When I miss America, when I miss the heady American cycle of extremity and shame— glutting and then repenting with such extremity the penitence is itself a kind of glutting, abstaining until the abstinence is as voluptuous as excess—I look at r/gooncaves.

A few definitions. Gooning refers to entering a state of trance-like, porn-fueled masturbation. It’s edging plus: the idea is to hold off orgasm essentially indefinitely and fall into a sort of a drooling state of ecstasy. Consuming a profound amount of porn is integral to this.

A goon cave is like a man cave—and the majority of gooners are men—only instead of decorating with dart boards and Foosball tables and beer fridges, it’s just as much porn as possible, on as many screens as possible, all playing at once.

How many monitors do you have? Use them all in your goon cave. In fact, have six to eight different porn scenes going at a time, and put a desktop stripper on top of them all to round things off. Get a few porn magazines, tear out the pages, and tape them all over your wall. Set up projectors, and project more porn on top of the pages. If there’s no more room on the walls for projected porn, there’s always the ceiling.

The r/GoonCaves community post photos or short videos of their setups, often with blurry, backlit evidence of their gooning in the foreground. They set up caves in their bedrooms if they live alone or with roommates, bring travel set-ups to hotels on business trips, or convert living rooms while their family is away for the weekend. They ask for appraisal, what do you think of my set up? Users comment, sometimes incoherently but often chummily. Nice cave, bro! Have a great time! If the photos are taken in the daytime, you often see venetian blinds covered with a dark sheet to achieve a black-out effect. There are often Fleshlights lying around, sometimes bottles of gin, poppers, bongs. There’s a surprising amount of LED strip lighting to set the atmosphere, so there’s a source of light other than the dozens of scenes of hardcore porn.

This abundance, of course, reminds me of America. When I fly back from Germany to visit my hometown in California, I walk through deserted suburban streets that are wider than German highways. The aisles in Safeway are empty of people but so full of stuff, three times as much stuff as in German supermarkets. I always end up standing in the cereal aisle, mouth open. Walls of cereal. Boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of cereal.

It makes me grit my teeth, not with anger but with a kind of excitement that feels a little like cute aggression. It’s exciting to think of innumerable little crispy cereal squares. It’s exciting to have so many of one thing, repeating beyond comprehension. It’s horrifying in the same way the manic repetition in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ segment of Fantasia is horrifying.

Watching an overwhelming amount of porn allows the gooner to embrace their porn addiction, or at least partake in the fantasy of being helpless in the face of pathological need.

Often, some of the screens in a goon cave will be a slideshow of captions encouraging or affirming porn addiction.

More & More More & More More & More

More & More

Goonscroller Goonscroller Goonscroller

Don’t Worry You got Porn

reads one caption, red and blue text overlaid on a photo of two women, one in a blue bikini, one in a red. Another caption, white letters against gradient lilac, next to a photo of performer

Brooklyn Gray, says:

Forget Real Life

Porn Is All You Need

Many of these captions are available on r/PornIsCheating, a subreddit that describes itself as “the original and best place to find your porn addict captions on reddit!” The captions on r/PornIsCheating are intricately peppered with the rhetoric of pathology. There are captions that ape the language of concerned appraisal you’d see in a brochure for a recovery centre—If you can’t resist rubbing your lady bits against something every chance you get, you may be addicted. There are captions that suggest the tough love of an intervention—Porn is a drug and you’re hooked. There are captions that sound like the first step to recovery—You have lost control and it ain’t coming back, except of course recovery is the opposite of what users aspire to.

What they want, as Redditors with names like Kingofgooners69 say, is more, more, more. “My porn addiction and me abandoning all my other projects to solely focus on porn as i sink deeper into its grasp was the best decision i ever made.”

Obviously, I found these subreddits when I was looking for porn. More specifically, I found these subreddits when I was looking for porn and my access to the vast majority of it was denied to me. I was at a writing residency in a small Finnish town, where the internet was connected through a branch of the local library. That meant a few things: download times were glacial, making video calls was impossible and all traditional channels for consuming porn were blocked. What was left was Reddit.

When I worked part-time at the Iowa City Public Library, I learned about blocked porn sites, and the ways that people navigate around these blocks. An important part of the job was making sure that the people who used the computers, sometimes for hours at a time, weren’t looking at porn.

