The Predictive Powers of the Pervert

Revisiting the origins of this newsletter, the Norm Finkelstein story and gooner fascism.

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

There is an underlying romanticism behind much of my work, a sentimental sense of daydreaming about the possibility for a better world if only we could all just get along and get offline. I’ve written these stories, like “It’s Obviously the Phones” and “Why Is It So Hard to Admit We Need Each Other?” and “Death by Situationship” because I love to do so. I’m an optimist at heart, and what is the purpose of writing at all if not to put forth my most starry-eyed visions of the possibilities of the future?

But in truth, I started this newsletter with one primary intention in mind: to talk about perverts.

Norman Finkelstein in a 2008 interview

When I say “pervert,” I don’t necessarily mean it to be a bad thing. There are, of course, people with sinister perversions, illegal ones, ones that hinge upon the demoralization of an innocent person. But I am referring mainly to those whose proclivities sit beyond the range of what we consider the norm, either in the strength of their desires or the nature of the desires themselves. In an era where defining what is normal with regard to desire, this constitutes a wide swath of people. A lot of us are perverts in some sense. It can even be a badge of honor.

This is, in part, why I gave this newsletter its name. These cases we consider niche are more common than we think. But maybe in some quest for institutional legitimacy or because I found I have more to say, I began to depart from the perverts here. My own mother is now a subscriber, though I don’t know for sure that she even opens the emails. Still, I know she checks her emails, and I am forced to imagine her seeing a word like “gooner” in her inbox. She does not know what that word means. Will she Google it? Will she text me to ask?

I first wrote about the gooning community back in December 2022, when I had fewer than 500 subscribers and the term was still relatively unknown by the Internet-mainstream. I also wrote about this whole story again a year ago, but I’m going to repeat it again once more. Gooners — people who masturbate for hours on end, aided by pornography, hoping to achieve something akin to a hypnotic state — were still relegated to somewhat niche corners of Reddit, but it was clear their numbers would only grow. My purpose in writing about them was to critique what they represented about our sexual culture, a sign of an increasingly isolated and yet overly indulgent world that pushes the individual further toward disconnection.

“Even if we do interpret all of this as fantasy or roleplaying, we can still read gooning on its face: a corner of the world fetishizing porn addiction is the obvious end point of a culture with endless unfettered access to pornography and a population of people with little else better to do,” I said at the time. “If you’re a lonely young man with few social/romantic prospects whose sexuality has primarily been dictated by pornography, what reason is there not to take your consumption to its furthest reaches?”

A few months after publishing, I was asked to participate in a reading hosted by Mars Review of Books. I decided to read a shortened version of this essay. One of my fellow readers that evening was the esteemed writer and political scientist Norman Finkelstein. The event itself was indeed somewhat bizarre, a bit too irony poisoned for someone of Finkelstein’s position, and understandably he did not have a very good time. Following the reading, he appeared on a podcast where he said as much. But he was apparently struck by my specific reading: “It was so saturated with sex, kinky sex, wild sex… Gooning… it means basically being transfixed for video porn for 24 to 48 hours straight, and it struck me, and I know this is going to sound harsh, but even though this crowd considered itself bohemian, and even though this crowd considered itself anti-establishment, this is exactly the crowd that would go over for fascism.”

Finkelstein appeared to be conflating the event itself with the subject of my essay. Elsewhere on the podcast, he lamented that the party appeared filled with wealthy, Ivy League-educated people (I am neither), and for whatever reason he seemed to interpret my essay as both an endorsement of gooning and an alignment with this crowd writ large. But what’s both funny and frustrating is that Finkelstein is exactly right about these types of practices I was attempting to highlight: gooning is emblematic of the type of social isolation and embrace of base bodily pleasure toward empty fulfillment that is culturally destructive. That’s what I said in my essay!

In any case, in the two years since publishing and following the release of this podcast, the word “gooning” has functionally become a meme. I do somewhat believe that Finkelstein and I are partially responsible for this. Those clips of him talking about gooning and fascism planted the seed. It is now, for many online, synonymous with masturbation itself. Most people reference it as a joke — I don’t believe the majority of people referencing the practice actually watch porn for hours on end. But it nevertheless speaks to the broader shape our sexual culture has taken on: everything is described in extremes, made permissible, flattened to a joke. All of us are expected to exist simultaneously on the furthest ends of a binary, at once both puritanical prudes and gooner perverts.

But this is again why I took on this project of writing here in the first place. I wanted to talk about the perverts and what they tell us about ourselves. The perverts, as I think the gooning essay has demonstrated, offer something of a predictive tool. If our relationship with sex is a barometer for the vibrancy and health of our culture (which, of course, I think it is), the pervert is the barometer for our relationship with sex. The pervert is the canary in the coal mine. Two years back, the perverts told us that we were barrelling toward a society of seclusion, one in which our primal instincts have been entirely modified by digital mediation. The gooner represents a person whose desire for sex has been rewired into a desire for constant, repetitive online stimuli. Is the way we seek connection through social media all that different? Is the hostility distributed through the online Gender War not a depiction of a similarly mediated instinct of its own?

We can look toward the perverts now and attempt to find a glimpse of the future. I see one where the self and sexuality are even more fragmented. Maybe AI takes us further from the real world and transposes our desires into a space that does not even exist. Maybe the widening Gender War divide breeds a new batch of self-identified beta males who fetishize their virginity. Discord servers dedicated to such themes are already on the rise. While identity politics appear to be declining, I’m hearing that the sexualization of black men and fantasies of eradicating whiteness are becoming more and more popular among white men as a kink on Reddit pages and chat groups dedicated to “Black New World Order” — likely an article for another day. Any of these niches could remain just that, niches, but gooners were once a niche, too. Surely, like the gooner and like this period of gendered animosity, it will all remain very online. It will serve as an outsized representation of the lives of a small group of people and their wants, and yet it will influence how we view our collective sexuality, just the same.

As I said from the start, though, I’m an optimist. We are capable of navigating these pressures. They are merely new signs and symbols through which we interpret our culture, but they needn’t be the singular defining force of our culture itself. It is all just a lens. While there is something to learn from it, something to suspicious of, we are not destined to be victims to the fascistic lure of technological pleasure that Norm Finkelstein describes. Not even the perverts.