This is the blog of a historian named Charlotte (she/it/they), known across the Internet as PhD, DSc, MD, PT Discworld. Officially a PhD! (also received a Professor of Thaumology from Unseen University, Ankh Morpork). She has interests in goth music, science, academia, Doctor Who, Discworld, and various other topics. Trans as fuck. GNU Terry Pratchett
at the risk of sounding like a boomer i dont get gooning
like is it just jacking it multiple times a day or is there something im missing here
From what I understand it originally referred to a specific fetish, but it got stolen and is now just the new way to call someone something akin to “porn addict”, “degenerate” or anything else to that effect.
To talk about the original fetish though, from what I understand it’s a response to all the “porn addiction” hysteria. Basically, the idea that consuming this content can turn you into some sort of brain-dead pleasure drone who only wants to keep consuming. Essentially, Gooners (the fetishists themselves) are a bunch of people who think that it would be really hot if porn addiction was a real thing. I’ve seen it compared to hypno, except instead of another person it’s the content itself that is doing the hypnosis. The whole idea of getting a bunch of monitors and having porn on all of them, or hiding away in a “goon cave” isn’t actually about the porn itself. It’s about the idea of it, the idea of having your brain turned to mush as you melt into being a hedonistic drone concerned only with your own pleasure, enslaved by the fake world on the other side of the screen, able only to make yourself feel good.
I remembered seeing this image floating around here a while ago because people found it amusing, but I went looking for it again because I think it’s a good example of the whole phenomenon:
I myself am not a gooner. I am not a primary source on this matter, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt. But I do have respect for them, to see a whole ass moral panic and then to decide to touch your junk about it shows the unstoppable drive of humanity. That you can never keep a horny person down. It’s counter cultural and subversive, a celebration of what is scorned that does not try to make itself acceptable, but instead leverages its unacceptability to push into new territory. Gooners are majestic animals and they have my respect.
It does suck that people keep ruining kink/fetish terms. It’s one of my more niche takes, and one I don’t talk about much, but I do kind of lowkey think that Charli XCX owes the kink community an apology for what she did to the word “Brat”. That shit must be hell for all the actual Brats out there.
Part of the problem is that a few historians in the 70s and 80s argued that romantic friendship was seen as normative and was completely socially acceptable. Since then historians have done in-depth research showing that romantic friendship was only semi-socially acceptable and was seen as sexually suspicious by some people. But every time someone suggests romantic friendship might be part of queer history they’re told “that’s just the way people spoke back then” by someone who read a Tumblr post based on a Blogspot post based on the Wikipedia page that was based on a couple of articles from the 1970s.
ALT
Emma Donoghue does a good job of explaining the nuances of romantic friendship in Passions Between Women (tho I do think the chapter on female husbands has a lot of room for improvement). She gives a good summery of what I’m talking about here:
The term ‘romantic friendship’ was widely employed in the eighteenth century to refer to a loving relationship (usually between women of the middle or upper classes) of varying degrees of romance and friendliness. Since the 1970s many historians have used it as a label for any passion between pre-twentieth-century women about which no hard evidence of genital sexual activity survives. But there are problems with this usage. First, it makes these relationships sound like slightly more fervent versions of ordinary friendships, whereas often they were lifelong emotional partnerships, more like marriages than friendships. Also, because the term is often used in opposition to a phrase like 'lesbian love’, for example by Lillian Faderman, the two are assumed to be incompatible, when in fact many of the romantic friends of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have shared sex, 'genital’ and otherwise. It is crucial to distinguish between the dominant ideology’s explanation of romantic friendship - that it was sexless, morally elevating, and no threat to male power - and the reality of such bonds between women. A sensible point made by Chris White is that no matter how often society informed women that their friendships were purely spiritual, their bodies could have taught them otherwise: 'it seems hardly credible that simply because women did not have penile erections they would not have recognized how sexual arousal felt and what it meant’.