I’d make a slow figure eight around the circular computer stations after coming back from shelving. If any of the people browsing—mostly men, many unhoused—had managed to get through the library’s parental controls, I needed to tell them to stop. It was articulated to me that I shouldn’t tell them they were doing anything bad, merely

that they were doing violated library policy.

“Mainstream discourse suggests that understanding porn as a pathology is not in fact a moral assessment,” states porn studies scholar Madita Oeming, in an essay titled ‘A new diagnosis for old fears? Pathologizing porn in contemporary US discourse.’ “Obviously this is misleading, since deciding who is ‘healthy’ always entails defining what is ‘normal’ and so constitutes an ideological process.”

Oeming is referring to a current wave of concern about porn addiction that started in the 2000s and became enmeshed in the cultural consciousness, in part, thanks to Don Jon, Thanks For Sharing and Shame, three Hollywood movies of the early 2010s

that “brought porn addiction to the big screen and […] both reflect[ed] and multipli[ed] the ubiquity of this discourse in mainstream American culture.”

What people call porn addiction—as articles on the subject will tell you, as a caption on r/PornIsCheating, which gleefully states You love being a dopamine addict overlaid over two pixelated babes by a swimming pool, will tell you—is a matter of the lab rat in our brains hitting the lever marked FEEL GOOD too many times. The diagnosis of porn addiction, then, isn’t prudishness; it’s the rule of science. Judgement isn’t being passed; earnest concern is being articulated.

“On a temporal axis, the discourse surrounding porn follows the typical pattern of sin– crime–disease that has already been observed with regards to the framing of, for example, homosexuality,” Oeming continues. “Whether put in moral, legal, or medical terms, however, it remains a designation of deviance that still carries with it the normativity of a former understanding as sinful.”

The denizens of r/PornIsCheating revel in this former understanding. Many captions are devoted to extolling sin (The sins of the flesh feel so damn good, states one caption) and there are a fair number of photos of latex devils with mascara tears. But even more employ the language of the sacred and the divine. The community is being called upon not to transgress, but to worship.

What’s being worshipped isn’t a specific sex act or a specific performer. These captions aren’t in the business of partialism, fetishising feet or cocks or ass. Instead, it’s capital P Porn—a vague, infinite, powerful entity—that’s the subject of worship. The user is being urged to worship Porn, be a pervert for Goddess Porn, that Porn Is Our Religion, Porn Is God.

It’s a twist on the rhetoric of Alcoholics Anonymous-style recovery. Instead of addressing your addiction through admitting you’re powerless and turning your will over to the care of a higher power, the r/PornIsCheating community frames porn as not only the high you’re powerless against but also the God you submit to. Porn is a game of slap-the-bag played with a gallon box of communion wine.

This gives you the permission to both worship and abuse with vigour. In fact, the more you worship, the more addicted you get. Or vice versa: sinking deeper into your addiction gets you closer to God. No matter how you look at it, you’ve doubled your fun.

And that’s good, because rapaciousness is the name of the game. It’s the central tenet of fetishised porn addiction. It’s the reason for the shift towards abstraction, for worshipping Porn as a monolith. By replacing specific desires with the desire for porn in general, you’ve ended up with net more desire. And also: you’re so besotted with porn that you allow porn to seep into everything, every thought, every interaction. Porn doesn’t need to just be defined as a video showing two people fucking. Bikinis are porn, one caption states. You don’t need nudity to pump, says another.

This isn’t pornography as famously defined by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart as, “I know it when I see it.” This is, “I know it if I see it.” Porn, like God, is omnipresent. You’ll see it everywhere; you just have to give yourself fully to it.

In the seven years since I’ve moved to Germany, I’ve had to confront the particularly American way morality and health are fused in my mind. My impulse is to treat even moderately unhealthy behaviour as badness. “So bad,” I lament when I realise I haven’t drunk more than a glass or two of water in a day. “I need to be better,” I say when I haven’t eaten enough vegetables. A hangover is sin; a cigarette is sin. A bacon cheeseburger is potentially a sin, unless it’s eaten as an expression of the proper love for my body in all its flawed glory, in which it’s virtuous.

My non-American friends are bemused.

“If you’re thirsty you’re already dehydrated!” I say.

“That doesn’t sound true at all,” they respond. “And, even if it’s true, so what? You’re just a little dehydrated.”

“But being dehydrated is bad!” I say.

