Every night after work, Chad logs on. He isn’t looking for a date. He’s meeting his ‘goonbuds,’ a group of online friends he has known for eight years, and together they pick a video, watch it for an hour or two, and chat the whole time on X.

Chad is 36, lives in Hawaii, and is a virgin by choice. He is also a gooner, which means he spends hours at a stretch pleasuring himself to porn, often alongside others in an online community. On weekdays he puts in about three hours. On weekends and holidays, sometimes the entire day.

His story starts, as many do, in repression. His family was deeply religious, and porn was something to hide. As a teen he traded clips and DVDs with school friends, but nobody ever spoke about it. “Too awkward,” he says. So he carried it alone for years.

Then came 2020. Stuck at home during Covid, he stumbled onto the gooner community on Reddit. He was 30, and he’d never heard the word. The moment he did, he recognised himself. For the first time, porn felt silly, social, even fun, and the shame loosened its grip.

Also Read: The science of timing, when you're most likely to conceive

His setup is surprisingly modest: a laptop hooked to a 27-inch monitor, a tablet on the side, and 11 masturbation sleeves, a leftover from a monthly subscription box. He once ran three monitors and gave up because it was too much to manage.

He also keeps a vintage collection of DVDs and VHS tapes going back to the 1980s, and he misses the old studio era, when porn stars were genuine celebrities. AI and OnlyFans, he says, are eroding that, and he expects to be catered to even less.

Soon he’ll move into a two-bedroom apartment and turn the spare room into a “goon cave,” projector, bed, signed photos he currently stores under his bed, and a lock on the door. He insists it isn’t shame. He simply doesn’t want anyone, a landlord or a visiting friend, to stumble on explicit material they didn’t sign up for.

He lists the perks plainly: no STI worries, no chance of a pregnancy scare, and a lifestyle that suits his introversion and social anxiety.

His parents have stopped asking about marriage. The community, he says, is far more ordinary than its reputation, office workers, couples who goon together, and a growing number of women, nicknamed ‘goonnettes.’

And then Chad asks the question that makes this story harder to dismiss.

We don’t blink when a couple has sex several times a day. We call it passion, even goals. So why is a single man with the same appetite, who turns to porn and toys instead, treated like a problem to be fixed?

Also Read: The Horse we judged at twenty and recognise at thirty

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Maybe the discomfort isn’t really about porn at all. Maybe it’s about a man who has made a full, structured, social life around desire and needs no one’s permission, and no partner, to do it.

Is Chad a warning sign or a preview? Decide for yourself, but know that for millions of people the line between ‘lonely’ and ‘content’ is drawn by whoever is doing the judging.