In the psychic landscape of late capitalism, fringe modifications of mental refuge and sexual behaviors emerge as a response to hyper-mediation, oversaturation, and commodified affect. One significant subcultural movement is gooning: the masturbation practice wherein the subject enters a trance-like state, edging themselves by withholding orgasm for hours while masturbating glued to pornography.¹ The gooner represents a libidinal reorganization of genital stimulation under conditions of relentless dissonance from selfhood brought about by technological intertwinement. Not simply a sexual preference, but a symptomatic response; Gooning functions as a ritual in the psychic economy of late capitalism, enacting a fascistic submission to jouissance through digital overstimulation, bypassing symbolic mediation and relational development in favor of commodified, compulsive pleasure.

Gooning pursues not orgasm but jouissance. Jouissance is a libidinal intensity, an excess that surpasses pleasure and ruptures symbolic coherence by bordering on the ecstatic and even psychotic. Where pleasure is sought after for satisfaction and the alleviation of tension within the confines of egoic boundaries integrated into social norms, i.e. orgasm or smoking, jouissance exceeds what meaning, law, and language contain. In his 1960 essay, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan writes, “Jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks, as such. It can only be said between the lines by whoever occupies its place” (Lacan 1966, 695). Where the speaking subject is barred from full jouissance because of language’s castrating power, the trance-like state a gooner indulges in is a transgression of the typical usage of masturbation as a means to orgasm. A masturbatory practice that is sought for the easing of tension, in alignment with pleasure, must end at the point of satisfaction: orgasm. The subject remains a participant in the symbolic order, utilizing genital stimulation for momentary ease. The gooner defies this pleasure principle² in that they do not speak, they act in excessive compulsive masturbation rituals, the pornagraphic image a fragmented echo of sexuality for a subject who refuses to be castrated. The gooner in their repetition and perpetuation of a heightened state of arousal is consumed by sensation that cannot be symbolized, no longer seeking satisfaction or regulation, but entranced by compulsion and painful enjoyment. Language dissolves, ego boundaries erode, and the subject becomes absorbed into a loop of digital arousal: a trance of self-erasure that opens the door to pleasurable submission, and thus to fascistic psychic structures. By overwhelming and bypassing the symbolic structures that govern the ego as a coherent mediator between drive, reality, and identity, gooning short-circuits the perception of selfhood; The gooner’s body is no longer unified, but scattered across pornographic images. Identification is not with a singular image but a ceaseless series of stimuli that results in a breakdown of coherence, agency, and differentiation from the object of desire.

In revealing how the gooner may leave themself vulnerable in the arms of authoritarian leadership, a substitution of the father in classical Freudian psychoanalysis by way of the image as the symbolic device for libinial organization should be made. As theorized by William Reich in his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, obedience of the individual flows from the repression of sexual impulses in early childhood, garnering traction for the submission to fascism by way of an authoritarian leader representing the father of a given society. Gooning suggests that overstimulation also produces submission. While juxtaposing repression, the act of sedation via perpetual masturbation enacted by the gooner additionally disorganizes the ego and produces docility. Reich argues that fascism is not simply a political regime but a psychological condition shaped by libidinal management by way of repression of genital sexuality. He writes, “The suppression of the natural sexuality of the child, particularly the genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, ‘good’ and ‘docile’ in the authoritarian sense of the words” (Reich 1933, 30). In a swing of the pendulum, gooning exhibits an excess of pleasure in the form of jouissance, rewiring the libidinal economy from the repressive force of the Oedipal structure as replicated by the strong paternalism held by fascist leaders into a state of docility. The gooner’s docility by contrast is characterized by a captivity to one’s own prison of masturbation without orgasm. In the libidinal economy of the gooner, overstimulation via endless pornographic loops, compulsive edging, and the pursuit of trance beyond orgasm produces the same result that Reich described: psychic submission, the dissolution of autonomy, and a desire for domination. He continues, “The affective tie to the leader is a direct continuation of the child’s tie to the father. It is the basic mechanism of all authority. It is an expression of the need for authority, which is based on the suppression of sexuality” (Reich 1933, 53). The goon community (goonmunity, if you will) does not have a leader in the traditional sense, but rather submits to the image as their phallic authority: endlessly commanding the subject’s attention not only in the psychoanalytic sense of ego disorganizing but additionally aided by the addictive nature of online media consumption. The fatherless submission of gooning must structure obedience via self-annihilation, the gooner must disintegrate into their own ecstasy to achieve the classically described glassy-eyed, mouthwatering trance. Reich echoes the nature of jouissance inscribed into gooning in his diagnosis of mysticism as “...a psychological expression of the sexual yearning that has been turned away from real life” (Reich 1933, 146). The gooner’s trance mirrors Reich’s mysticism: the libidinal withdrawal from real life into ecstatic fantasy. Here, submission arises from hyperstimulation rather than repression, not from denial but from a loss of ego boundaries at the hands of jouissance, now structured psychopolitically. Gooning is privatized, to be practiced in solitude in front of the screen as libidinal fascism: not the result of ideological manipulation but of compulsive digital ecstasy.

