Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/23/reddit-bans-r-gooncaves.html
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I have no problem with people watching and enjoying porn… it’s fine. But this sounds fucking gross, as you say. Sound like the people there need to go outside and touch some grass, as they kids say…
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Not to be confused with:
Otherwise, Googling photos of these rooms, the main thing that differentiates it from a typical home office or gaming setup seems to be lighting and an unusual amount of monitors. Display shelves for anime figuries, manga books, etc. also appear a lot. I would assume there are also special compartments/drawers for the various … accoutrements of the activity. The whole thing makes me kind of sad for the people involved.
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Seems like a strange thing for people spend that much effort on. I guess everyone needs a hobby though. If that’s your hobby though I’m shocked there are enough folks comfortable sharing it to create a reddit. I feel like my life was better before knowing this. Is this the sort of thing HP Lovecraft was talking about when he said “We live on a placid island of ignorance”?
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Sounds like a Cribs-type community for incel dudes
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wow, gooner oppression, I never thought I’d see it 
(I also never expected gooning to be a thing, culture moves fast)
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I think the classier term for such a room is a “masturbatorium.”
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“And you’re using my blanket!”
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This is the natural evolution of the incel I suppose.
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My daughter had to be the one to explain hentai to the teacher (college level not high school) while the guys going “umm I am not comfortable explaining this”
There was an issue with someone spending his classes watching. The other guys in the class were supportive of needing to deal with the issue but did not realize someone would have to define it.
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“Everyone need a hobby.”
Gooncaves!
“Er - not like that.”
Did they have to explain it past, “Animated porn from Japan?”
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I don’t think so but it had not occurred to them that they would have to do that. The teacher was probably around your or my age not someone distant enough in generations that they expected him not to know.
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Over here, Gooners are something else entirely.
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Yeah, these cave guys probably have more in common with gurners than gooners
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That reminds me of a bit I thought of for a stand up joke.
“I hope our loved ones aren’t actually looking down on us from heaven. At least not all the time. I don’t want my grandma to confront me about watching Hentai after I die. ‘What were you doing? They’re cartoons! They’re not even real girls!’”
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Similarly but inversely, I was recently watching a Japanese game show with someone(Kasso, basically ninja warrior but skateboarding, very fun, definitely boingboing worthy, its all on youtube) when one of the contestants proudly declared in language intelligible to english speakers he had a “Hentai Style”, and I had to explain that in Japanese, hentai is really more akin to the english word “perverse” and isn’t specifically about cartoon porn, but the act of explaining it and knowing the difference, made me feel like the person I was telling was just thinking about why I would know the difference. (hentai in the non porn sense is actually a fairly common word in Japan is why)
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*Was looking for an art related gif for another BBS thread and this one came up. Just had to come back and post it here 
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The construction and sharing of goon caves takes something that’s typically an isolated, solitary experience—masturbation—and makes it social in a virtual setting. “Deindustrialization and atomization are, in my opinion, huge contributors to men losing homosocial leisure spaces, as well as viable, long-term romantic relationships,” Brooks said. “So, for men who are struggling with loneliness, feeling isolated, or don’t have meaningful interpersonal relationships, then the only thing to do after work is to play video games and masturbate. In order to participate in imagined homosocial escape, you need a space to hypothetically share with the dudes, and if you only have a gaming setup in your apartment, or in this case a goon cave, then that is what you share to meet that belonging need.”
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When I lived in Seattle, I had something that pretty much qualified as a gooncave, though I just called it “my living room”. Big beanbag chair. Mood lighting provided by a couple of variable-color lightbulbs. Blackout curtains. Projector set up to cover an entire wall. Surround sound. It was a great place to play video games, a great place to watch movies (especially with one of the last great video rental stores a block away from my apartment) and it was a great place to watch porn, by myself or with my SO. Sometimes for a very long time, especially on a long, dreary Seattle weekend where I barely had the energy to get out of bed and feed myself, never mind leave the house and do anything.
I could have probably called it “my home theatre” too. Sometimes the home theatre just happened to be showing porn, y’know?
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Here in Australia, goon is what we call cheap booze[1], particularly wine-in-a-box (which was invented here). So my thought was a “goon cave” was just somewhere people went to drink when the local park was in use
[1] cf goon bag, goon-of-fortune, etc
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