Let’s dive right in! Gooning is masturbation with diligence and great duration, somewhat obsessively, often in a bit of a trance state where time loses all meaning. Gooning done properly is quite thoroughly mind-altering.

naked man in a goon trance while jerking it with a jelly sleeve sex toy

Gooning is serious masturbation, usually while looking at porn and neglecting all your other obligations. The connotations of being a gooner are comical and derisive. Gooning, like masturbation itself only more so, has a stigma.

furtively gooning at the office to clandestine bondage porn when he ought to be working

Gooning stigma is only to be expected. Gooning is slang from Reddit, gaming communities, and other places like that. These are not places famous for sex positivity, so it’s no wonder that the discourse around gooning is not sex-positive either. Gooners are almost always figures of mockery.

faceless gooning otaku whacking off to endless boxes of porn DVDs

Although gooning is male-coded by default, women can and do goon. However I suspect (without evidence) that few women are labeled as gooners or teased for gooning unless they’ve self-identified and claimed the label for their own reasons, just as women don’t usually get as much masturbation stigma laid upon them as men do.

cartoon of a woman with big tits searching porn for art references who ends up gooning

In an older but still active subsense of the word “gooning”, gooners may deliberately edge themselves or delay orgasm for long periods of time for an enhanced orgasmic experience; this can be a deliberate means of achieving the self-hypnotized or dazed state that gooners also frequently achieve by accident. This edging or orgasm control sense of the word was an early connotation that is still reflected in how Wikipedia weakly redirects “gooning” to its edging article.

Urban Dictionary includes many competing and conflicting entries (as always) but the popular entries exclusively focused on edging tend to be older. Newish entries with a good ratio of upvotes to downvotes look more like this one:

Gooning: For males: the act of becoming completely self-absorbed with your penis and masturbation, such that your face and mannerisms takes on the personality of a goon: tongue out, vacant expression, grunting, muttering. Men gooning often prefer hours of edging/erection to actual release/orgasm. An artifact of modern times and plentiful porn.

See also this one:

Gooning: masturbation so intense that it becomes a state of meditation that consumes you and provides endless pleasure, you either pair it with overstimming (cumming as much as you can) or edging (trying not to cum for as long as possible). There is not one way to goon, they all just have one goal; be consumed by your masturbation into bliss. It is almost always (but doesn’t need to be) paired with porn or surrounds itself with porn. It is also known at bating.

If you are young and highly online, this gooning primer will perhaps have been a belaborment of the obvious for you. But I have been encountering gooner references for a dozen years or more, and despite obvious context clues referencing masturbation, I couldn’t quite pin down what all the deeper slang connotations were. I finally had to get down in the linguistic research mud and figure all this out. Once having done so, why not share with the class?

I’m sure there are gooner nuances I missed or even got wrong. Feel free to fill up the comments with your takes on gooning!

Art credits: The naked gooning man with the jelly sleeve toy at the top of the post is by an unknown/anonymous artist. The office worker furtively gooning at his desk while clandestinely viewing bondage porn is by Adler. The faceless otaku goon methodically whacking his way through boxes of porn DVDs is by Vyrus Smith. The two-panel comic of the woman who accidentally ends up gooning while porn searching is by artist Butter Sugoi.

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