The gooner, embodying jouissance as a position of ecstatic captivity in one’s own heightened arousal, operates in a terrain of unsymbolized emotional access. Also featured in this terrain lies the act of screaming, an affective expression adapted in early psychological development during infanthood as a primal, somatic discharge of psychic pain or intensity. In her 1933 essay “The Psychology of Screaming,” Nina Searl argues that the scream is an overflow of raw affect, a psychic response when the ego is too disorganized to mediate between inner tension and external reality. Much like gooning, screaming emerges “not as signal, but as the affective equivalent of an uncontained fear” (Searl 1933, 240). Gooning becomes a scream without sound, without release, orgasm, or any resolution of tension. Searl describes a child patient who struggled with speech development, running around the room as a way to escape his own shrieks. Like the child Searl describes, the gooner is unable to metabolize desire through symbolic channels; instead collapsing into the body, into sensation, into a libidinal scream stripped of voice. The gooner’s prolonged stimulation becomes a form of affective evacuation, a way to manage psychic overload not through thought or speech but through the repetitive, auto-erotic loop of masturbatory submission.

To goon is to abandon selfhood in ecstatic trance, a behavior driven by libidinal excess and ecstatic collapse revealing a compulsive, commodified relationship to pleasure paving way for submission to fascism. The gooner represents a psychic economy shaped by overstimulation, emotional disorganization, and the disintegration of symbolic mediation in late capitalist life.

¹Full definition on Urban Dictionary by user Anonymous94611, “Well-known slang term in sexual subculture of chronic and compulsive masturbators, used both as a verb and a noun. Means achieving the trance-like blissful state reached when riding the edge of cumming for as long as possible, perhaps many minutes or even hours at a time. Also denoting the absence of control, compulsively pursuing that feeling as an avid masturbator. The term has been in frequent use for at least ten years, perhaps emerging from the physical look of one who is "gooning" or "in the goon," which is a self-possessed, glassy eyed stare of stupidity (thus, an oaf). Also known as "bator mush" and "slain in the bate."

²Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle, that is.

Works Cited

Anonymous94611. 2006 “Goon.” Urban Dictionary. www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goon.

Lacan, Jacques. 1966 Ecrits “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” 671-701. New York: W.W. Norton Company.

Reich, Wilhelm. 1933 The Mass Psychology of Fascism “Authoritarian Family Ideology and the Mass Psychology of Fascism,” 28-146. New York: Orgone Institute.

Searl, Nina. 1933 “The Psychology of Screaming,” 193-240. London.

Montgomerie West is a multidisciplinary designer, performance artist, and writer. Her chronically online habits of hoarding webs of information across internet cultures and academic interests in psychoanalysis, affect, and queer theory coalesce into a body of work meditating on desire, branding, and dogma.

Her one woman show CCC: A Montalk In the Panmonticon will run March 14-15 at The Maker’s Ensemble in Brooklyn, NY. Tickets available here.

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