by Max Naum
from issue 01
Earlier last year, during a podcast interview, American political scientist Norman Finklestein made a comment, the depth of which even the speaker himself might have overlooked. Finkelstein was talking about a recent reading he had done for a New York publication called Mars Review of Books. Naturally, the 70-year-old Holocaust scholar felt a bit out of place in a Washington Square bar filled with zoomers reciting texts about “the hermeneutics of core-core” off of their intentionally cracked phone screens. This sense of alienation for him seems to have been made manifest in one word he heard that night during one of the readings, and that word was
“GOONING”
Gooning is a practice and an online subculture centered around masturbation that involves maintaining sexual arousal without reaching orgasm for an extended period of time, resulting in a hypnotic, trance-like state. Finkelstein went on to claim that the crowd in attendance, concerned with such topics or engaged in such behavior, possesses undeniable dormant fascist tendencies, ready to activate promptly, given the opportunity. While the intellectual integrity of Finklestein’s comment is questionable, I would argue that the connection drawn here between gooning culture and fascism is highly significant if considered genuinely.
One important thing to acknowledge about the way gooning is going to be considered in this analysis is as a mostly heterosexual male-oriented practice. While various edging-based fetishes have existed for a long time within the queer and kink communities, the particular type of gooning fetish predominant on resources like Hypnotube does not primarily appeal to a homosexual or female audience. This distinction is also an important one to make because of the later-discussed subdivisions of the fetish tied to gender, sexuality, and race.
Hypnotube was created and is maintained by game developer and OnlyFans creator Mia Electra, as a community hub for people, both creators and consumers, interested in hypnosis-adjacent pornographic content. The photo and video content available on the site can be divided into multiple categories, with the most basic, in terms of potential appeal, being the PMVs (Porn Music Videos). This general category features short to long-form compilations of pornographic videos edited together to a rhythmically driven pop song or a longer EDM track. PMVs have been around for quite some time, however, as most material hosted on Hypnotube, these PMVs are distinct from similar content found on more “vanilla” platforms. Here the editing puts much less emphasis on style or smoothness of transitions and is much more implemented to condense as much continuous pornographic visuals as possible into a singular video. To further ground this distinction, it’s important to look at how such content is consumed and explain the idea of a “goon cave”.
Goon cave is a term used within the community, especially on forums such as r/GoonCaves to describe a physical setup for prolonged masturbation sessions accompanied by non-stop porn consumption. The scale of these setups varies from primitive software, allowing the display of multiple videos on one screen, to elaborate constructions taking up a whole room that can include up to 10 screens and ceiling projections, powered by high-end GPUs and filled with robotic sex toys/machines. While the space of regular gooning compilations and PMVs on Hypnotube is mostly occupied by material oriented towards straight males without any specific fetishes, it is a fairly common thing for these porn enthusiasts to host fellow forum members at their physical “caves” and partake in extensive masturbation sessions together.
These spaces, while being very much self-constructed introduce a theme of collective worship into the culture surrounding Hypnotube and gooning as a whole. The visual language of a goon cave bares a heavy resemblance to many of the places of worship, present in the majority of the world’s religions. The caves of gooners with a particular affinity for the physical medium of paper posters and printouts of their favorite models or scenes, as well as those of people with the dedication and the monetary means to set up more than a dozen screens in the room, provide an aesthetic experience quite reminiscent to that of an Orthodox Christian cathedral or a Vajrayana Temple. The Slavic Orthodox church decor overwhelms the viewer with endless sequences of images of saints, angels, and illustrations of holy texts, not unlike the way pornstars and scenes surround one in an elaborate gooning setup. This experience of sensory overload is meant to create a feeling of submission within the onlooker's psyche, whether they seek this feeling out for spiritual catharsis or carnal pleasure.
In the context of goon caves, the deliberate arrangement and saturation of visual stimuli not only captivate but also condition inner reflexes, establishing an authoritative presence over the gooner’s experiences. These themes of authority are anything but understated throughout the Hypnotube content, given that its core subject matter is hypnosis. The videos catered to a general hypnokink audience feature a similar editing style to the PMVs with an ASMR-type reverberated female voiceover focused on domination, hypnosis-like abstract dirty talk, and sensual mouth sounds.