Elizabeth Mavor resurrected the phrase 'romantic friendship’ in 1971 specifically to shield the Ladies of Llangollen from being called lesbians. It has become a popular term among historians, often invoked to neutralise and de-sexualise textual evidence. Many use it, as Bonnie Zimmerman points out, 'with an audible sigh of relief, to explain away love between women, instead of opening our eyes to the historical pervasiveness’ of that love. Because so many women were passionate friends, they argue, passionate friendship between women must have been nothing more than a fashion and could have no connection with sexual identity. (p122-123)
Views on romantic friendship varied from person-to-person and even one person could hold seemly contradictory options. Donoghue explains:
To emphasise how socially acceptable love between women was in this period, Lillian Faderman points out that Hester Thrale was a close friend and visitor of the Ladies of Llangollen. She suggests that Thrale must have made a clear distinction between their virtuous love and the illicit passions between women which she attacked in her diary, because the Ladies ‘seemed to follow to the letter the prescriptions for romantic friendship’, including scholarliness, retirement from corrupt society and spiritual communion with nature. Randolph Trumbach argues that, because Hester Thrale does not seem to have suspected them of the Sapphism she was so aware of, the Ladies must have been considered as having a friendship which, to the most suspicious eye, only 'approached sapphism in some regards’. Recently, however, Liz Stanley has unearthed an unpublished diary in which Hester Thrale describes the Ladies of Llangollen as 'damned Sapphists’ and claims that women were reluctant to stay the night with the Ladies unless accompanied by men. So it seems that romantic friendship had no symbolic refuge, not even in Llangollen Vale, in which to hide from occasional suspicions of Sapphism. Hester Thrale is a fascinating example of the doublethink that made it possible to be aware of lesbian possibilities, yet defend romantic friendship as the epitome of moral purity. Mostly she hid away in the back of her mind the suspicion that some of her best friends were Sapphists.
Donoghue also wrote the article ‘Random Shafts of Malice’: The Outings of Anne Damer which deals with the rumors of sapphism that surrounded Anne Damer and her romantic friendships.
Another book I have to recommend is Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America by Rachel Hope Cleves that covers the romantic friendship/marriage of Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake. Cleves does a good job of explaining a lot of the nuances of romantic friendships semi-social acceptability:
Romantic friendships did not often provoke a community’s concerns about illicit sexuality, in part because sexual feelings were not strictly coupled with romantic feelings the way they would be later in the nineteenth century. Men and women could experience and express emotional intimacy in a wide variety of relationships. In addition, sexuality figured into a lot of nonromantic relationships. The bonds of authority were just as likely to lead to illicit sexuality as were the bonds of romantic love. Society saw no more reason to link same-sex sexual behaviour with romantic friendships than with the relationships between master and apprentice or teacher and student. Plenty of masters made unwanted advances on the apprentices they hired, but early Americans did not cast a suspicious eye on all employers and workers. Likewise, friends who expressed passionate love for each other were free from suspicion unless they gave reasons for concern.
Concerns arose when friendships seemed to interfere with marital futures. Young people might become so devoted to each other that they dreaded to be divided. Educated young men sometimes worried that they would not find the same communion of souls with lesser-educated women that they shared with their male peers. Young women sometimes feared marriage as a traumatic event that would draw a curtain over the friendship of their youth by restricting their time and resources. Most young people put those fears behind them, because they saw marriage as the central pillar of adult life. But when friends became reluctant to separate, their elders sought to intervene. (p41-42)
She also highlights how some romantic friendships did induce sex:
Romantic friendship created scope for wide variety of strong feelings, including trust, pity, love, jealousy, happiness, and eros. Historical research reveals that the intimacy between female friends could extend to sex. The most overt record of lesbian life available from the period, the diary of English gentlewoman Anne Lister, shows that women looking for sexual intimacy with other women found ample opportunities within the framework of romantic friendship. Lister used a secret code derived from algebra and ancient Greek to record her orgasmic sexual encounters with a number of friends, one of whom eventually became her life partner. Romantic friendships were so popular among literate young women of Lister’s generation that it would have been strange if her sexual relationships took place outside their context. It was sensible for a young woman seeking sexual encounters with other young woman to do so within a popular form of relationship marked by physical intimacy, declarations of love, and elevated sentiments. (p41)
thank you! These are exactly the kind of recommendations I was hoping for.
The majority of people are horny. People are always going to be horny. You cannot stop people from being horny. Throughout history there have been extensive attempts to suppress horniness and they haven’t worked. You can be mad about it all you want but horniness will prevail against any adversity. There will always be an aspect of horniness within society. Sexuality cannot be contained by having missionary sex with your spouse alone in the privacy of a dark bedroom.
Also nudity is not inherently sexual OR evil, y’all really need to learn to unpack that Christianity shit that’s been so enmeshed in our (Western) culture.
I’m always really moved by sex-repulsed people who are still able to be allies to extrasexual people. I deeply appreciate yall.
Hypersexuality is a clinical term where sexual behavior is a symptom of some type of trauma or mental illness.
