Profs & Pints Philadelphia: The “Gooning” Lecture

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “The ‘Gooning’ Lecture,” answers to our questions about a growing online sexual practice, with Jenn Pollitt, assistant professor in the gender, sexuality, and women’s studies program at Temple University.

The term “gooning” has exploded across online spaces, yet many people have only a vague or wildly inaccurate sense of what it actually references.

Learn about gooning both as a sexual practice and as a cultural phenomenon shaped by the internet with Jenn Pollitt, a scholar whose research focuses on pornography, digital culture, and the changing nature of intimacy in the age of screens.

She’ll provide clear, grounded, and research-informed exploration what gooning is, how it emerged within digital porn cultures, and why it resonates with so many people in an era defined by screens, algorithms, and constant stimulation.

Drawing from media studies, sexuality research, and firsthand analysis of online communities, Dr. Pollitt will situate gooning within broader conversations about intimacy, attention, and embodiment in the digital age. Rather than treating gooning as fringe or purely sensational, she’ll frame it as a lens for understanding larger cultural shifts, especially in terms of how people navigate loneliness, overstimulation, and the search for intimacy in increasingly mediated environments.

Among the questions she’ll tackle: What does gooning reveal about how technology is reshaping desire and sexual experience? Why does it blur the line between pleasure and dissociation? And how does it challenge traditional ideas about connection, agency, and control? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: Photo by Terry Johnston / Creative Commons