jerk off in a language they can't understand
some thoughts on legibility & community
Gooning is going mainstream. Studios are producing gooning scenes and pornstars post about it on social media, some even retweeting cringe gooncaps. How did this happen? How did gooning ascend from niche forum fetish to mainstream porn fixture? You can point to the obvious economic incentive for content creators and cross-pollination with other kink communities, but before any of that could happen, gooning first had to become legible.
In Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott describes the plight of pre-modern farmers living under the yoke of feudal lords. Each village had its own microecology and farmers knew how to maximize yield by growing a mix of crops in uneven plots—however, this lack of standardization made it difficult for the ruling warlords to measure and tax each family. To solve this problem they forced the peasants into a monoculture, typically a cereal grain. A perfectly rectangular grid of wheat isn’t an efficient way to use the land, but it’s transparent, easy to draw on a map and assess, legible to the ruling party.
If this is unclear, here are some examples from our community—for “feudal lords” substitute “mainstream tastemakers” or “the media.”
The process of becoming legible is a process of change. The pre-modern farmers experienced this as coercion, we experienced it as a subtle reshaping of our collective subconscious in response to social and economic incentives. If you peruse the sacred texts, you’ll see many motifs which now feel cringe or alien, rough edges from an earlier time which were sanded down as gooning refined itself into a more comprehensible form.
To read a text from an illegible culture is to experience otherness. In Borges’ short story “There Are More Things,” the protagonist wanders around the house of a mysterious creature. Instead of regular furniture, the rooms are filled with “insensate forms” which “[do not] correspond to the human figure or any conceivable use.” He cannot visualize the true shape of the monster, only speculate based on these misshapen artifacts “in much the way the anatomy of an animal, or a god, may be known by the shadow it casts.” To attempt to categorize the illegible is to feel discomfort, confusion, exclusion—“I felt that I had intruded, uninvited, into chaos.”
The advantages of legibility are obvious—it is a prerequisite to gaining popularity, attracting funding, securing a place in the hierarchy. Without it there would be no Brazzers scene, no retweets from pornstars, no recognition from the rest of the world. So as the gooning community barrels towards mainstream popularity, let me humbly offer some reasons why we may later regret this.
Legibility does not guarantee deep understanding. I predicted that when the word “gooning” goes mainstream most people will think it just means “jerking off” and I still think this is the most likely outcome. Legibility confers high-level recognition but not empathy. Very few people know about the rich inner lives of furries, but lots of people can point out furry aesthetics. This has obvious implications for content creation—some performers won’t truly understand your fetish and will only be able to produce a shallow imitation of what you desire. Some Twitter commenters have already said that Brazzers’ “Sexually Rated Programming” scene fell short of their expectations (no comment). You can try to educate and explain, but whenever an idea is removed from its original context something will be lost in translation.
Validation is a hedonic treadmill. Right now it’s new and exciting when a pornstar discovers and acknowledges the existence of gooning. Gooner-themed content from studio performers is still rare. But discovery is a finite resource, and it will be exhausted. In a few years pornstars will tweet “love all my gooners!” as often as “love all my fans!” and it will become not just banal but also expected. When constant validation is the emotional baseline, all that’s left is to feel anxious about losing that precious attention.
Illegibility is a strategic advantage. Social media platforms and moderators and lawmakers can’t ban something if they can’t find it. In the old days we labeled files “pr0n” to avoid content filters, and this worked for a while until software improved. What matters now is conceptual differentiation—if platforms can’t understand that something is pornographic, then they can’t bring down the banhammer. The foot fetish previously occupied this niche, but as its legibility increased social media sites began treating them like nsfw-lite content.
Legibility paints a target on your back, and you can no longer avoid getting sucked into horrible mainstream cultural discourse. While it would be funny to see NYT Op-Eds about pornosexuality or US Senators holding up posters of gooncaps in Congress, it’s less pleasant to accidentally go viral and end up with 10K angry replies informing you that you’re going to hell for your sins. Hopefully it’s obvious why “porn addiction fetishism” may not benefit from notoriety.
The process of becoming legible is a mean reversion process. The easiest way to acquire legibility is to abandon the most unique elements of your movement and drift closer to the center of the bell curve on one or more ideological or aesthetic or sexual axes. If you were an O.G. (original gooner) on gay bator forums in the 2000s then this happened to you a decade ago, and you may lament that we now associate gooning with porn worship instead of its former fixation, penis worship. More recently the r/GOONED subreddit skyrocketed from 200K to 450K subscribers in the span of 6 months, and I’ve noticed more mainstream porn pictures and fewer deranged captions on the front page over time in direct proportion to this growth. Gooning’s final form may be even more safe and generic—mean reversion comes for us all.
It’s entirely reasonable to believe the above problems are worth having in exchange for popular recognition and legitimacy. Fetish communities have a long history of disagreement about legibility—consider Fifty Shades of Grey, the most popular work about kink in this century. It introduced millions to BDSM and made D/S relationships legible to the mainstream, accelerating their normalization, but also reinforced incorrect and dangerous ideas about BDSM practices. Even a decade later it’s unclear whether its impact on the kink community was net positive.
Either way, it’s too late to put the goon genie back in the bottle—gooning is here, it’s legible, it’s blowing its load all over popular culture and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. And in spite of my legibility-cautious stance I’m excited for what we’ll accomplish with new collaborators and more resources. Smaller offshoot communities still have the ability to choose illegibility, however.
If you do seek shelter in obscurity, you will need to break off and form your own oasis in the Great Erotic Diaspora. You don’t need to make your discord private or lock your twitter account (although this does help), the essence of illegibility is in how you communicate. Explore and experiment, but refuse to explain or categorize yourself. Do not give your creation a name. Speak in a way that only your kindred spirits will understand. This is an art, but if you practice well, then like Borges’ monster you can leave a trail of artifacts in plain sight without exposing your true form. So get out there and be Weird. No one can stop you if you jerk off in a language they can’t understand.
MOMMY TOMMY IS NOT CRINGE BRO