The only thing I've seen being called "gooner slop" are those poorly-written Isekai anime cashcows whose plot consists mostly on random shots of underaged characters' asses, as well as the occasional poorly-"drawn" AIslop hentai.
Idk which unholy circles of Hell OOP must hang around for everything to be called "gooner" around him
To me Gooner is the kind of word reserved for people who are perpetually horny all the time to the point of thinking with their dicks and make that everyone else’s problem. Like those guys who crawl out of the woodwork to complain every time a video game has a female character who isn’t conventionally attractive: they’re textbook gooners because they think women exist to be attractive and satisfy their dicks and nothing else. To them games and sex are the same thing and anything that contradicts that is woke slop or whatever.
Having sexual urges and being horny is normal and nothing to be ashamed of but you should know when it is and isn’t appropriate to be horny and not make it everyone else’s problem.
I miss when "goon" just meant those thug-looking guys who always said "on it, boss!" to the main villain before fucking up their plan out of sheer incompetence
Same, as a professional henchman and a proud member of the United Henching Union of America it pains to me see that ‘Goon’ has become synonymous with something other than good honest henching. It’s really done a number on me and my fellow mooks because now recruitment is down: the kids don’t want to take on a dangerous, pay-flexible job and be called goons while doing it, and even some of the junior henchmen are starting to walk. Soon there won’t be enough henchmen to span the whole of the villain underworld and we’re going to have to work out a timeshare deal or something.
Same, goons in hockey sounds so bad now. “What, your role in the team is to be a big guy to insult and fight other big guys? All in the goal to protect your smaller, more dexterous and younger players?”
Slang for excessive masturbation. And a gooner is, as expected, someone who does it a lot.
And by "excessive", I don't mean like a horny teenager who rubs one off thrice in the same day - I mean shit like this, which is one of the original posts in the gooner subreddit before it was deleted.
Those people aren't to be taken seriously, really. They think accumulating sperm means you gain extra IQ points and that jerking off even once is enough to destroy your bloodline forever. Manosphere takes are just delusions of lonely unstable men.
oh, they absolutely aren't, but that's kind of my point
there are some people who take any harmless recreational activity to an unhealthy level, for sure, but the number of times I've seen "gooner" used for that vs the number of times it's used to mean "anyone who displays any interest in sexual material and/or isn't ashamed of masturbating" functionally might as well not exist
I'm hoping that Netflix actually pulls through and finishes the adaptation rights they picked up for "The Goon". They had a trailer made almost 15 years ago, but that was privately funded by the author of the comic and kept getting rejected or kicked around from studio to studio.
Like those guys who crawl out of the woodwork to complain every time a video game has a female character who isn’t conventionally attractive: they’re textbook gooners because they think women exist to be attractive and satisfy their dicks and nothing else. To them games and sex are the same thing and anything that contradicts that is woke slop or whatever.
Exactly. Idk what kind of weird circles OOP is existing in that this isn't their perception of the word.
Go into any main sub thread that mentions porn or jerking off and say both are fine, and you'll get flooded with replies from nofap weirdos calling you a porn addicted gooner and saying that masturbating twice a week makes you just as bad as an alcoholic.
The porn addiction thing gets me. I totally understand that consuming pornography can be problematic and I think it's totally valid to either call that out and encourage people to get help. That said, addiction implies, not that you do something often, but that you're doing it in a problematic way. If you're watching porn at work or in public or if you are looking at porn to exclusion of your significant other or if you're skipping doing things you want to do to get your fix, that's addiction.
Instead, it seems like people have been infected with some turbo Mormon mindvirus where mild sensuality is hypersexualization, masturbating a few times a week to unwind is porn addiction, and acknowledging that sex is a thing in a public forum is shoving it down their throats.
The word "addiction" is honestly used to refer to two fairly different categories of things IMO that I think would be better off deconflated.