Extrasexual, supersexual or megasexual are terms people have started using for highly sexual people who aren’t doing so as a maladaptive response.
Obviously the actual lines between the two are blurry since it can be hard to untangle if you have trauma, but that’s the intended difference.
Imgur was created in 2009, and has remained one of the most popular image hosting sites on the internet for decades. Its 300 million active users access content on the platform over 60 billion times per month. Compared to other image hosting sites of the early 2000s, such as Photobucket, Imgur has a reputation for being a place to host niche, originally created works, including memes, personal artwork, image macros, fan art, and yes, highly specific porn and fetish content that caters to small yet passionate communities.
Until 2016, the only way to share images on Reddit was by passing them through Imgur first. If you didn’t already have an Imgur account when you were making a Reddit post, you mostly likely uploaded it without bothering to create one, so your image files were posted anonymously. But Imgur is now mass-deleting all images that can’t be linked to an existing account. This means that the vast majority of image posts on Reddit that predate 2016 will be completely broken after Imgur’s new terms of service are adopted. That’s not just posts with pornography or nude photographs that are getting removed, which would be a sizeable data loss itself, but nearly eleven years worth of digital history.
Many of these in-depth Reddit posts are absolutely reliant upon images. And every single one of them that came before 2016 can potentially be ruined following the Imgur purge. Even many posts that were made after 2016 will be destroyed as well, because many Reddit users who upload images to Imgur never create official accounts.
Whenever sexual content is driven from social media, there is little in the way of public mourning. If anything, there is a tepid acknowledgement of the harm that will befall sex workers, alongside outright celebration that at last these sites will be scrubbed of the most unseemly and dangerous sides of human nature, and at last rendered “safe.” But condemning future generations of queer and kinky people to ignorance and loneliness is not saving them. And exposing someone to sexual content too early in life is not the only form of sexual harm. Denying a person a chance at self-recognition can be equally traumatic, and violent.
Those of us who do decry the sanitization and Disney-Worldification of the internet are frequently likened to predators who wish to expose our bodies and proclivities to children. Our mere existence as adult sexual beings with adult bodies is deemed a threat. Paradoxically, we are also mocked for taking the removal of erotic art so seriously. Porn is somehow viewed in our culture as both frivolously pointless, and profoundly terrifying.
But in reality, sex is not dangerous. And sex is not frivolous. It’s a rapturous, inevitable, and an essential force in human life. Sex isn’t for everyone, but it is one of the most precious ways to experience inhabiting a body, and refusing to acknowledge the existence of sex makes it impossible to fully appreciate human history, identity, or any form of art.
Sex’s removal from public discourse and digital record keeping is a hateful, genocidal destruction of one of the most precious aspects of the human experience. We are right to mourn for it. And we are right to fear what comes next, after our bodies are rendered unviewable and our dreams unspeakable.
the first time i posted this essay link, tumblr removed it for being sexual content and then blurred my account. jesus fucking christ. read the piece, please. our ability to communicate and find one another online is rapidly eroding and this is no light matter
sure glad that there arent any psychological ramifications or traumas that could come from teaching people thruout their lives that their bodies are a source of inherent shame and are sexually dangerous (and that this applies to peoples chests differentially) or else following the lead of the imagined person who is least comfortable (for any reason) w bodies and desire could maybe have some sort of negative impact
I think people really need to think about the whole “suits are lingerie for men” thing.
And before I delve into this, I’m going to put a big FEMINIST DISCLAIMER so if you want to not be annoyed by the FEMINISM going below here, just scroll past:
When it comes to actual lingerie, it is hyper-feminine and super revealing, and meant to be worn by women. It exposes a lot of skin, and basically is as close to naked as possible without being naked, so it strongly suggests nakedness while also maintaining the forbidden fruit/still hidden motif which only increases desire. And with lingerie, the only suggestion is sexual, since it is designed to be sexual.
Suits, on the other hand, are the complete opposite. They cover up almost everything, leaving only the top of the neck, the head, and the hands uncovered. They are strongly masculine, being the “dressed up” clothes for masculine-leaning people, and it is primarily designed for men alone, at least traditionally. Suits, however, suggest power, wealth, dominance, and formality, and are not meant to be sexual in the way lingerie is. Instead, in the case of this “suits as lingerie” thing, suits are incidentally instead of inherently sexual. The desire does not lie in the actual body of the suit-wearer, but in the clothes themselves, which is different from lingerie.
