On Gooning

Life in 21st century western society is characterized, in part, by the completion of the shift away from old Christian ideas toward modern ones rooted in liberalism and feminism. Really, I mean that people are okay with porn now. We are faced with a historical singularity where mass-produced content is intentionally crafted to maximize eroticism; i.e. to create the most erotic work conceivably possible in the digital medium. Yes, obscenity is still regulated on television, but for the first time in human history, there exists a public digital mass commodity market for overtly erotic media.

Were men in any other time in history faced with something close to this?—Or are we truly facing the greatest provocation of sexual desire in history? An always-available distribution of photos and videos to be consumed in private, in seemingly infinite variety and format. Prostitution required physical locality, and a greater social and financial cost than internet pornography. Porn sent by mail or other means of physical distribution was bound also by locality and the need for physical storage. On the internet, pornography exists essentially without locale, and storage is hidden from the consumer. Due to the mass adoption of smartphones, everyone is theoretically milliseconds away from porn. The smartphone also means that creators of porn, participants in “sex work,” have a lower barrier for entry and can reach a global base of clients. They may even be able to do so anonymously, without impacting other areas of their life. We are witnessing an internet-based deterritorialization of gooning. It shouldn’t require any further analysis of historical erotic forms to see why the current state of affairs is unprecedented: the structure of networked pornography alone elevates it above—or at least makes it singular among—all historical iterations.

The existence of this largely above-ground (on the consumer side) porn market is far from the whole problem. Imagine, how would a history textbook written a millennium from now describe the emergence of the selfie and the corresponding change in self-identity relative to pre-internet society and the initial development of photography? Due to the smartphone (the goon terminal), foids online—perhaps most zoomer women—submit their own likenesses to the internet, basically the same global repository (there is no locality) which contains the porn market.

Karl Marx, in criticism of a form of false (to him) communism, wrote

“this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property.”

Perhaps what we have now is a liberal form of this communalization of women, where instead of moving from the so-called “private property” of marriage to “universal prostitution” (Marx said this),¹ we have a form of individual simulated self-ownership of women, reclaiming themselves as property—“I am My Own Whore.”² The real problem with this is in its solipsism. Everybody enjoys the company of promiscuous women, but this digital self-adoption of the pornographic way of seeing carries paranoia, shame, isolation. The dynamism and will of real life party is totally lost. Each jpeg is its own jail cell.

Could things become any more extreme? Sensitive young men are faced in private, always with the full force of human erotic creation. You can turn your phone into a Skinner Box if you really want to — maybe even if you don’t want to. As in a typical Skinner Box where the animal learns to associate stimulus with physiological response, men are made to associate cybernetic pornography to their sexuality, thereby domesticating it and confining themselves to pathetic isolated gooning. To choose not to goon is to refuse to succumb to an entire infrastructure contrived for maximal temptation; literally to overcome humanity’s greatest effort toward eroticism. The entire economic setup is amenable to description in terms of a Skinner Box style system, with its quantized inputs and outputs, its wages and credentialism: the goon economy.

In Bronze Age Mindset, BAP observes that “Chimp in state of nature never jerks off, but in captivity he does […] where he senses he is in owned space.” Throughout the entire work, BAP argues that the point of life and biology cannot be found in the mere study of natural selection and phylogeny, but must be searched for in phenomena like the play-fighting of animals, birds in song, and the cultivation of beauty. All things that may ultimately be dismissed by biologists as unimportant to ‘survival and reproduction.’ For the chimp in captivity, these sorts of behaviors — “solving problem of life in and under trees, mastering what tools he can, mastering social relations " — become futile. We exist in owned space, trapped.³ Gooning is a form of idle stimulation in response to this context.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, in the first book of My Struggle, notices the analog of owned space in art:

“Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it. Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies anymore, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasingly large part of our lives is lived. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist.”

I invoke this to say that the extent of our captivity stretches far beyond modern work and culture, but to the entire space of human imagination—of what can even be conceived as possible or available by men.⁴ What’s interesting about this passage from Knausgaard, especially put next to BAP, is what he does feel in pre-1900s art. He explains, “the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain,” and ultimately attributes this to the “objectivity” of the works. This feeling arrives within the “distance between reality and the portrayal of reality.”

Our prison of jpegs runs exactly counter to the qualities Knausgaard speaks of. Porn today is dominated by photography, especially selfies or techniques that are tied to the digital medium. This places pornography squarely into the realm of entrapped, fully-exhausted, dried-up, owned expression.

What could happen to society if goon culture continues to spread? In Herodotus’ Histories, Candaules, ruler of Lydia, belives his wife Nyssia is the most beautiful woman in the world, so he tells this to his guard Gyges. Candaules doesn’t trust that his words alone have convinced Gyges, so he insists that Gyges secretly views his naked wife.

“Master,” [Gyges says], “what an unsound suggestion, that I should see my mistress naked! When a woman’s clothes come off, she dispenses with her modesty, too. (trans. Godley 1920)

The word translated to modesty here, aidōs is also used to mean reverence, honor, and shame. In the Greek context, it has to do with protecting one’s image. This emotion is said to have promoted social cohesion; it was what compelled people to follow the rules of society. Nyssia, having seen Gyges, tells him that he must either kill himself or Candaules, because he has “outraged all custom” by looking at her. He kills Candaules. The removal of aidōs due to Gyges’ voyeuristic look was sufficient to end a dynasty.

Imagine, then, the ramifications of a society-wide disappearance of aidōs. Could the exclusive partnership of men and women continue at all? What will become of the family? Will it bring about a total undoing of all society? Probably not. I think that aidōs, our sense of shame, is too fundamental to go away completely. Certainly, these social phenomena will have an effect on birth rates and partnership, but a goon-based collapse or regime-change seems unlikely. A David Foster Wallace-style artificial intelligence goon-tainment system does seem within reach, though: a virtual reality video model that can respond to brain activity and infer the most erotic output for its viewer may be sufficient to overpower most men. In the face of these mounting challenges, we must resist total captivation. Goon if you must, but do not let yourself be domesticated by the private Skinnerian nature of online porn. Cultivate your will. Lift weight. Spend time in sun. Find what evokes the feeling that Knausgaard gets from pre-1900 painting.