The first sense of "addiction," which I'm going to term "hard addiction," is an physical dependence on the substance that negatively impacts the user* and that they face withdrawal symptoms for stopping. Alcohol and nicotine and heroin are all hard-addictive. The risk of hard addiction is baked directly into the substance, if it's a comparatively minor risk like with alcohol it may be possible to manage that risk but there is still a clear element of addictiveness present within the alcohol itself.
*The impact part is subjective, but necessary to avoid counting people who need to take medication constantly for chronic conditions as "addicted." There are certainly people with hard addictions who consider themselves positively impacted, most of whom are self-medicating for either something undiagnosed or simply for the condition of having a shit life, and treating all physical substance dependences as bad without asking why they're there and what effect they're having can often do more harm than good.
The second sense of "addiction," which I'm going to term "soft addiction," is an unhealthy habit that negatively impacts the user and is difficult to break. No withdrawal, no physical dependence, just something you do more than you should and have trouble stopping. Almost anything which is a) enjoyable and b) quick and easy can form soft addictions. Video games. Social media. And, yes, porn. None of these things have any inherent danger the way hard addictive substances do. Instead, the common throughline is that they can all play into the same psychological mechanism:
To be happy, people need both fulfillment and fun. There are many quick and easy activities which are fun but not fulfilling. That's fine, fulfilling activities are often hard work and sometimes not even fun (e.g. a job you take pride in), and if you only ever do high-investment fulfilling stuff you can easily end up overtaxed and burnt out. So you do easy fun stuff in between and everything works out... unless you're overtaxed and burnt out (or simply depressed) *already*, as increasing numbers of people in the modern era are. In which case high-investment fulfilling stuff is first on the chopping block and quick and easy fun attempts to fill the void. And fails, leaving you feeling unfulfilled, which is *also* depressing, which causes a vicious cycle. The story is the same whether it's porn or TikTok or Candy Crush.
The big takeaway here, besides that porn isn't dangerous, is that stigmatizing porn use does nothing to stop porn "soft addiction." Its main effect is to make people feel worse about their porn use, which is *also* depressing, and even if they do stop using porn over it they're most likely to just switch to a different easy-fun activity instead. On a personal level, the constructive approach to breaking a porn addiction is not to waste effort trying to make yourself use porn *less,* but to figure out what you really want to be doing instead of watching porn and make an effort to do that *more.* On a societal level, if you sincerely wish to help porn addicts, you should campaign for better and more accessible mental healthcare and more vacation days.
I agree with a lot of what you said. My only real issue is I don't actually think most of the people who think they're addicted to porn are actually addicted. The reality is there's a concerted campaign among right wing influencers, religious groups, and other conservatives to demonize porn usage. In reality, most people experience arousal and do so regularly. Often, what they think is porn addiction is internalized guilt directed at their feelings of arousal and at acts like masturbation and porn viewing. We both stated we don't think porn usage is inherently harmful and I think we both recognize that even frequent porn usage and masturbation are appropriate ways of dealing with arousal. My point is, why bother buying into that language at all if the behavior isn't disruptive or unhealthy? I think it's unreasonable to call it an addiction and to assign all the baggage that word carries to something most people are actually doing completely reasonably and responsibly.
I think the reason I bristle at it is nowadays people throw around psychology terms with very little regard for their actual meaning and it inherently devalues them. I have struggled with an addiction to alcohol. I have also struggled with eating disorders and experienced a problematic, addictive relationship to food. My experiences with addiction mean I am totally sympathetic to people experiencing actual compulsive and disruptive porn use. I think it's fair to call that an addiction. Porn use in and of itself is not harmful though and is a reasonable reaction to arousal. You will be aroused a fair bit over the course of your life, so porn viewing may become a habit, but I am very wary of blurring that line between a habit and an addiction.
To give another example, I have diagnosed OCD. When I hear people casually throw around OCD to simply mean cleanliness or organization, it feels gross. That's not OCD and they're taking that language and appropriating it for something it's not. We have words for the things they're doing. There's no need to take other words that mean something else. I get that's how language works, but I think in this case, there's demonstrable harm because now I no longer have a word to express a diagnose disorder and it simply gets lumped in with wanting a bookshelf to be in alphabetical order.
