For Gen Z Republican men, sex is solitary

James Fishback is almost certainly not going to win the GOP nomination for governor of Florida this year, but he’s become an object of media fascination all the same. In part it’s because Fishback holds such bigoted views that he makes the frontrunner, Rep. Byron Donalds, look moderate by comparison, even though the congressman said Black families were more stable under Jim Crow. Fishback peddles antisemitic conspiracy theories and hurls racist taunts at Donalds.

But what is really drawing attention to the 31-year-old Fishback is how he, while running far behind with older Republican voters, generates real enthusiasm with young conservatives. Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times described the packed audience at a Fishback event as “very young,” writing, “several attendees told me they were in high school.” Vanity Fair’s Dan Adler wrote that the long-shot candidate “has captured the most extreme attitudinal aspects of the Gen Z online right.” Fishback is polling at 32% with GOP voters aged 18-32, and his campaign events are larger and growing.

While he is drawing huge crowds, his audience is mostly young men and boys. A key to Fishback’s appeal merits only a fleeting mention in most profiles: his proposal to pass a 50% “sin tax” on OnlyFans creators.

“We want to stop them from doing it,” he told Sneako, a Donald Trump-worshipping podcaster who is popular in the far-right manosphere. Fishback called these creators, who often make adult material, “hoes,” arguing they should instead choose to be a “a nurse, a teacher, a stay-at-home mom.”

“Say what you want about Saudi Arabia,” he added. “There are no women hoeing out on the internet in Saudi Arabia.”

It seems peculiar to fixate on one platform known for hosting spicy material, at least for those outside of the far-right manosphere that cultivates an audience of teenage boys and young men. But in the chauvinist world of the online right, OnlyFans and solitary sex in front of a phone or computer are major obsessions.

“Gooning” — slang for excessive masturbation — has colonized the discourse of Gen Z Republican men, and it’s a subculture so consumed by misogynist anger that their conception of sexuality has become onanistic.

In November, Harper’s published a fascinating deep dive into gooning written by Daniel Kolitz, who immersed himself in the world of young men preoccupied with masturbation to the point of treating it like a vocation. But perhaps out of a desire to keep the humanity of his subjects at the forefront, Kolitz ignored how gooning overlaps heavily with the MAGA movement and manosphere content that reduces heterosexuality to a battle between men and women for domination. The straight male world of gooning is deeply tied into subcultures like incels, the “red pill” and other male supremacist communities.

What ties all these different flavors of misogyny together is an unspoken belief that male heterosexuality, at least in our modern times, is degrading. Gooners see women as inferior, which makes women’s right to reject men feel like a humiliation. As Louis Theroux demonstrates in his new Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere,” Gen Z-oriented right-wing influencers tell men the only way to right that perceived wrong is to subjugate women totally.

Even if a few influencers make money by telling their young fans that they have harems of women under their thumbs, for most men, the fantasy of a “tradwife” who is utterly submissive to her man is unachievable. An alternative is to retreat into a masturbatory environ.

Fishback’s campaign inadvertently gave the world a glimpse into how gooning-obsessed this youngest generation of far-right men has become. Leaked text messages from the Florida governor-hopeful’s campaign showed one high-ranking staffer semi-jokingly suggesting that straight sex is “gay” — echoing a claim by fascist influencer Nick Fuentes — because of this perception that engaging with women is degrading. Another set of leaked texts, these from conservative students in Miami-Dade County, was nicknamed “Gooning in Agartha.” (Agartha, the legendary utopia that some believed to exist at the center of the earth, was believed by many Nazis to house an Aryan superior race and so is a fitting reference to include in a chat full of racist and antisemitic dialogue.)

During the recent Winter Olympics, journalists Madeline Peltz and Michael Edison Hayden reported how many young MAGA men had developed an unsettling fixation on the figure skater Alysa Liu, fantasizing openly that the Team USA champion was a secret Trump fan. They were swiftly disabused of that notion — but not before deeming her “goonbait.” What was striking about the discourse, Hayden told Salon, was how it was all about masturbation.

