Curated adult content Twitch streams feature gooners slack-faced, squealing or staring dead-eyed into monitors playing porn in front of them as they pleasure themselves for hours on end — and the question remains: Is it a true “goon state” or are they literally gooning for the camera?
The iconic imagery and absurdity associated with gooners all make great fodder for memes and internet slang, prompting many people to ask: Is anyone actually gooning?
How are people using “gooning” as slang? How do I use this word in a sentence?
Because “gooning” ostensibly means losing yourself — or doing a performance of losing yourself — in pleasure while you masturbate, the term can be used more generally in a colloquial way to describe being overly excited or rabid about anything.
You’re “excited” about something? No, you’re absolutely “gooning” over it. They’re “exaggerating” the way they act? No, they’re “gooning.” You’re “gagged?’ You’re actually “gooning.”
“Millennials have used it to be like ‘Oh, I’m gagging for that’ — which I sign off on as proper usage,” Marx tells Them.
Because the performance of gooning itself can be absurd, younger generations like Gen Z and Gen Alpha have embraced its comedic implications. If someone is being dramatic, they’re “gooning.”
“‘Gooning’ is a fucking dumb word, a dumb kink,” Marx says of the current cultural sentiment around the slang. “A lot of Gen Z send-ups of gooning have very sharply noticed that — they're all being facetious with their ‘brain rot’ memes and TikToks. Gooning this, sigma that, skibidi this — they’re very intelligently aware of the absurdity of all this discourse and language use.”
To that effect, as seriously as gooning can be taken for pleasure-seekers and porn performers, gooning is also widely considered entirely unserious by people who use it as a colloquial saying. Use of it in slang is often sprawling, liberal, and not related to sex at all — probably because it’s just fun to say. Is it gooning to say someone is gooning? Totally, and that’s exactly what makes it so silly and goofy. And for a generation who famously copes with the horrors of the world by way of humor, it’s actually no surprise something as absurd as gooning has made its way into everyday conversation.
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