Talking about gooning is difficult, I think, for three reasons. The first is that people use the term “gooning” to refer to different things. The second is that people’s experience of gooning are very different depending on how they experience sex in general. 

The third is the misconceptions. Gooning was a very niche thing that suddenly jumped into the mainstream. Not a lot of people knew what it meant but many wanted to know. That demand drove people who didn’t understand gooning to write clickbait — with nonsense like “gooning is an extreme form of edging” — and make gooning content to cash in. And that’s what people found when they googled “what is gooning”. Muddled waters.

In this article I hope to clear those up by sharing my point of view from being part of the community for the last 15 years and from many hours of conversations with different gooners. 

So, what is it?

First of all, I’d make an important distinction between the physical act of gooning and the internal state the gooner may find themselves into. When people talk about gooning they usually mix the two things together, but I believe them to be two related but very separate things. 

The physical act of gooning, the “acting out” of gooning, is visually very striking. It looks extreme and wild. It’s the tongue out, the drooling, the wild eyes, the uncontrollable sounds. You act a fool, you look stupid, like a “goon”, demented. I’ll call this “gooning out”.

The internal state of gooning. A dream-like blissed-out feeling of flow some people feel while they goon. I’ll call this “the gooning state”. It is a kind of trance of pleasure.

Let’s talk about trance. 

We all experience trance. It might sound really foreign or extravagant to some, but we go into trance states all the time. It’s a fundamental part of the human experience. States of flow where our thoughts stop and our perception takes over. It’s the Instagram doom-scroll. It’s the autopilot when getting home from work or school. It’s getting lost in your favorite song, or in your favorite dish, gardening, washing the dishes… There is trance to be found everywhere.

The question isn’t “have I ever experienced trance”, we all do every day, but more like “where am I getting my trance from”?¹

Music and Volume

In order to explain gooning

let’s imagine pleasure is like music. 

A strong orgasm is the volume turned up to 100%. You have no choice but to listen. The pleasure overrides everything else. You lose control of your body, your eyes roll back, your body twitches. Your mind is blank, and for a few seconds, it’s all feeling.

But what happens when you learn to listen? 

When you can let the music take over when the volume is 50%, or 30%, 20%…

Riding the goon state is like dancing to the music of pleasure. When the music is lower you just bop your head to it and when it’s louder you let yourself go more. You zone out and fall into it. You can start with just light moaning and before you know it you find yourself in a full body intense goon. 

Just like dancing

everybody goons differently. 

Some people can dance while sober, others need a few drinks. Some people intuitively fall into it, others need to practice before they can do it. Because it’s so raw, everybody brings themselves into it. It can be raw, unfiltered sexual expression.

Gooning is, of course, not restricted to bating or even to sex. It’s a trance state similar to subspace, or pupspace. Ultimately, it’s about being able to surrender control and giving in. The only thing standing in our way is our ego.

Is gooning performative?

I’ve heard people say that gooning out is performative, and there’s definitely an element of that going on but I’d like to present another angle. It has to do with pathways. Facial expressions and movements can change the way we feel. Hold a frowning face and you can start feeling the edges of anger. Our brains are great at associating things, over time and with repetition they become hard wired.

Like JV Marx wrote in his article Notes on Gooning, “make a face, see how you feel”². The act of gooning out itself can become a shortcut into the gooning state. Especially for people who do it often, the actions become associated with the inner state. It can send you there. Especially when you’re doing it with someone else. You may start making faces at each other “performatively” and before you know it, you’ve dragged each other under an ego-death deep goon. 

Pathways

Gooning out is not the only pathway into the gooning state. We all experience sex in different ways. The ways in which we relate to our bodies and minds, to sound, to touch and to our sense of self, are wildly different from person to person. These differences — in turn affected by our culture and lived experience, our personality, our fears and our current situation — end up creating a variety of sexual practices.  Of ways we individually connect to our deepest sexual self. Ways to bypass our ego.

The bator community is built around these shortcuts. From the ways we speak to each other to the actual practices, like bator babble and monkeybating, the culture has formed around these pathways to ego-silencing and surrender. I hope to keep exploring these ideas in the upcoming issues. 

If you’re immersed in bate culture, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you for reading and until next time!

*** You can listen to a 90-minute conversation about different people’s experience of gooning on Bator’s Journey #37, moderated by Nick Woof, JackAll Club and myself. Different approaches from different people. Check it out!