Women are abused.

In an earlier draft of this article, I listed out all of the ways in which Savannah Coffey, the star of Bound by Love, is tortured in this movie.

It's like someone shoves a cigar in her face.

She gets stabbed in the back while pregnant.

She gets shot in the face, thrown off a balcony.

She's shot in the face? No, sorry.

Shot in the back.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

...

I was like, it's all in place to, to displace me.

Because the kind of writing I was doing was so rote and so formulaic and was so easy to write because it was basically assembling the building blocks of, you know, the same kinds of sentence structures and the same kinds...

I mean, every article I wrote essentially had the same structure, which was sort of like identifying a problem, pitching the product as the solution for it, not mentioning the product because, you know, these were sort of, like, covertly promotional pieces, explaining some historical background of the problem, then explaining in greater detail why this solution is so great, and then a kind of, you know, wrap things up paragraph.

But yeah, these things were so rote and form- formularized that it was, it was obvious that a machine that was designed to churn out repetitive, low-quality prose, uh, could displace me in, in a second.

And I mean, you know, again, even in those sort of early days when the technology was not really there yet, um, I remember a client being like, "Well, ChatGPT says this." I remember the first time-

Hmm.

So I am wondering if you are seeing one kind of cult leader in the midst of all of this, or if you think it's different for every gooner.

I would guess it's different for every goo- well, actually, yes, no, I'm, I'm completely wrong.

Sorry.

Alice D'Lish.

I would say the mainstream gooner, the average gooner, which I'm going to posit as someone, maybe a male between the ages of 22 and 26 or something, although there's a wide range, is vastly more interested in, like, e-girls than they are in what you would think of as a conventional, like, studio hardcore porn star.

A lot of these e-girls don't even really do porn in a conventional sense, and I think that's part of the appeal.

I think a lot of these guys, for lack of a better word, like to be teased, like to surprisingly leave something to the imagination a little bit and sort of look at these, like, they're often treating, like, you know, sort of like, uh, lewd imagery, but not straight-up porn.

I'm curious, like are there more or less culty ways of engaging with gooning or the goon space, if you will? Like, what's kind of like the worst of the worst? And then, you know, if someone is like goon curious, is there a way to be that healthily?

When did you realize this story was about a hell of a lot more than porn?

It's a good question.

I mean, there was a period in my life, this would have been last winter I would say, when I was really at the peak of my goon anthropology, when I was waking up every morning with a sense of overwhelming dread because I knew I would be opening up the laptop and, especially when I was trying to understand the PMV as a form.

Now, I watched way more of those than would ever have been actually strictly necessary for the, for the reporting process.

Probably like 500 of them when I could have watched 5 or 6....

but I'm mentioning this because I would, I would wake up every day and, and watch this hyper-kinetic pornography and talk to these people and look through these spaces and A, feel my brain, like, atrophying in real time, but B, the more I looked at it, I mean, as I was saying, the more it seemed like this was just a crazy, and almost, like, in a way, collectively, an almost, uh, funny parody of the internet, you know, writ large and sort of, uh, the mechanisms of, uh, attention-getting that, or, you know, attention-marshaling, whatever, that, uh, they keep all of us sort of locked into our platforms.

'Cause ultimately when I was talking to people about their porn consumption habits and what keeps them locked into Discord, I mean, I'm looking at Twitter constantly.

Or the plumber.

(laughs)

...

the equivalent in the sense that you're like, "I thought I was ignored to whatever I would see on my laptop." So you get into the Goonverse, and there's a stream room, which is basically a Zoom call where you're all watching something together, but everyone is masturbating.

Head's cut off at the neck, so it's just neck down.

They're watching pornography that I had no reference point for, this kind of hyperkinetic montage of just penises going into vagina nonstop, crazy, one after the other, I would say.

Not just humans, uh, you know, CGI generated horse women, obviously a lot of hentai, things of that nature.

And there's so much going on.

Like, the cuts are that fast?

What did you learn about them? Like, were there traits that bound them together? You know, things that you learned from your survey where you could find through lines?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, what I learned first and foremost is that Most of them are not masturbating.

What I thought was that they were masturbating for 8 to 12 hours a day.

In fact, it's really just like 2 or 3, and maybe 3 or 4, and then a few times a month, they'll really go all out.

And put in the time required to reach the goon state.

But what was notable was learning that what really binds these people are the rituals of the community.

Like, does that happen to gooners too? Like, I wonder if you start doing this, if you just get to some point where it's like, no, the cuts must be faster.

What did you learn about them? Were there traits that bound them together? Things that you learned from your survey where you could find through lines?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, what I learned first and foremost is that Most of them are not masturbating.

What I thought was that they were masturbating for 8 to 12 hours a day.

In fact, it's really just like 2 or 3, and maybe 3 or 4, and then a few times a month, they'll really go all out and put in the time required to reach the goon state.

But what was notable was learning that what really binds these people are the rituals of the community.

So that would be things like feeding and wank battling.

Like, does that happen to gooners too? Like, I wonder if you start doing this, if you just get to some point where it's like, no, the cuts must be faster.

(laughs)

And in the wank battling forums, you basically...

There's so many different kinds.

There's 8/9/10 wank battling.

There's hentai wank battling.

There's, there's a whole variety of them.

But the idea is basically...

(laughs)