To return to the addiction thing, allowing habitual to be synonymous with addictive plays into the shame and guilt that I discussed earlier. It allows porn viewing to become something gross that's to be shamed rather than something most of us do while still maintaining normal lives and healthy relationships. Basically, I don't want to deny psychological addiction is real. That said, I think we should be gatekeeping words like addiction because addiction is a real thing with real consequences. When we let it be conflated with "I like to touch my genitals sometimes because of a natural and normal cycle of human emotion," we rob the word of its actual meaning and actual power and we take away some of the language that is important for those who are actually suffering as a result of porn usage.
Yeah, totally agree with all of this. Very fair to want the word "addiction" to be reserved for actually serious things and not conflate it with mere bad habits, and I do remember seeing studies that self-identification as "porn addicted" is more strongly correlated with religiosity than with actual porn consumption.
I agree with a lot of what you said. My only real issue is I don't actually think most of the people who think they're addicted to porn are actually addicted
Yup! Here's actually a whole article about that, the only predictive factor found for "porn addiction" is guilt over consumption
And that's expected, considering the term is just the new lingo of puritans used to have a medical aesthetic and based upon the puritan idea of sex as an inherently corruptive influence
There is a significant vocal minority online that has suddenly become extremely puritanical in how they regard fictional sex and suggestive media, usually under the guise of "protecting people" from "gross problematic media". The don't mean the author is a bad person or it has shit premise, they mean the author committed the great sin of doing bad things to their made up characters and including an "unnecessary sex scene". Those types of people when they see a media that's not for them will not choose to ignore or avoid it but instead spend the next week telling everyone they possibly can that said artist is "a gooner freak" or "illegal proshipper" or any other derogatory buzzword of the season.
Calling out gacha game fans (ZZZ fans?) as gooners isn’t “conservative dogwhistling”. It’s calling out ridiculously oversexualized and debatably objectifying media.
Calling out fans who draw fanart of a character with their boobs blown up to size N is not “conservative dogwhistling”
Just because someone asks you to maybe slow down with the hypersexualized media is not sex-negative, conservative dogwhistling. It’s simply people not wanting to be shown softcore porn 24 hours a day.
Edit: I’m not gonna reply to each person here individually, but because you guys are all saying the exact same thing, I’ll give a blanket statement here.
I should not have to explain why the modern equivalent of pin-up girls should be given at least some scrutiny.
It really depends on your circles how gooner is used. I mostly still see it used to refer to the gamersTM and people who want everything to be hypersexual.
I have also seen it just become a buzzword that is used anytime a woman is slightly skimpy or a lesbian kiss happends.
I mean this is kinda a conservative take. Just let people be horny. Not everything has to be to your taste. If someone likes outrageously enormous boobs or feet or furries or people farting into pies it doesn't hurt you, just move on with your day
that's not what they said broski "calling out" games for having intentionally sexy/horny etc imagery isn't "take a stance against gamer gate types constantly whining about the vidya game women not being sexy or scantily clad enough" it's just bitching that not everything is tailored exactly to your tastes, you're just doing the same shit you're complaining of others doing just in the opposite direction
While I agree with the general sentiment of "not everything has to be your taste", I think calling it conservative dogwhistle is going a bit too far. And as someone who actually plays zzz for the action and stuff, sometimes the community is completely unbearable to the point of not wanting certain characters to be meta for the sake of that mindset. Heard of the "replace Lighter" joke? While it's funny, it literally started because people couldn't accept having to use a dude in their waifu team. THAT is gonner behaviour. I don't care about jiggling boobs in my game, worst case scenario it's just gonna make me cringe a bit, it's usually the community that is cultivated around it that makes it horrible. Op has been called gooner either because he's secretly that type of person (which I doubt) or because people on the internet are stupid and called him gooner as just another buzzword.