“When I look at this overlap between porn culture and the radical right, I don’t see these men expressing a desire to have sex with or even kiss or cuddle the women they like,” he explained via email. “Everything is masturbation-themed, as if this is the only possible means of sexual gratification.”

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Hayden noted that the fantasies are sometimes “highly aggressive,” with the “gooning session” being imagined as violating a woman’s consent. “I find it a little disconcerting to never come across a post where someone is clearly imagining themselves in bed with that woman,” he said, “rather than just aggressively masturbating in her direction.”

This mix of desire and anger is evident when it comes to the OnlyFans models who occupy so much of the mental space of both manosphere influencers and their fans. As I documented in my investigation into the popular “Whatever” podcast, many of these shows generate content by bringing OnlyFans models on as guests, only to spend hours berating and insulting them for the delight of their male viewers. The women subject themselves to this, however, because they know the same men who hate on them in the comments will become customers of their adult content.

Theroux commented on this in his documentary, noting how manosphere podcasters profit “from OnlyFans girls while at the same time calling them disgusting.” He viewed this as a paradox, pointing out that they “advocate for traditional values while at the same time wanting to be seen with scantily-clad models in bikinis.”

But it makes more sense if you understand what Robert Evans, the host of the “Behind the Bastards” podcast, explained about the manosphere denizens on a recent episode: “They can kind of only conceive of human relationships in patterns of dominance and violence.”

Having spent far too much time listening to these guys on “Whatever” and other related content, it is clear they see OnlyFans a way for women to escape their duty to be housewives. Instead of giving real-life sex to a single man in exchange for his support, they offer masturbatory fodder to men in exchange for cash. Because it allows women some measure of financial independence without their having to actually touch these men — much less cook or clean for them — this is seen as not fulfilling their natural subservient roles.

Of course these men’s real issue isn’t with the small percentage of women who engage in sex work, which is called the world’s oldest profession for a reason. What’s actually new is that women can go to college and get jobs other than sex work, and at rates that were impossible to imagine a century or so ago. It’s this, and not OnlyFans, that makes it easier for women to be picky about when and who they marry, since they don’t have to do it for survival.

OnlyFans is a favorite scapegoat, though, because conservative young men can use it to prop up the myth that women’s bodies are the only thing they have to offer. As Theroux’s subjects repeatedly insist to him, a woman’s value is in her “titties” and her “vagina.” Poor, oppressed men, on the other hand, have to work for a living. (This logic also ignores that OnlyFans is hard and often exhausting work, especially since content creators have to do their own marketing on top of the work itself.) Working themselves up about OnlyFans puts a moralistic gloss on this misogyny, because it allows these young men to reduce all women to tradwives or “hoes,” while ignoring that most of the women turning them down for dates have regular jobs like they do.

OnlyFans is the synecdoche for sexist grievance for another reason: So many of the women on the platform are semi-amateur, not the pros you see in most adult content. This makes it easy to mythologize the site as a place that’s funneling the “girl next door” out of the marriage market and into an imagined life of luxury gleaned from lonely men’s credit card payments. In reality, most women on the platform use it as a side hustle. (In my interviews with OnlyFans models for my “Whatever” feature and other reporting, all were using it to supplement being underpaid in jobs ranging from acting to nursing.) The women are so desperate for customers, after all, that they are willing to subject themselves to abuse on manosphere podcasts in hopes of raising their profiles. But in case it wasn’t already obvious, these gooners are impervious to facts or lived realities.

MAGA politicians are benefitting from the distorted, nihilistic fantasies shaping the worldview of the gooners. Donald Trump and his imitators offer a politics not of hope but of vengeance against those believed to have wronged the right in some way. As much as Fishback may present his OnlyFans tax proposal as an effort to shape behavior, his language about “hoes” shows it’s really just about lashing out at a group of women who have become a scapegoat for the anger of Gen Z Republican men.

This rage won’t do anything to make their lives better. Still, these men prefer to hang onto it rather than accept the troubling possibility that women are just people — and most are easy to get along with if you treat them like equals.