A colleague reminded me of the apocryphal tale of the psychoanalyst who, after listening to a patient for only a few minutes, would mutter, “another one ruined by masturbation.” The joke was meant to move patients past the common neurotic fear that masturbating causes irrevocable damage.
Freud called masturbation the “primal addiction” upon which all others are based, but refused to link it to pathology or illness. And yet—despite 50 years of sex-positive culture—when considering the consequences for a generation raised on infinite, frictionless pornography, we’re abruptly returned to the age-old fear that masturbation will ruin us.
Our culture wars circle around hedonism and asceticism as they did at the turn of Freud’s century, with many trying to square the circle along political lines that blur as easily as the clientele lists of Jeffrey Epstein. Psychoanalysis, however, is neither hedonistic nor ascetic; it sees both as strategies to manage an intractable problem everyone fears and feels overwhelmed by. Namely, sexuality. If some patients reinforce problematic fantasies or pathological compromises through compulsive masturbation, who’s to say masturbation is the culprit rather than a symptom? If it were a symptom, what of?
Freud speculates that depleted potency as a result of overindulgence might not be a problem at all. Diminished sexual force could also mean reduced brutality and aggressiveness, a price civilization demands. (“Virtue accompanied by full potency is usually felt as a hard [HA!] task,” he writes.) In an era where masculinity is yet again actively weaponized, this potential disarmament is interesting, maybe even critical. Might exhausting our will-to-enjoy help contain, if not treat, our persistent agita?
Freud says he was most concerned with obstinate personality traits (read stubborn, aggro, negging) for the control or denial of sexuality’s more sensuous and vulnerable shades. In a letter to a colleague, he describes a patient whose rigidity “considerably reduces his chances”:
He wants to be neither man nor woman, nor will he settle for guilt-free masturbation; he insists on complete abstinence, though he might have learned this resolve only leads back to masturbation, which he then hides from me and endures for a time thanks to a heightened manic state—until the crash comes. He is a stone, wrapped in cotton wool.
The fear of masturbatory excess and thus damage is a residue of guilt that haunts the forms of sexuality we still refuse to contend with. Guilt can spread and harden—becoming a chronic societal refusal to consider the actual alternatives before us regarding, say, unregulated pornography, sex trafficking, pedophilia, and the glorification of misogyny and violence. How do we address these without turning into righteous moral police, reinforcing repression? We, too, are like the stone wrapped in cotton wool—our relationship to sexuality is ambivalent, puritanical, and indulgent. When will the crash come?
No recent article on contemporary sexuality has generated more cultural friction than Daniel Kolitz’s “The Goon Squad,” published in Harper’s last month. Suddenly, everyone knows what edging means, what a goon cave looks like, what a porn music video might contain. Kolitz searches this world for a shred of redemption. He wonders if gooners are pursuing a limit through terrifying excess—dreams of self-ruination, mental annihilation, ecstatic dissolution, desires for authority and community, the wish to crawl back into the warm infinity of screens. In fact, all this sounds a lot like what every one of us is struggling with. (Minus, perhaps, the industrial quantities of masturbation.) But Freud would say that masturbation merely discloses what’s already there. In my conversation with Kolitz for the second installment of Neurotica, I try to get to the bottom of what this new world can tell us about who we are—and where we are headed.
What is chronic porn masturbation a symptom of?
There are a number of factors at play. One is the sheer accessibility of it. As far as people looking at it to a self-punishing degree, in a way that interferes with their relationships, certain obvious social factors are at play. The pandemic sent people indoors. People are lonelier than they’ve ever been. People are less embedded in a community than they’ve ever been. And a lot of the people I spoke to had jobs that were punishing.
We’re all a bit messed up about what’s real these days. That’s why I liked the gooners as you depicted them, searching.
A lot of the porn they’re watching is actively telling them that they’re losers, that they have terrible lives. A lot of them told me they were unhappy and that this insulting entertainment was a way to eroticize and dig into the reality of the situation—to make it fun, in a way. The idea is that you can push through reality—or turn to fantasy—to engage with your life in a way that’s more appealing—or in this case, sexualized. What got me interested in the first place was the pornification of social media, everything being funneled into OnlyFans.
All the information we’re getting on our phones—news, shopping, communication from friends and family, hardcore porn—it’s all part of a seamless bombardment.
Porn has broken the barrier. At one time, it might have been confined to an embarrassing habit, something outside of daily life; now it’s part of it … Everything exists at once, in the same swirl. Maybe you do need some kind of boundary between those things, and the theorists I’m only half-familiar with are right.
In psychoanalysis, some part of sexuality is always repressed. The more you try to make it a seamless part of your conscious life, the more you’re actually ignoring those repressed aspects. Pornography might even reinforce repression for some. This seems to make sense with the fact that pornography has led to a disengagement with sex IRL.
