Sorry gooners

on masturbation, pleasure, and shame

I’ve been holding this piece back for a while because frankly: my top level thought is that it’s deeply embarrassing to talk this openly about masturbation.

But I saw Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and that has given me a reason to articulate some of these thoughts as I process how I felt about the movie.

So let’s get this out of the way: I feel deeply weird posting about this. I am experiencing a lot of shame and embarrassment discussing this subject matter so openly. But I think it’s important that I do talk about it openly as part of de-stigmatising the conversation around desire, sex, and masturbation, and combatting broader social shame, and my own personal shame around it.

Now that it’s said let’s get into the article proper.

Contains spoilers for: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, The Invite, and Nosferatu

Other content warnings self evident I hope.

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A few months ago a friend sent me this article:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/

It’s a phenomenal article. The author immersed himself in “gooning” culture for months and writes about it with such panache. There are some lines and turns of phrase that are unforgettable.

It’s about a subculture on the internet where men… I don’t know how to say this any other way… masturbate to the point of extreme bodily discomfort in pursuit of a nirvana-like state of arousal, but also do this on live streams with other people, and send each other pornographic images and videos to try and force arousal out of each other. They then rate and review the images/videos. Someone wanked to the point of not being able to get an erection ever again, many of them broadcast their “goon caves” for public scrutiny and humiliation.

The broad takeaway for me is that “gooning” is a branch of a degradation kink: masturbation is seen as a degrading, subpar experience, and the extremes of the subculture push the humiliation and exhibitionist elements further.

It’s practiced mostly by men, and though I don’t usually like to make assumptions, I’d say these men are not doing very well.

My reaction to reading about gooning was to pity these men (which I think perhaps is their goal, and they get off on this too?? Help???) because it made me sad that masturbation was not something that was as fun for them as it has become for me.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the latest film from Jane Schoenbrun. It follows a queer filmmaker who is rebooting a classic 80s slasher film, and seeks out the reclusive lead actress from that film as part of her research.

What starts out as a pastiche of slasher films reveals itself as a weird, hilarious, and complex film about sex and death (it was in the title all along).

In the opening montage of the movie we learn that the name of the 80s style killer is ‘Little Death’, or en francais - ‘le petit mort’, which is the phrase they use for the English word ‘orgasm’. So from the first minute and a half I was primed to view the film through the lens of sexual pleasure.

I had a really emotionally vivid experience of the movie, and felt like I was learning something really intimate about the filmmaker. The main character is working through her feelings about her own eroticism through the movie she is working on. It makes for a quite raw depiction of the real life filmmaker’s perspective, as the character so clearly says early on:

Sometimes I think I am my work.

The movie does a really excellent job of exploring the weird relationship between sex and death: the 80s film-within-the-film has a sex scene that ends with the characters being stabbed through the chest right at the point of climax: they cum as they die, or die as they cum.

The main character, Kris, is depicted seeing this moment as a child, which maybe is a way of showing her erotic world being influenced at a young age by this (very common) idea that for women, sex = death.

It makes me think of the gothic stories that serve as warnings: don’t have sex or you will die, don’t give in to desire or you will die, desire is monstrous, and you better not have sex with the monster oh no, because sex = death.

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Back when I saw Robert Egger’s Nosferatu (late 2024) I started drafting a substack titled “why does she have to die”. I never posted that substack, so here’s where those thoughts have finally found their home:

I was really upset by Nosferatu. I spent most of the movie in this strange sense of kinship with Ellen, who is dealing with shame about her erotic desires.

But I thought it was kind of miraculous for a movie to make its hero brazenly sexual and comforted by the people in her life that her pleasure wasn’t a sin, and might actually be the thing needed to save the world.

And then she dies.

We get so close to narratives where female desire is not seen as an aberration, something to repress or control or fear, only for the closing message to be that such sexuality is only acceptable if it has an expiration date.

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At the end of Nosferatu, Ellen dies after having sex. Her eroticism is her power, and it saves the world, but it kills her, and the world goes on without her.

At the end of Miasma, Kris and Billie die after having sex and being killed by Little Death. It’s the way these films go: the masked killer slays the teens for having sex and being stupid.

Schoenbrun is not hiding the fact that in their world sex and death are the same.

But in Miasma, there’s a beautiful twist to this seemingly terminal fate for women who have sex.

Because Schoenbrun is saying that yes: sex and death are the same thing, and this is incredible. Because in the morning, Kris and Billie lie in bed, dead, covered in one another’s blood, still as corpses.

Then, in an act of patient filmmaking, they finally awaken. They smile at each other. They go to the gas station to pick up candy. They hold hands and look at one another with unabashed desire the whole way.

I grinned through this sequence, watching these two women post-orgasm floating through the world blood-soaked, having died the night before.

Because pleasure is the only way you can die and be resurrected.

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I used to find masturbating shameful.

I did it in the bath, with the extractor fan running to mask any sounds. I did it furtively in my bed late at night when I was sure everyone in the house was asleep. I did it but feared it, feared my experience of pleasure, and didn’t really listen to my body.

For a little while as a teenager I thought I might be asexual, because I found pleasure quite scary, and feared the idea of experiencing it with anyone else.

I never thought of myself as a person who liked sex. I was curious about it, and craved intimacy, and after high school I went to parties where people were being tied up, but I never did any of it myself.

In university, when I found myself in a bedroom at a party with a guy I was attracted to, I bailed mid makeout because it was all too overwhelming. I’d go home with that same guy another night, and in his bed when he tried to initiate sex I turned him down so he wanked himself off, and in the morning he asked me not to tell the girl he’d recently broken up with (who I would see later that day) what we’d done the night before.