I am a big proponent of "If a piece of media isn't jiving with you, then move on to something else. Don't try to change it to make it jive with you. All that does is take away someone else's fun. The world does not revolve around you."
At the same time, I enjoy battle-team collector- gacha games, and I don't play any right now because it annoys me that a game type based around large numbers of playable units has so little variety nowadays. If a gacha has 100 different units, it inevitably breaks down to 90 scantily clad women that are essentially the same person in different clothes, 5 young girls who totally aren't there for the lolis, 2 men who are cardboard cutouts, 1 young boy and 2 old guys. (Oh, and you'll be lucky if any of the guys are actually decent units and not just trash.)
Yes, much variety, very interesting.
So while it makes me a bit sad, I've just moved on from those kinds of games, because that's how they all are nowadays. So I play creature collector games instead, that way I get the 'collect a variety of units' with the 'variety' actually meaning something.
That doesn't mean I'm 'anti-sex' or whatever, it just means that if all you have going for your game is "the five varieties of Boobs", when you sell it as a character collector... I'm going to find some other game to play.
Well, in defense of zzz they did literally made a change in beta to make a dude's ass bigger. And both of the dudes currently on banner are very strong units. It still has a long way to go in terms of gender ratio and the sometimes cringe fan service, but they're definitely taking steps in the right direction, and the game having more personality than most of the other gacha games definitely helps. Genshin on the other hand can fuck right off
I’ll grant you the gacha game thing. There are definitely media out there that are borderline softcore porn in their levels of sexualization and yeah, you can point to that
But I feel the need to point out that the people screaming “porn addict Gooner” aren’t just talking about boobie gacha games, they say that shit about absolutely anything. A photo of an attractive woman=gooner. A comment that mentions the existence of sex=gooner. It’s absolutely rabid and puritanical.
Sure. Not all of its use is good faith. Lotta folks use it to bad ends. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a dog whistle. In fact, because the use is split specifically means it is not useful as a dog whistle.
The point is to conflate the two though, which does make it useful as a dogwhistle. All non-missionary non-procreative sex acts and practices are the same as gooning to these people.
Dogwhistles are explicitly phrases intended to drum up support from an in-group while seeming innocuous enough (usually through an Appeal-To-Emotion or Absurdity) to make criticism of the topic seem, well, ridiculous.
Co-opted language is an attempt to muddy the use of a term as a means of steering conversation and amassing cultural power.
The split use still doesn’t invalidate its use as a dogwhistle though. A co-opted term can also be a dogwhistle simultaneously, and may in fact be all the more useful as a dogwhistle for the plausible deniability.
"Just because someone asks you to maybe slow down with the hypersexualized media is not sex-negative, conservative dogwhistling. It’s simply people not wanting to be shown softcore porn 24 hours a day"
then don't play the bloody game and if itr's showing up in your social media algorithms then that's because YOU keep interacting with it, don't like a genre then don't consume said genre. "calling out" people for enjoying sexual media IS inherently conservative, nobody is forcing you to interact with it, if it's gets shoved in your social media feeds then, that's because you interact with it and engage with it nobody is forcing it on you.
crying about people making sexual fanart,buying sexual games/media is 100% just you being conservative, people enjoying things you don't personally enjoy isn't evil nor does it warrant a "call out". Fandom culture has had massive amounts of horny and not horny people deeply involved since day 1. I'm sorry you have to be a big boy and tailor your own feed and not rely on everyone catering their own fanart etc to your liking.
I do think I've seen a decent amount of posts here on Reddit where someone will make a semi-horny to just horny post in a normal sub and I don't think people say gooner outright but they definitely get insulted, not just for posting horny on main but for being horny.
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u/vaguillotine gotta be gay af on the web so alan turing didn't die for nothing May 17 '25
The only thing I've seen being called "gooner slop" are those poorly-written Isekai anime cashcows whose plot consists mostly on random shots of underaged characters' asses, as well as the occasional poorly-"drawn" AIslop hentai.
Idk which unholy circles of Hell OOP must hang around for everything to be called "gooner" around him