As the tempo rises, the video frame is split into a mesmerizing triptych, and in the center, a young woman mouths the lyrics to an EDM-laced version of The Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” as images of other topless women aside her glimmer in sync with the beat. In another video, from the creator xfeeefeee, e-girls costumed in cat ears and bikinis bounce and gyrate, paced perfectly to the song’s pulse, as the scissoring baseline of Opiuo’s “Dopamine” grows louder.
These are not the videos made famous on MTV’s Total Request Live countdown of yesteryear. They are portals into the future of sex—techno-infused proof of how our online sexual ecosystem, one that is pushing us deeper into a communion with the self, is coming alive in a whole new way.
Porn music videos (PMV) have circulated in fringe corners of the internet for years, shared profusely, and almost exclusively, among invite-only Discords and message boards. But across the past year, as gooning has exploded in the zeitgeist, PMVs have also broken containment. In more recent months, the format has undergone a kind of renaissance on X where they have found massive audiences.
For gooners, the subculture of young men who love to endlessly masturbate to internet porn, they have become the ideal form of “bate fuel,” a propellant that keeps them edging for hours.
Though PMVs vary widely, the videos are typically fan-made edits centered around a specific theme, fetish, storyline, adult performer, or content creator (e-girls are a favorite among straight gooners). A single video, which can run up to four or five minutes, is jammed to the gills with dozens, if not hundreds of clips, which are pulled from porn that has already been posted online. From there, editors synchronize their clips to a trance-inducing type beat (techno, EDM, and hip-hop genres are among the most popular choices).
Amsterdam-based web designer NoodleDude jump-started a generation of PMVs by mixing social media with explicit content from OnlyFans, Harper’s first reported. Many of the subculture’s hallmarks, like the three-panel triptych format, were pioneered by him and DigitalFiend, another prolific editor. Ultimately, as your screen is overtaken with a flurry of fast-moving clips, a PMV is meant to work like a spell, elliptically seducing the viewer into a state of endless, nirvana-like masturbation.
“The gooning community—it’s like a mirror. You can see little reflections of wider society coming in through their kinks,” Spencer, the creator behind niche PMV account SpoogeTube, tells WIRED over Zoom.
Gooning’s exact origins are up for debate, but some speculate it started on 4chan in the early 2000s.
A vast variety of specialized PMVs—called “gooner edits”—that are proliferating across X have adopted the same techniques of creators like NoodleDude but with unique twists.
While scrolling X last September, Spencer, a 28-year-old college student in the UK, noticed that “a lot of really cool edits” were beginning to show up on his feed, but they were missing one thing: “there wasn’t a narrative in them,” he says. (Citing the explicit nature of the work, the video editors WIRED spoke to asked to be identified by a pseudonym.) That’s what pushed him into the world of PMVs, where he creates highly stylized edits for gay gooners. “I just wanted to make something that I kind of would want to watch.”
His videos occupy the realm of fantasy without reservation. In “The Curious Straight Boy,” he flirted with the idea of hetero gooners jerking to other men. “I have a goon cave like every other boy,” the narrator begins, “but I’ve watched so much porn I’ve started noticing some of the guys more than the girls.” Recently, worrying that he was running low on fresh ideas, he joked with one of his voiceover artists that the only solution was to crank up the surrealism. His idea: “What about the life of a cum sock?”
