He recently wrote a very detailed post titled “Reaching the ‘Goon State,’” where he outlines the various “stages” of gooning. “After two hours or so, I felt the goon.” “I set up a timer for three and a half hours, and I just went,” he says. “I didn’t even fully believe in it for a long time.” But that day finally arrived when he decided to beat his personal edging record. “It took me a long time to ‘feel the goon,’” he tells me. To get there, though, redditor JoiJunkie, a 21-year-old Southerner, says one must first master edging. “I’ve had gooning sessions where I’ve edged for 14 hours in a single sitting before finally cumming.” “When you can get to that point and can maintain it without cumming, you can basically stay in an orgasm state that lasts for hours instead of seconds,” he explains. He computes that the goon state happens “around the last two to three percent” of heightened pleasure, just short of orgasm. To goon, Christfister says, “Instead of powering through and jerking off 100 percent to orgasm, you ease off around 90 percent and slowly build up” to the point of no return. Like anything worth accomplishing, gooning takes practice. Gone are thoughts of your workday or the national debt, he says, while your “inhibitions will have completely melted away and you are at one with your body.” Many gooners describe it as the state where your “mind merges with your cock.” Instead, a gooner remains “deeply in the bliss of masturbation,” Christfister continues, submitting themselves to an unrelenting cycle of tease and denial. It’s like when a basketball player enters “the zone” and can’t miss a shot because their muscle memory and mental focus are locked in sync - except in this case, the goal is to not shoot a damn thing. With gooning, however, the desire to orgasm “pretty much goes out the window,” Christfister explains. Edging, gooning’s close cousin, is a bit more time-consuming and involved, but it comes with the promise of a more powerful and gratifying ejaculation at the end.
This, to be clear, is completely different from the regular ol’ wham-bam-thank-you-m’am whackoff you do when you’re mildly horny and trying to fall asleep. “It’s an almost hypnotic, semi-meditative mental state a person can enter after prolonged masturbation.” “Gooning is a sort of modernized version of tantric sex/masturbation without the spiritual aspects that have been traditionally associated with it in the past,” says Christfister, who moderates two of the many subreddits dedicated to the topic.
Only then can an edger truly claim to be “ gooning. The ones who travel furthest for self-pleasure say that, if they edge long enough, they fall into a mind-numbing trance where nothing matters but nutting. Most of Reddit will tell you that edging is fantastic, but the real hardcore ’baters level up from there.