So to assert that suits are lingerie for men is to suggest that the thing that is sexually alluring about a suit-wearer is what goes along with the suit: power, wealth, and dominance, and to assert that the masculine part of heterosexuality is to be powerful and dominant.
Now, I am not saying that to be sexually attracted to suit-wearing people is wrong, but I am just criticizing comparing it to lingerie, and how the whole idea reinforces heterosexism and the assumption that to be masculine is dominant, and that we must enforce that.
Heterosexuals do announce their sexuality in public, all the time, of course. Walking down the street holding hands, kissing their lover, wearing wedding rings, clothing and other aesthetic codes. But it is not a movement from unacknowledged to public, it has no risk or social consequences in itself. In his coming out letter, Cooper notes that he didn’t come out because a reporter’s private life shouldn’t matter. Indeed. But part of the point is, being heterosexual isn’t private – it’s public.
I know the movie isn’t even out yet; I know we have seen only a few minutes of footage that may not even all be part of the actual movie, but we need this movie.
And by that I do not mean “all of us people who want to watch some manbutts” (although that is nice too): I mean we, as a society oversaturated with the sexualization of women, need this movie because it puts men in the roles that are assigned to women in almost every space ever.
We, in this culture of overly sexualized women, run magazine ads featuring beautiful women in states that reduce them to their sexual nature: they postured to be sexually ready, staring into the camera like it is the eyes of every man who is watching her, saying I look like this for you; or maybe she is clothed, but still staring into the camera, mouths hung half-open as if in a state of near-orgasm, holding up a tube of lipstick, silently saying,You should look like this for him.
I am defensive of Magic Mike already because maybe, just for a few minutes, it might take this gaze off of women and direct it onto men, and that will be enough of a change from the norm to make some people think. And from then on, when a man cites this movie and how it made him viscerally uncomfortable, a woman might be able to turn to him and point out that she watches her own half of our species receive the same treatment everywhere; that men are so rarely sexualized that it is a shock when they are; that it is a relief when men are sexualized because it reminds women that the burden of being sexy does not always fall on women. And maybe Magic Mike will frame sexuality as a powerful thing, rather than a submissive thing. Lord knows we could learn to stop treating sexual behavior as a sign of defeat. Look what it does to our ideas of women.
Men should be given permission to be sexy, too. And honestly, the heterosexual men who have to sit through this movie could do with some exposure to the things women see. This is what women are; only they are this everywhere. Women should be given fair, balanced stories in media: ones where they are not drenched in ambient sexuality at the expense of other aspects of personhood. And men should be permitted to be sexual, because they rarely are outside spaces where women are directly involved.
So look at the man-butt, boys. Look at it. The man-butt is the coming of change.
I met Alec when he was 3 years old. I was coming over to babysit – I had met some of Alec’s…
When people throw down the ‘oh kids are too young they won’t understand homosexuality/trans issues etc’, I like to remind them that it’s the best time to start. When they reach about school age, they begin to question on the previously concrete rules that had been laid down for them, and are incredibly open to new suggestions.
Today my friend said that feminism isn’t relevant anymore. I didn’t get angry, in fact, he seems like a liberal post-feminist himself.
However, feminism is still as relevant as it was 30 years ago, albeit for different reasons.
I’ll give a giant ass list of reasons why:
Women still have no rights in many many parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia, parts of South America, any theological state, etc.
Women are still viewed as inferior by the whole of Western society
Rape is still a giant issue in the Western world
Raped women are often blamed for their rapes (what they wear, if they were drinking, etc)
Sex workers are vilified and all seen as deficient and suffering from either enslavement (e.g. white slavery) or mental issues
Women make less than men in ALL societies with monetary systems
Men and women are pigeonholed into gender roles that sharply contrast each other
Intersex babies are “corrected” at birth to conform to heterosexual standards of sex (“fixed” by standards of penetration)
Gender-nonconforming people are seen as odd, strange, sick, etc
Cross-dressers are seen as perverts or that they have mental disorders
Contraception access is still an issue in even Western society
Abortion is still an issue in even Western society
Society encourages men to be violent and women to be submissive
Women and those who identify as women are discouraged from the sciences and maths
Men are discouraged from social work softer subjects
Bullying over sexuality is still a major issue in Western society, and there are laws that even legalize it in some parts of it
Advertising. I don’t need to say anymore.
Sex is seen as a sinful or bad thing to engage in
Women cannot be sexual, yet men can
Aesexuality is seen as a disorder that can be fixed, or is not seen as a legitimate sexuality
I’ll just stop at 20. Feel free to add to the list as you want.
ALT
