Bashing the bishop, choking the chicken, spanking the monkey, or whatever you want to call it, it's said that 90% of American males have masturbated at some point in their life.
The average American man masturbates one to two times a week, but obviously, there are those who 'rub one out' much more or even less.
The subject of masturbation has come back into the spotlight a lot recently, with so-called looksmaxxing influencers arguing about the benefits of edging or abstinence.
There's also been a clampdown on how we access pornography from some governments, while many of those against masturbation say we're wrecking our brains with porn addiction and constant dopamine bursts.
Advert
We previously covered one YouTuber who claims he went a year without 'buffing the muffin' and experienced better mental clarity, but while supporters say you'll experience increased testosterone, he didn't measure his levels.
The NoFap community continues to champion supposed benefits like increased energy, improved focus, and sperm quality, as well as higher confidence, whereas others have called out a lack of masturbating for higher levels of sexual tension, anger, and stress, as well as Epididymal Hypertension – the scientific name for 'blue balls'.
One medical expert has explained how not masturbating for a year might not bring the benefits that looksmaxxers are all raving about, and, putting it simply, sperm that isn't ejaculated is simply reabsorbed back into the body.
Content creator Chris Ivan went in the other direction on his YouTube channel, instead trying to masturbate every day for a week to purposefully check out the trend of 'gooning'. There have been plenty of warnings about gooning, despite it becoming one of 2025's most popular sex trends on Google.
The general idea of gooning is that you masturbate to the point of climax and then abruptly stop, repeating the process until you reach a euphoric 'goon state'. With Ivan busting one out in the name of science, the fact that the video is titled, "I Forced Myself to Get Addicted to Gooning... It broke me," might be a bit of a clue that it wasn't smooth sailing for him.
He recalled a period when he was 18, watching pornography and effectively taking five-minute gooning breaks before getting back to work. Back then, he admitted it made his brain 'fuzzy', with many experts warning about how porn addiction can have this kind of effect on our concentration.
Discussing porn in general, Ivan mused: "These websites exist because there's somebody else on that other side of the screen that purposely created a location to offer some of the most addictive content there is to be consumed.
"They want you to be addicted to it and make money from serving you ads by getting you hooked onto this content."
As for his gooning journey, Ivan says that the dopamine hit you experience when masturbating tricks your brain, and in the aftermath, your levels return to below baseline. It's this that makes you crave more pornography and masturbation because you're chasing that earlier high.
Even by the second day, Ivan said his brain felt like 'mush', being exposed to this kind of extreme content regularly. He went on to explain his intense feeling of guilt for watching so much porn, as well as how even simple tasks like taking a shower suddenly felt like a chore. By day three, he's even struggling to get up on time.
Opening up about the emotional toll, Ivan explained how it 'degrades' your life: "The hardest part about not viewing this content is controlling your urges to view it whenever you're bored, or down, or just need to fill up some time. And the hard part is having the self-discipline to like wait for that thought to go away and wait for those physical emotions to leave."
Overjoyed to be at the end of the experiment, he offered his advice to others and suggested putting website blockers to stop exposure to X-rated materials, cultivating your social media feed by saying you're not interested in certain content, and even sleeping with your phone in another room to combat any late-night urges.
As Ivan reminds us, his experiment wasn't to glorify gooning, but to show how easy it is to slip into addiction, the effects, and what it takes to pull yourself out of constantly pulling yourself off.