This is an argument that will never be resolved. It is true that German tourists have a penchant for wandering into Death Valley with nothing more than a can of Pepsi and dying of thirst. It’s also true that a few years ago, the Texas Longhorns’ coach Tom Herman created the Longhorn Football Hydration Chart. It showed a gradient chart of urine colours, from clear (labeled Championship Hydration Levels) to ochre (labeled YOU ARE A BAD GUY!!!). Wouldn’t it be nice to be free of all this? Yes. But there’s an element of fun to my American moralising of health. Your day becomes a game taut with dramatic tension—doing yoga gives you some imaginary shower of brilliant coins, forgoing it is failure, casting a pall over everything, but giving you a chance to repent and plan for tomorrow. It’s highs and lows, virtue and sin, as much as you want, a ceaseless up and down that is, for me, as soothing as being rocked to sleep.

In 2011, the same year the film Shame premiered, concern about porn addiction gave rise to what was first a subreddit, and then a website and recovery empire: NoFap.

NoFap is one of the most prominent and visible resources available to people who feel that their porn use has become compulsive,

“a secular community-centred sexual health platform designed to help you overcome porn addiction.”

It might seem like r/PornIsCheating stands in complete opposition to something like NoFap, right down the fact that

NoFap is “secular” and r/PornIsCheating is all about fanatical worship.

But r/PornIsCheating arrived on the scene in 2014 in a spirit of impish perversion.

And not simply in the sense of be a pervert for Goddess Porn, but in the fact that r/PornIsCheating takes the recovery language of NoFap and repurposes it— without changing much, if any of it.

Nothing in the NoFap section titled ‘Porn Addiction Basics,’ which includes discussions on ‘Markers of Porn Addiction’ (increase in porn use, increase in porn intensity, an inability to stop porn use) and ‘Symptoms of Porn Addiction’ (porn induced erectile dysfunction, or PIED, disinterest in sex in favour of porn, lack of motivation) are refuted by places like r/PornIsCheating. Instead, they’re embraced. Every statement made about the detrimental qualities of porn addiction gets used as evidence of porn’s power as a holy intoxicant. These symptoms and markers of porn addiction are out-and-out celebrated: say thank you for your PIED, every new fetish you develop deepens your relationship to porn, dump your wife for porn.

It would be wrong to say that these are being elevated—these r/PornIsCheating posts state that these symptoms and markers drag the gleeful user further into the gutter.

But in turning everything around, the lofty plane of recovery becomes ridiculous, and, through porn worship, the gutter becomes Heaven.

I’m not a believer, but I do like to get swept away. I like to get overwhelmed— by beauty and fear and food and alcohol and lust and love—and I also

like turning towards austerity.

I can’t rid myself of my American tendency towards self- abnegation, my American tendency towards excess, my American

tendency to vacillate between the two. I’ll be up at dawn, hit the gym, Puritan work ethic, sucking down two litres of water to cleanse away the toxins and thinking smugly about virtue.

Then I’ll be lured towards sinfulness, become a real wastrel, ready to get burnt at the stake, beer in bed, Cheeto dust thumbprints on the pyjama shorts I’m still wearing at six pm. Then back again, because the pendulum swing between extremes, that ride, is delicious.

I’ve never woken up disgusted with myself, quit watching porn and joined an abstinence movement. I’ve also never ricocheted from complete self-denial and built a goon cave. But I understand the appeal.

“Honestly, the whole ‘porn addict’ thing (to me) was always about making fun of, and being the antithesis of, all those anti-porn assholes who want to tell people how they should live their lives,” says one of the r/PornIsCheating mods. The post, which addresses the trend of NoNutNovember, a self-explanatory abstinence project along the lines of Dry January, continues: “My point: don’t watch too much porn, make yourself feel guilty, then go crawling to the no-fap people.”

It’s an arresting statement, made in a sea of captions that say things like porn wants you to ruin your life and incoherent expressions of masturbatory bliss like NNNGGGGGHHH. It illustrates how r/PornIsCheating itself was started, in part, as a NoFap protest movement. This resistance may have something to do with the fact that porn isn’t the only thing that some devotees of r/NoFap direct their hatred towards.

