Enter the Goon Cave, Where Porn and Masturbation Is All That Exists

Benny has a PC that connects to four monitors that he plays his favorite porn clips on in a loop. An iPad and iPhone arm extension is mounted to the headboard of his bed, so he can keep the most intense scenes right in front of his face, hands-free. He keeps it dark in the room, to obscure everything in the room that isn’t porn, and a large-breasted sex doll without a head or limbs stays close at hand.

“The setup improves the viewing experience by flooding your senses with the most stimulating stimuli,” Benny told me. “You get lost in the screens, sounds, and sensations. You go into a trance-like meditative state of euphoria. You lose track of time and reality, truly living in the moment.”

Benny told me that he’s always been into edging (intentionally getting as close as possible orgasm, then stopping) and watching porn, but never dedicated a lot of time to either until the COVID-19 lockdowns, and after he started smoking weed. “Weed made edging feel so much better. Since I was now spending hours a day edging since there was nothing else to do, I was trying to find ways to make each session better and more pleasurable,” he said.

His is one example of a goon cave, a dedicated, often elaborate and thoughtfully-constructed setup for viewing porn for hours, even days, at a time. Gooners and their caves have existed for years, but their community has exploded in recent years—and with it, content creators who are working to meet their needs.

WHAT IS GOONING?

“Goon” has many meanings, some of them more safe for work than others. As a noun, traditionally, it’s meant something synonymous with thug or hooligan; hired muscle. Goons were also the self-deprecating nickname members of the forum Something Awful gave to themselves. But the meaning’s changed over the years. Urban Dictionary defines gooning (and if there was anything one could reliably trust Urban Dictionary for, it has to be this) as a trance state, “when a man becomes completely hypnotized by the feeling radiating [from] his penis.” Under this definition, gooning isn’t a rushed and frenzied jerk-off sesh, but meditative.

In a 2020 essay for the Gay and Lesbian Review, Jason Armstrong wrote that gooning is a moment during a masturbation session when porn falls away, and “the connection to the penis is all that's required to reach an almost frightening height of sexual ecstasy. At that point one enters the [mastur]batehole, a sort of sexual abyss.” 

The gooners I spoke to echoed these definitions. Gooning is a flow state: an extended edging session marked by mindlessness, loss of control, and total surrender. For the habitants of goon caves, it’s being enraptured by the shadows on the cave wall, and willfully shunning the sunlight of reality. Some go as far as to define themselves as “pornosexuals,” people with a sexual preference for porn over real-life sex.

According to Google searches, gooning has been trending upward for years (leaving aside one extreme spike in 2018, when the coach for the Cavaliers basketball team used the word in its SFW meaning and confused a lot of people into searching for it). Despite its steady increase in popularity, unlike many other fetishes and kinks that have been studied by sexologists and psychologists, there’s little scholarly research published about gooning.

Angel Au Lait, an adult content creator who specializes in gooning, told me that someone approached her with a request for a custom gooning clip in 2017. “At the time, I didn't know what it was and no one had really been putting out anything that was penetrating the main scene,” she said. “So I did it and quickly realized it was a niche being supremely underserved.” She started her own website, The Goon Hole, in 2021, which features videos and photosets of models, often speaking directly to the viewer jerkoff-instruction-style, edited with mesmerizing, colorful graphics and text.  

Gooning content shares commonalities with other domination kinks, like hypnosis and jerk-off tutorials that lead the viewer through how to touch themselves and mantras to repeat. “Gooning to me is letting go of thoughts, and allowing your domme to take complete control of your mind, and/or actions. Which then means FULLY embracing being guided by a powerful woman,” adult content creator Iwantprinxess, who makes gooning and financial dominatrix content, told me. “Most people are drawn to gooning because it takes the pressure of decision making away. When you consent to going into goon mode, it's calming to have a domme you trust that much that you don't need to think for yourself.”

More mainstream adult sites are catching up to the phenomenon, where interest in gooning has reached a tipping point; Clips4Sale added gooning as an official category earlier this month. "In the past few years, gooning has emerged not just as a sexual practice, like edging, but a distinct fetish, with its own community and style,” Clips4Sale spokesperson Avery Martin told me. “We’ve seen more and more creators develop relationships with their goons that borrows elements of goddess worship and other power exchange, but is different, and more Dionysian. We haven’t seen a category take off like this since JOI. It’s really the first new major fetish of the 2020s." 

WHAT MAKES A GOOD GOON CAVE? 

Crafting a dedicated home space for relaxation and enjoyment of a specific hobby isn’t new. “Man-caves” have been a thing for decades (which in turn inspired the cursed phrase “She-shed,” in the name of gender equality), and gamers have long taken pride in their battlestations. Goon caves could be seen as an extension of those spaces, places carved out as special, crucial to the set and setting of an intentional masturbation session.

Thomas Brooks, assistant professor of psychology at New Mexico Highlands University, told me that like these more family-friendly spaces, he sees goon caves as places outside of the pressures of everyday life. “It moves masturbation from something that happens in the mundane to a sacred place that is given symbolic importance,” he said.

Several gooners I spoke to said that a cave must be comfortable. Sessions can last for hours or days, after all—the more comfortable and accessible the surroundings are, the more likely a long-haul gooner will be to stay put.

Multiple screens are also a must: tablets, monitors, wall projectors, anything that can cram into a space to show as much porn as possible. Posters and magazines taped to the walls add an air of permanence, some said. Lube, snacks, and toys are optional but helpful—especially for long sessions.