The image of these videos’ target audience, as a male possessed by an insatiable desire to be dominated by a woman has been in cultural circulation at least since the publishing of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s famous book Venus in Furs in 1870. Nowadays, porn categories such as femdom consistently top the charts of most searched material on large aggregators like PornHub. Still, the type of power-play presented on Hypnotube is extremely distinct. Most of the base statements that can be heard in the various humiliation videos on the site are related to the viewer’s pornography addiction and inability to have and/or enjoy real-life sexual activity. Not only are the AI-animated uncanny images of women in these videos degrading the audience for their inability to resist pornography, but they also incessantly encourage continuous consumption of it until the point of total annihilation of one’s cognitive function. Dehumanizing terms like “pump drone’” or “porn object” are used to address these consumers.
The desire for freedom from responsibility, intelligence, and reason is a frequent recurring theme in a lot of the site’s content. Many of the hypnotic videos in this thematic category feature fantasies of being enslaved by something like a giant corporation or an alien civilization and reduced to a singular function of perpetual sexual stimulation and porn consumption as some sort of elaborate cruel experiment. Among these degrading videos appears a sub-category called brain breakers, which is only a subsection of the general brainwashing category. This allows us to observe how the visual language of propaganda has assimilated into the gooning culture.
Videos like “Barbie Brain Injection”, featuring flashing ai-generated imagery accompanied by a static high-pitched frequency would seem completely out of place on a pornographic website. However, for the audience of Hypnotube these oppressive aesthetics are sometimes the most important part of their sexual experience. The sissyfication kink, which dominates the site’s content pool, is deeply predicated on the dynamics of forceful coercion. It can appear as though the so-called sissy hypnosis fetish is based on some sort of an intermediate stage in one’s path to transitioning and self-acceptance, preceding a full realization of one’s identity, commitment to gender affirmative care, and other social processes involved. And while this can be true for some people who have at one point interacted with this side of Hypnotube, the core principle of adherence to the sissy identity is the belief that one is not a woman but is defined by his inability to be a real man. This can seem confusing, but if viewed from the perspective of the audience’s assumed crippling porn addiction things become much clearer. The image of femininity sissy hypnosis content is trying to impose on the viewer is not derived from real-life or even literary female archetypes, but the image of a pornographically objectified female figure.
According to the videos, the first prerequisite for adopting the role of a sissy is sexual frustration created by either one’s inability to derive pleasure from real-life sex due to failure to find partners or a lifetime of pornographic exposure ruining one’s ability to enjoy sex normally. They might display footage of awkward unattractive sexual encounters to persuade the viewer this is what the limit of their sexual experience is, as well as to assert their inherent inability to “please a woman”.They claim the viewer’s attraction to hardcore porn, especially featuring anal penetration, stems from the fact that the actions displayed are something that could be inflicted on them. To capitalize on similar sentiments, Hypnotube is filled with advertisements for micro chastity cages and specialized lingerie. These cages, apart from extending the practice of orgasm denial through restricting stimulation, are an integral part of sissyfication, conditioning one to derive pleasure from the idea of his genitals’ inferior size. The reason for withholding sexual gratification within the sissy subculture is the fact that the “sissy urges” get weaker as one orgasms, knocking them out of the state of complete obedience to the pornographic delirium, necessary to engage in most of these practices. These and many other ideas expressed within the sissyfication videos come together to form the image of a sissy as a gender identity and a sexual orientation based on one’s porn addiction.
The repetitive exposure to scenarios where one's lack of traditional masculine sexual prowess is highlighted and subsequently morphed into a form of sexual allegiance to being a 'sissy' reinforces a self-image tied intrinsically to these characteristics. Much like how Nietzsche describes ressentiment as a force that gives rise to new values and identities from perceived injuries or injustices, sissyfication content turns failure into a specific kind of sexual and gender identity. This identity is celebrated and ritualized within the community, fostering a distinct group cohesion against an imagined normative societal framework that supposedly does not accept or value them. The regime of the site directs this personal dissatisfaction into a highly specific form of engagement that perpetuates the site’s culture and consumption patterns. This manipulation ensures ongoing engagement and loyalty to the content, much as authoritarian regimes harness ressentiment to maintain power and suppress dissent.