I probably spoke to someone who calls himself Alpha Gooner more than anyone else in the piece. He was a pornosexual; I found him to be a fascinating character. We went through the whole course of his sex life. He’d had a little bit of sex in high school and then stopped in his early 30s. He was against porn as self-degradation; he viewed it as a hygienic regimen and a form of self-care—he would exercise, then watch porn to release his sexual desire. These were all distinct parts of his life that worked to keep him disengaged from sexuality.
There was almost something religious in your article. You have a ritual, a shrine, a desire for ecstatic communion, and this godlike figure speaking prohibitions.
It is self-consciously religious on their part. There is the Church of Gooning, and even the Goon State is a religious concept. Part of it is ironic, Internet humor. It’s the kind of joke that is not really a joke. The premise of the Goon State is that if you’re bombarded by enough pornography, you can enter a quasi-religious zone beyond the bounds of the quotidian experience. In the article, someone named Gooncultist, who is a sort of theorist, says, “the tricky thing about the Goon state is that you have to believe in it to get there.”
We had the idea that if all of our fantasies and choices—what we buy, what we subscribe to, our kinks—could be out in the open, that would be great. The psychoanalysts, though, were really worried about this world of enjoyment. The mandate “you must enjoy yourself” is hell on earth.
The gooners have made that a hell. They revel in the idea of creating hell on earth through the pursuit of endless, mindless pleasure. And it does look like hell. There’s the cave itself and then what’s on the screen, which is just the most hyperkinetic, ultraviolent, depraved pornographic imagery. And there’s a whole deranged lexicon attendant to the space—like “hand pumpers” and “pump sluts”—that is as hellish and alienating as possible.
It reminded me of punks, even hippies. In Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, kids are dropping out of society to become hippies. Here, there’s no real society to drop out of. There’s no Haight Ashbury to go take meth at, lose your mind, and commune with your fellow man. Instead of watching Netflix in your room, you watch deranged pornographic montages.
I was just looking at Signorelli’s The Apocalypse, it’s a sea of bodies being bitten, groped, and ripped apart. It’s quasi-orgiastic and horrible.
It did seem like a Renaissance depiction of hell.
What I found so striking in your portrait was the porn voice-over: “Keep scrolling. Further. Deeper. Forever. And ever. Submit. To porn. You can’t. Turn back.”
For a large number of participants, it is an advanced form of humiliation game: getting off on how disgusting and depraved you are. For others, it’s a religious attempt to cleanse or transform oneself through pornography. If there’s anything novel here, it’s fetishizing your relationship to porn itself. This kind of pornography eliminates what was once the conventional idea of pornography, which was to imagine yourself as the person on screen engaging in these activities. Now, the fantasy is being able to indulge in not-quite fantasy for the rest of your life.
What surprised you about the reception of your article?
I didn’t expect so many gooner defenders. I figured I’d written a rhetorically airtight piece, so to come out against it, you’d have to say that masturbating for 10 hours a day is, in fact, a good thing.
You got called out as being moralistic?
I got called conservative, sex-negative, a fascist—which I disagree with. That was surprising because I thought I was describing reality. But I guess there is no set picture of existence. I didn’t expect the piece to take on the life that it has, even if people think I am a reactionary.
There have to be careful ways of talking about this that are not just celebrating it.
There is creativity at play in the space. It has a set of aesthetics that I find genuinely stunning. I would sit there, jaw-dropped, unable to process what I was seeing. It’s a cultural phenomenon that is worth exploring, and I hope other people do.
I tried to find music video porn.
Don’t. You do not want to see it.
We should bring back more classic fantasies—bring back the body, bring back limits to transgress.
I don’t know if we’re too far gone for that. I’m kind of a doomer—I don’t think anything about our relationship with technology is going to change anytime soon. The only hope I see is boredom: people reaching a point of disgust with the sheer amount of content they consume and deciding on their own to change, to leave their bedrooms. I think this has to come from us; it’s not going to come from corporations or the government, nor perhaps should it. At a certain point, it just has to be so numbing that some people will close their laptops, turn off their phones, and say, “I’m done with this.”
Luddite-touch grass community rise up! I realized recently that technology has affected my dreaming. Even in the same way that this pornography erases your own personal elaborated fantasy. It’s invaded that private space. I was moved by the gooners enacting this total bodily damaging invasion.
They’re burlesquing. They are the ultimate extension of technology infiltrating our private lives.
For further study…
- A psychoanalyst on the grief underneath the use of technology.
- Jessica Winter on the male crisis and some critiques from the perspective of women.
- Jia Tolentino on our obsession with Gen Z sexuality. Are they or aren’t they?
- Let’s remember that unforbidden pleasures are always overlooked. Why give so much power to the forbidders? Adam Phillips, in conversation with Chris Oakley for the London Review of Books.
- We can learn a lot from fantasies, a knowledge that is being usurped by the porn industry.
- And finally, I gave a talk on masturbation fantasies in 2023 that might be worth revisiting.
in your life?
