Pornography & a disturbing post-human future

Somewhere near you—next door, in a room down the hall—there may well be a "gooner".

You might not know what that is, and I’m trying to figure out how to tell you without making me too squeamish to write this or you too squeamish to read it.

But we’ve waved away too many things because they seemed too strange to discuss—until it was too late. We might want to unsee all this, but it’s time to see it clearly.

In the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Kolitz documents the widespread and growing phenomenon of "gooning"—a pornography-obsessed subculture among predominantly Gen Z males who spend hours, even days, consuming pornography, often in front of multiple screens in specifically constructed rooms they call "gooncaves." The goal isn’t sexual satisfaction but the indefinite prolongation of arousal: what they describe as reaching a "goonstate" of transcendent bliss, supposedly to achieve the kind of "ego death" promised by the higher levels of Eastern meditation.

Even before reading this piece, some might conclude they know what it’s about. After all, we’re a quarter century into the almost-ubiquitous presence of internet porn. The subject comes up in virtually every church men’s accountability group, every congregational parenting seminar. And, of course, we know the problem behind porn is much more ancient than any of our modern technologies. From the very beginning, the Christian church—in continuity with the Old Testament—warned believers about sexual immorality (porneia). And Jesus taught about the dangers of imaginations captive to lust (Matt. 5v28).

Sexual integrity

Lust, after all, is the abstraction of a person into someone consumable and disposable. Pornography is meant to give a person the simulation of a sexual experience unanchored from the covenant fidelity and intimacy of the one-flesh union of marriage. The Bible’s vision of sexual integrity is not, as is often caricatured, the result of a scolding God who resents human pleasure. Quite the opposite. Usually, though, the church has had to teach this proper understanding of lust in spite of the fact that the short-term "benefits" of sexual unrestraint seem more carefree and harmless than chastity.

In recent years, many have pointed to the misogyny of the "incels" (involuntarily celibate)—young men, perhaps first brought to attention in the gamer world, who cannot find a mate and who burn with rage against the women to whom they believe themselves entitled for attention and sexual pleasure.

The gooners, though, would not claim to be involuntarily celibate. They describe themselves as even a step beyond those men—in a tale as old as Lamech—who want sexual pleasure without responsibility. It is not that these gooners want other people’s bodies apart from their hearts and souls; they don’t want the bodies either. It’s not that they want to distil pleasure from covenant; they don’t even really want the pleasure.

Kolitz describes those among the gooners who call themselves "pornosexual." They are, he writes, not just uninterested in real-life sex with a real-life person but are terrified by it. Respondents told Kolitz they found it "exhausting" to try to figure out what’s going on in a partner’s head. Indeed, over time, this community has found that it’s not just the friction of interpersonal intimacy they find exhausting and boring but even pornography itself—at least the way any previous generation has understood it.

Evolution

The gooners represent the evolution of porn: those adapted to the ubiquity of it have grown accustomed to a degree of stimulation most porn isn’t equipped to satisfy. A new form described as a "porn music video" (PMV) has emerged, with rapid-fire and contextless images speeding by almost too fast for any of them to be noticed. This, Kolitz writes, is a kind of "freebase pornography—porn purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to the brain."

In pornography as humanity has known it, going all the way back to its roots in ancient prostitution, one of the typical pretences is that the person being "consumed" actually likes the consumer. Not so with gooning.

In this new evolution of porn, Kolitz notes, entrepreneurs design videos that explicitly ridicule the gooners for their inability to have real relationships, for the shamefulness of gooning itself. "Healthy gooning, as any gooner can tell you, is an oxymoron," Kolitz writes. "In this world, I was coming to learn, the degradation is the point."

"If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself," Kolitz writes. "Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone," even taunting the viewers themselves that no one would ever want to be with them in real life and that their using this "content" is proof of that.

Upsetting

One commenter on the social media platform X, whom I couldn’t discern as Christian or otherwise religious, wrote that he found the article "genuinely, viscerally upsetting" for the "dehumanisation" described in the piece, noting that there’s something "really grim going on here."

"It’s like total abstraction," this commenter wrote. "The arousal is coming not from sex but from the stimuli itself. It’s almost post-human." I would argue almost is not even the right word here.

This should alarm us on its own terms, but it also should wake us up even more, because this is not just about pornography or sexuality or the next generation. It fits with a much broader move toward a world where everything is like goonspace—stimulation without communion. Describing the misery of the gooners, Kolitz uses the metaphor of hell. This is perhaps more apt than even he intends.

C.S. Lewis

As C. S. Lewis taught us in the last century, our problem is not that we want more pleasure than a schoolmarmish God will let us have but that we are too easily pleased—fine with mud pies in the slum because we cannot imagine a holiday on the seaside. We’ve quoted that repeatedly, but I wonder if we really understand it.

What’s unique here is not lust and shame (as old as Eden’s fig leaves) but the ecosystem that can give us exactly what we think we want—until we are so trapped that we no longer know how to feel want. Sexual sin distorts attachment; this ecosystem dissolves it.

Porn industries and their allies don’t make people sexier. They evacuate the capacity for human eros by abstracting pleasure from persons, from story, from place, from love.

Again, Lewis rightly argued throughout many of his books that when we treat appetites as masters rather than as signals, they shrink our capacity to enjoy even the pleasures they promise. Overstimulated and under attached, the nervous system habituates to novelty and speed and loses patience for the slow, strange mercy of covenant love.

A disembodied age

The gooners are not some freakish fringe. They are omens of a disembodied age that beckons us all. We can say no to it. We might seem powerless in front of such matters, even wilfully ignorant, but the broader body of Christ, transcending time and space, knows the way out: the mystery of Christ (Eph. 5v31–32).

But escaping this disembodiment will require us to recognise that we face not only our own fallen flesh but also an entire industry of unseen algorithms trained to lead us, step by step, toward this post-human hell. It will require seeing clearly and modelling a different story—one that is set at a wedding feast, not in a warehouse of screens.

Among the first tasks of the 21st-century church will be to break this spell—to remind ourselves that we are creatures, not machines, and that we are created for love. Love is slower and riskier than a blur of images. Love seeks not to degrade and humiliate us but to point us to the one who loves us beyond all we can ask or even think. Love does beckon us to come and die, but not to be obliterated in ego death. Love calls us through death to newness of life and fullness of joy.

We can proclaim that kind of love, and we can model it—especially with those who believe themselves too far gone to ever be really loved. We can offer grace and mercy and community through the gospel and, with it, actual life and love.

The gates of hell cannot withstand that kind of love. Surely the screens of goonspace can’t either.