Reddit user Jerkjunkie1010, who has a laptop, a tablet, a projector, and two DVD players and a Playstation 4 in his cave, told me that being “surrounded and immersed in porn” makes the cave experience. “The overstimulation that I get from having everything going on at once. I can stare at one screen or magazine but my peripheral is constantly filled up and I’m hearing sounds coming from all around me,” he said. “These are all things that help keep me engaged for hours.”

Moderator for r/gooncaves aussiepornaddict said that it’s about variety. “I can have multiple porn videos playing, sometimes there are boring bits or parts that just don’t do it for me. Rather than fast forwarding, I can just focus my attention on another screen,” he said. “Sometimes there are particular porn stars that I really admire so I like to have their videos on multiple screens too.” 

A solid stash of porn, of course, is the make-or-break element to any goon cave. “Gooning, for a lot of people, is about porn. And having more and more and more of it. As much as possible! It’s a fetish that makes you want to engage more in the fetish and then fetishize the fact you want it so badly!” Angel Au Lait said. “The community around the constant buying, feeding, engaging only makes that even more potent; gooners will encourage one another to go deeper, to watch specific videos, to challenge one another to contests to see who can hold their edge the longest! For the most part, they are always positive and respectful and praise, and even worship porn.”

Some gooners use poppers and prescription or illicit drugs to enhance their cave time. “I love to use Adderall or Vyvanse when I goon, it gets you super hyper fixed on the porn, and also very slightly dulls your sensitivity, making you stay on the edge for literally fucking HOURS,” Redditor 420j0bud told me.

He said his longest gooning session was 32 hours, with two breaks to eat and rest. “After you hit that 3rd or 4th hour, the usual stimulation shifts gear and feels so incredibly good, that you almost never wanna cum, because if you cum, you can take edge and if you can't edge you can't goon,” he said. “I wanna let people know about goon culture, some people may already goon without even knowing it has its own term!” 

SOCIAL AND COMMUNAL GOONING 

Although the goon cave is a sacred space, for many gooners, it’s a pleasure that’s meant to be shared. The very active subreddit r/gooncaves has 34.8 members as of writing, mostly people posting photos of their setups or whatever content they’re watching. Several people post there to notify others that they’re entering a goon session and have their direct messages open to chat. User porn_brained told me that he’s “almost always” streaming whatever porn he’s watching to a Discord server, where people can gather to watch and chat. “I personally find it nice to view porn in this semi-social setting, as it makes me feel less alone with the fact that I have a socially unacceptable habit with it,” he said. 

The construction and sharing of goon caves takes something that’s typically an isolated, solitary experience—masturbation—and makes it social in a virtual setting. “​​Deindustrialization and atomization are, in my opinion, huge contributors to men losing homosocial leisure spaces, as well as viable, long-term romantic relationships,” Brooks said. “So, for men who are struggling with loneliness, feeling isolated, or don't have meaningful interpersonal relationships, then the only thing to do after work is to play video games and masturbate. In order to participate in imagined homosocial escape, you need a space to hypothetically share with the dudes, and if you only have a gaming setup in your apartment, or in this case a goon cave, then that is what you share to meet that belonging need.”

Pornosexuality is a phrase that’s used frequently in these social spaces, either in usernames or as a self-proclaimed label some gooners identify with. Porn_brained, who told me he’s a 21 year old man, said that he identifies with the term pornosexual and that he’s “deathly afraid of sex.” He finds porn to be an escape, as well as a way to explore sex secondhand, he said. “I really don't have much interest in having sex with a ‘real’ partner at this point in my life. I'm not a virgin, but I've never really found sex particularly gratifying, and I am stable enough in my platonic relationships to not really want to seek out a romantic partner. I've got my friends, I've got my work, I've got my non-gooning hobbies, and then I have porn and gooning to fill the sexual itch that almost all humans have.” 

Jerkjunkie1010 said that he didn’t learn about the term “pornosexual” until a few months ago, but can relate to it. “I like identifying as such but I’ve always been open and fluid with my gender/sexuality. ‘Pornosexual’ really embraces the idea that no one in your life will be able to pleasure you as much as the porn. I’m 25 year old virgin and I’ve had a few partners in my life, but sex wasn’t the most important thing in those relationships.” 

Not all gooners are pornosexuals, however. A 30 year old man who goes by LordPornAddict online told me that his goon cave is more of a moveable feast, setting up and tearing down based on when his wife, with whom he shares a home, is around. She doesn’t know about his goon cave. But their sex life is better than it has been in a long time, he said, which he credits to hours of gooning giving his penis “super endurance.” 

He’s been setting up and removing his cave for six years, with his longest session being 40 hours, when his wife went on a weekend work trip out of town. 

“I started my gooning on Friday 5 p.m. to Sunday noon,” LordPornAddict said. “Porn playing non stop on my TV, PC, tablet and phone. My tablet was following me everywhere. Porn playing on the TV even if I wasn't it. Porn playing on my PC and screen recording each sessions. I had porn playing while sleeping to affect my brain. Best hours of my life.” 

Benny told me that his relationship to the term is fluid. Porn is his primary source of sexual satisfaction—for now. “Where I differ from other true pornosexuals is that if I had a girlfriend or wife I’d want to have sex with them over a sex toy,” he said. “True pornosexuals prefer porn over anything else sexual even when given the opportunity. I have seen many people slowly destroy their lives because that’s all they want out of life which is of course unhealthy to the rational person.” 

He tries to keep it balanced, he said, taking breaks from gooning to focus on other areas of his life. “If I could use my platform to influence anybody in this sphere, I’d want to share that there is more to life than porn. Be a balanced individual,” he said. “The ironic thing is that if you take care of yourself then you will have the capacity to enjoy more porn overtime versus indulging in it until you become so depressed that you don’t even enjoy life or porn as much as you could have by maintaining a healthy balance.”