“NoFappers persist in articulating abstention from masturbation and porn as advancing specific and often extreme sociopolitical visions,” writes Scott Burnett, a professor at the University of Gothenburg, whose work focuses on the ‘manosphere’ and NoFap. He goes on to articulate that some NoFappers make statements that advance manosphere-adjacent myths, all relating to some “specific masculine subjectivity that is threatened in some way.”

Burnett’s work divides these users into seven core mythologies, whose ranks include the Meninists who believe that because “porn drains energy from men, it must be a feminist plot,” to “NoFap Alt-Righters [who] consider pornography a form of societal control and trickery; it is a plague on society, and it is their job to unmask who is behind the porn industry: Jews.”

For the NoFappers Burnett discusses in his work, it’s not just about overcoming your own perceived weaknesses or the threat of temptation. It’s about fighting an invisible power behind the throne, a malicious force working to undermine masculinity via porn. The central r/PornIsCheating and r/gooncaves belief is, of course, far simpler. There’s nothing beyond porn. Porn is an all-encompassing, omnipotent force. The light of heaven isn’t blinding white, it’s endless flickering blue in a darkened room.

The idea that the essential structure of porn is the loop is well-trodden ground. In The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus talks extensively about how porn works in opposition to the fulfilled expectations of the narrative arc, saying, “it is precisely in repetition, in repetition sustained to infinity and beyond, that pornography and its allied phenomena live and move and have their being.” In her paper ‘Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?’ Andrea Long Chu responds to Marcus, suggesting that the GIF is what the genre of porn was waiting for: “the rise of the twenty-first century pornographic GIF might confirm the intrinsic eroticism of the digital loop […] the GIF can suspend its own climax infinitely.”

Below a caption on r/PornIsCheating that states No cumming, gooner is an enthusiastic chorus of comments: no cumming! almost 99 days cum free! pump pump pump; It’s so tough but essential not to cum. Must go deeper. Through forgoing the orgasm that brings the trance of masturbation to a close, gooners attempt to inhabit a GIF-like state of infinite pleasure—or even better, the state of infinite pleasure provided by innumerable GIFs.

One porn scene playing on one screen, or one GIF, suggests an infinite that can be studied, that can be memorised even as repetition pushes it into absurdity. But seven or eight of them in a grid, projected onto a ceiling papered with Hustler Honeys, above five screens

all playing their own grid of porn, suggests infinity is incomprehensible. A goon cave of porn is infinity not of possibility but of chaos, a thousand flash bulbs going off all at once.

There are far too many things happening simultaneously; there’s no way to focus on any one thing. If there’s audio, it’s waves of moaning, cresting discordantly or sometimes harmonising in bursts of clarity. The colours, too, clash until patterns reveal themselves: not just the flesh tones of bouncing breasts but the neon of gym socks, fluorescent mesh, or: now everything is black and goth-y and whatever brightness is there comes from the play of light on leather. A blur of pink could be any hole or all of them. Any money shot, any ending in sight, is made moot by the fact that, somewhere in the goon cave grid of infinite porn, someone else is just starting to undress, another scene is just beginning.

When I’m asked what I miss about America, I say, “road trips.” And this is true. But what I miss more than that is the potential of road trips, being on a landmass filled with unpopulated space. The wide streets of my hometown stretch into tomato fields, stretch towards the Sierras, Reno, the blank expanse of eastern Nevada. I used to live in Chicago, a city that’s very cozy with its brick and tater tots, but I could always give myself a nice thrill of terror by looking west down an east-west street, towards the suburbs and then farmlands and then Iowa and then Nebraska. Now, in Germany, I have to go to the Alps to get a hit of the sublime.

Or: a quick fix. Goon caves. The only way to look at more porn than exists in one goon cave is to scroll a feed full of goon caves. These men are looking into infinity. I’m looking at them and so looking into even more infinity.

One goon cave sticks out in memory, because of its simplicity. In a feed full of Baroque churches, stuffed to the gills with ornate decoration, it was a spare wayside chapel. The owner called it a “goon hole;” it was in his small walk-in closet. There was a piece of ruled paper with GOON HOLE written in marker taped to the top of the doorframe. Inside was a) some LED strip lighting in soothing violet b) a white plastic lawn chair c) three Fleshlights, neatly lined up d) a laptop e) a large monitor.

The verdict? Too safe; not enough infinity. “Right on but I can’t help but think you need to spread out,” says one commenter, “I say next time you get a chance, let porn take over your entire existence for a while and see how it feels.”