I don’t think I was ready for sex for a long while, because I was not yet ready to be in my body.

I’ve written about the turning point for this, at that fateful music festival where I stopped thinking and started dancing:

Up until that point I separated my body from my mind as much as I could. My body was a tool for carrying my mind around, a tool that I didn’t like very much, a tool that didn’t fit into what was “good” or “pretty”, a body that didn’t look the way it was “meant” to.

I recognise now that this was not totally my fault: I was bullied in primary school for being fat, at that same school boys put together a list of ratings for the girls out of 10 and I didn’t score favourably, I grew up surrounded by ideations of thinness and prettiness that inferred the way I looked was “incorrect". There is a long chain of events and ideas that constructed my negative self image, and I coped by seeing myself as an effervescent mind piloting a less than ideal body.

So what does this have to do with sex?

Another movie I saw at this year’s Sydney Film Festival has a line that comes to mind:

In The Invite, sexologist Penelope Cruz steps in to counsel a couple who are mid-argument, on the topic of why they haven’t had sex in over a year. The couple blame each other: him for not initiating, her for not reciprocating, and in the middle of the argument Penelope Cruz jumps in to ask:

Would you fuck you?

A simple, very powerful question: do you find yourself desirable?

Because this really matters when it comes to pleasure.

Yes, sex is a team sport: you should care about your partner’s experience, their pleasure, but if you’re not also in love with the way you feel during sex, if you judge yourself and shame yourself throughout it, then it simply is not going to do the thing it’s mean to.

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I started having sex at age 20. It came after a few run ups to the plate that fizzled out when I got overwhelmed again, but it did eventually happen. And it became obvious that I was not, in fact, asexual. But there was still an edge of shame and overwhelm to it.

I described it to my longterm partner as feeling like I was approaching a cliff, and getting closer to an edge, and knowing that if I stepped off the edge it’d feel amazing, but the fear and overwhelm would grip me and I’d have to back away from the edge. When I’d masturbate I’d get really scared of that edge, of what it would feel like on the other side, so I don’t think I had ever had an orgasm when we started dating.

I got there, and I cried pretty regularly post-sex. I think there was a feeling of intense relief, that I’d survived it, given the fear and overwhelm I’d experience in the lead up.

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In the years since then I’ve worked out that I like sex, a lot, but haven’t always had a partner.

So last year I decided that I needed to figure out what I liked, when I was alone.

I bought a vibrator, and subscribed to an audio erotica service, and regularly masturbated.

I got familiar with the cliff’s edge, with going over it, and with the feeling of walking along the edge and enjoying the rush without forcing myself over the edge.

This has undone a lot of the shame I had about my body. Masturbating has made me like my body a lot more. I like how it looks, how it feels, how it feels to be in my body. I know my body a lot better now, and I don’t view it as separate to my mind. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my increased desire to take care of my body through exercise and healthier eating habits came about after spending more time with it, intimately.

My body is me, and yes: I would fuck me.

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So, back to the gooners.

Degradation is cool, if you’re into that. So is exhibitionism, and edging, and pretty much any kink. There’s plenty I’m into that won’t make it into this article. But I’m not thrilled by the structures surrounding gooning as a practice.

Firstly, I’m not a huge fan of the idea that masturbation is humiliating, and that it’s degrading to do it. Sounds a lot like the rhetoric of it being a sin. It feels great, otherwise why would anyone do it?

Secondly, I don’t like the idea that in the hierarchy of intimate actions it’s like a consolation prize if you don’t or can’t have sex. We’re getting into some dangerously incel-adjacent territory with this one.

I have had better orgasms alone than I have had with partners. Masturbation is on my timeline, to my background music, whenever and wherever I want it. Partnered sex has its own language that I enjoy, but I challenge the idea that one is better than the other: they are simply different, and good for different things.

Masturbate because it feels good to do it. Because it gets you in sync with your body. Because you woke up horny. Because it’s a good stress relief. Do it because it’s awesome, because you like it, because everyone is doing it.

But can we please not do it in gross dark rooms, streaming it to other men who are doing it in their gross dark rooms, because we think it’s shameful and humiliating and we have such low self esteem that we think it’s all we deserve.

Have enough love for yourself to fuck yourself with joy, not shame, otherwise, to quote Rupaul, how in the hell are you gonna fuck somebody else.

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This thought doesn’t really fit anywhere else, so I’m just going to put it here:

I have this theory that abstinence is a tenet of most major religions because sex feels holier than God. Pleasure is a form of euphoria, of body and mind, and it can totally unseat “God” from the top spot of holy experiences.

Or at least it should feel like that, right guys?

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I guess it’s important that I put some writing about sex out in the world now, because so much of what I have coming up on my slate features sex.

Most imminently is my show for Sydney Fringe:

She Says or American Psycho for Corporate Bullies

There’s swathes of text in there about casual sex, attraction, being desired, pegging, and masturbation, and seeing as I’m performing the show myself (a feat way scarier than sex) I figure I need to get used to talking about it, in front of people.

My novel is also very much about shame, desire, sex, and repression. My main character (Liz) is a vessel for all my experiences of shame and repression over the years, and I have loved writing her journey of coming back into her body through sex and love (and a very romantic and [hopefully] hot sex scene). So if that’s ever going to be published I have to be ready to talk about sex.

Have I said the word sex enough do you think? Have I convinced you I’m any more comfortable about it now than I was at the start of the article? I guess I can be brave and also stupid, vulnerable and resilient, brazen and embarrassed.

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Hey we made it to the end.

Thanks for sticking with me on this one.

Was it as good for you as it was for me?