The fascist parallel carries over into the interpersonal aspect of sissyfication as well. And while some of the seemingly nefarious practices like doxxing / exposing community members are surprisingly somewhat consensual, there is another more aggressive side to the fetish, such as organized sissyfication campaigns carried out on various forums, social media, or Discord servers by people who derive immense pleasure from the conversion of others.
One known instance of these conversion attempts has taken place on 4chan’s infamous /r9k/ board. The so-called robots on the board, usually young men not in employment, education, or training, discuss their life frustrations, mostly related to social interactions and romance. A few years ago, a group of sissyfication fetishists, organized through a secret Discord group, unleashed a massive shilling campaign in the community. Essentially, the strategy was to identify vulnerable users posting about having issues entering a romantic relationship, and begin pressuring them with sentiments like “If you can’t find one, then why don’t you become the girlfriend, anon?” The more the victim would give into the idea the further he would be pushed, getting to the point of being gaslit into taking black market hormones, drugs and undergoing DIY medical procedures or even surgeries. These things have also occurred in much more disturbing circumstances, such as the GigglyGoonClown scandal, when similar actions have been performed against 12 to 16-year-olds. Much of the “reprogramming” content utilized by these actors came directly from Hypnotube creators.
These behaviors demonstrate a certain proclivity, for aggressively pursuing homogeneous social structures, seeded within the gooning community. But a more glaring example on the way xenophobia is present on Hypnotube is the BNWO content. At times closely intertwined with sissification, Black New World Order is a raceplay term describing the fetishization of black supremacy over all other races (especially sexual supremacy over white men). These images and videos use text such as “white extinction is imminent” or “white boys everywhere are giving into their true nature and black men are happy to take advantage”. As within the sissy-related content, a huge emphasis is placed on the idea of a “real” man depicted in the pornographic image, as opposed to the inferior sexually incapable viewer, only here this inadequacy is apriori defined by racial identity. This would seem like some sort of an extremely obscure way of channeling the so-called white guilt, however, BNWO is far from being born out of a genuine sense of black superiority.
BNWO is probably the aspect of the website with the most obvious socio-political connotations. However, obscure this fetish may seem, the sexual objectification of black people has existed in American culture since the times of slavery. Black people were viewed as inherently hyper-sexual and primitive, by the white American majority, which in their eyes justified ubiquitous sexual exploitation of both black males and females. These sensibilities remained deep in the American cultural vocabulary and later re-emerged in the adult entertainment industry. The black male figure in pornography is exoticized, being portrayed as sexually aggressive, dominant, and defined by physicality over any other potential attributes like personality, intellect, or even occupation. Their function becomes one more akin to an unstoppable chaotic force of nature, rather than a sentient rational human being. These well-established tropes like the “Mandingo” stereotype are concrete expressions of the fear of black sexuality threatening white purity and order.
One of the creators making BNWO and other gooning compilations and playlists is Nyarlathotep. Most of their content, including their personal website, seems to have been removed, with some remains scattered through random reuploads. However, their key significance for this analysis lies in their name. Nyarlathotep is the name of a deity from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Also known as The Crawling Chaos, he is pretty atypical for the Outer Gods canon, due to his ability to directly communicate and interact with humanity. Being a shapeshifter, he can take on an endless number of disguises, however, he most frequently appears as a tall black man.
When contextualized within Lovecraft’s dubious views on the subject of race, it becomes obvious why black here symbolizes an overwhelming sense of otherness and threat. In the minds of many, especially people engaging with media like raceplay pornography, black as a racial identity as well as black as symbolic darkness likely appear to be conceptually synonymous. This coupled with the common Hypnotube content trope of specifically black alien tentacles attacking and impregnating white women, indicates how frequently xenophobia is integrated into the gooning-adjacent content.
This intertwining of fear, desire, and taboo that both invokes and subverts the racist tropes allows for a ritualistic transgression of the viewer’s ideological norms. Such transgressions, as Georges Bataille might argue, are not merely acts of overt rebellion but are deeply imbued with a recognition of the power and presence of these prejudices and the in-group authority. He famously writes: “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it”. In Bataille’s terms, the pornographic depiction of racial and gender hierarchies within such content does not merely reflect existing prejudices but actively participates in a complex ritualistic process that reaffirms them. This process deepens the viewer’s attachment to these ideologies by linking them to moments of intense physical and emotional experience.
There is no need to be consciously indoctrinated into concrete racist ideologies to experience these effects, as subconscious xenophobic sensibilities are present in every individual. The audience can project their fears and desires onto an "othered" figure without having to confront the implications of their views in the real world. The eroticization of this dynamic, therefore, serves not just as a form of sexual gratification but as a psychological sandbox for playing out deeper social and racial anxieties. Therefore, I would argue that BNWO, sissy hypnosis, and similar content on Hypnotube do not merely represent or cater to existing racist sentiments but actively shape and reinforce them.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume the totalitarian flows that permeate Hypnotube’s content and gooning culture as a whole, are exclusively those of the far-right. This type of politically reductionist framing would obscure the much more grand and anonymous force, of which this cult of pornography addiction is only a symptom. This force is sometimes referred to as the attention economy or as David Courtwright puts it - limbic capitalism. Superficially, it is a form of economic exploitation that targets the human brain's limbic system, primarily focusing on the parts responsible for emotions and pleasure. Upon deeper consideration this economic model reveals itself to be more akin to a complex degenerative disease progressing throughout the body of our culture. It manifests itself through human actions and infrastructure, although its origin is non-human in nature and lies in the uncanny realm of the “world-without-us”.
This exploit in the flawed hardware of the human brain, produces its own totalitarian fascist ideology that exists beyond the commonplace political binary, slowly giving flesh to the kind of techno-capitalist feudal order, somebody like Nick Land could only dream of. This ideology is capable of absorbing any aesthetic regime or system of ethics, as its only necessary vehicle of self-propagation is consuming human attention. This attentive energy is then converted into capital, only to be immediately reinvested into the scaling of the mechanisms used to extract the resources fueling this process in the first place. Here the consumer becomes both the peasant and the land they work, harvesting the precious vital crop of their conscious experience, using tools “rented out” to them by the digital platforms in exchange for endless monthly subscriptions and the absolute majority of the harvested goods. Afterward the consumer is left with whatever tiny percentage of their time, energy, or monetary resources the feudal lords did not require them to surrender, having to live off of the bare minimum necessary to retain them in this asymmetrical arrangement.
The gooning practice of Hypnotube, is a prime illustration of these phenomena, especially if examined through the lens of its similarity to acts of religious worship. Practices like prayer or meditation could be understood through the perspective of Simone Weil, as an ultimate act of directed attention. In her perspective, these practices require a form of self-emptying and a deliberate turning away from the ego and worldly concerns towards a deeper engagement with the divine. This period of focused attention is not just a mental exercise but a spiritual one that clears the way for connecting the practitioner more intimately with the transcendent. This process of erasing one’s self in an act of absolute focus is almost identical to the way people seem to describe the process and goal of engaging in gooning.
In the context of Hypnotube, where users engage in prolonged stimulation but deliberate avoidance of sexual climax the manipulative power of limbic capitalism becomes evident. By fostering a state that mirrors religious or meditative absorption, these platforms exploit the human capacity for attention and transform it into a closed loop of desire and frustration. This echoes the mechanisms through which fascist ideologies historically mobilize collective focus and emotion, channeling societal grievances and frustrations toward obsessive loyalty to the state. Such mechanisms have been thoroughly described by Wilhelm Reich, using sexual repression as an example of utilizing artificially created frustrations to uphold dictatorial authority. Similarly, limbic capitalism on platforms like Hypnotube channels individual desires into an absolute consumptive dependency, subduing one’s entire being up to the point of forming one’s identity around these compulsions.
The all-consuming nature of gooning, much like the totalizing demand of fascist allegiance, requires a surrender of personal autonomy, well-being, or attachment to all social reality beyond its own. This drive within the consumer culture threatens to continuously expand creating an increasingly homogenous society of individuals reduced to single-function machines in service of endless consumption cycles, oblivious of their own exploitation and grim predicament. The relationship between online platforms like Hypnotube and their audience is an avantgarde vision of an emerging contemporary form of digital limbic fascism, where users are unknowingly enlisted in a totalitarian political structure and economy that trades in the very essence of their human capacities for devotion, desire, and meaning.