Gooning describes engaging in prolonged masturbation lasting 6-8 hours or more often in a state of sensory overload from multiple concurrent streams of pornography. Gooning rapidly grew in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic and has become an increasingly mainstream concept in the intervening years, yet it has been the subject of almost no critical scholarship to date. This paper looks to fill the gap in scholarship on gooning and builds off a presentation from AoIR 2024 to examine the ways in which gooning connects to porn addiction, pornosociality, and the “male loneliness epidemic.” This paper analyzes content from four gooning-based subreddits collected weekly across all of 2024. I show how gooning emphasizes mediated sexuality and intimacy, insular and socially unacceptable lifestyle conventions, and a dissociative “flow” state. Through this analysis we can envision gooning as a core response to the “male loneliness epidemic.” Through gooning, people gain temporary respite from the demands of the workweek – a sexual form of what Hu (2022) describes as digital lethargy – and form intimate homosocial connections despite the broader decay of our social fabric. That said, gooning often perpetuates normativity – of bodies, genders, ability, race, etc. – and refracts the problems of the contemporary world through a phallocentric lens. In closing, I argue that gooning and its connection to porn addiction, pornosociality, and the “male loneliness epidemic” is better understood as a response to the bodily and cognitive overload of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

My contribution is a theoretical conceptualization of the platform as a disruptive figure - not only in the infrastructural turn towards what scholars have defined as the “platformisation” (Poell, Nieborg & Van Dijk, 2019) of a diverse range of industries, but also as a political metaphor and a vector for social identification.

My main focus is on the rise of powerful, hypermasculine figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan, who notably leverage the concept of (dis)trust towards “mainstream” and “legacy” media in favour of tech platforms like Musk’s own X (formerly known as Twitter) or alt-tech platforms like Donald Trump’s Truth Social or Rumble. While these platforms are presented with a stated emphasis on free speech as a universal value, their usage is also driven and/or associated with strong, even authoritarian personalities, usually characterized by a hyper-masculine persona and US-exceptionalist attitudes.

My proposal is thus framing the “platform” and “platforming practices” as a key conceptual scaffolding for reading the current cultural momentum of these figures. Positioning the “becoming platform” of Rogan, Musk, or Trump (each of whom have come to embody platforms of sorts – respectively: JRE, X, Truth Social) in the context of the dangerous emergence of a “platformed personality capitalism” founded on “personality as infrastructure” (Rosamond, 2023), I discuss the identity politics of these powerful men and the way they function as discursive catalysts for platformisation as an urgent cultural and political issue.

This study investigates Italian Men's Rights Activism (MRA) online communities, addressing a significant research gap in masculinity studies that have primarily focused on Anglophone contexts. Despite growing antifeminist and men's rights groups in Italy's digital landscape, little research has examined their dynamics and impact.

Using Margaret Wetherell's concept of "affective practice", we examine how emotions function as dynamic processes that emerge through routine interactions and interpretive repertoires in digital spaces.

Through in-depth interviews with ten active participants in Italian MRA Facebook communities and thematic analysis, we identified six key interpretive repertoires: affective discomfort, denied recognition, feeling rational, conflictuality, affective alignments, and constructive affective repositioning. These repertoires reveal how participants position themselves within broader narratives of masculinity while negotiating emotional expressions that both challenge and reinforce traditional gender ideologies.

Our findings demonstrate that the circulation and repetition of discourse within online spaces are transforming men's issues into ordinary affective capital, which can easily adapt to different contexts and circumstances. This normalization produces two key consequences: on one hand, anti-feminist ideas increasingly infiltrate everyday conversations about society, becoming part of mainstream discourse through forms of ordinary affectivity On the other hand, discourses on male discrimination, even when not explicitly anti-feminist or misogynistic, risk resonating with more extreme, hostile, and openly misogynistic positions.

This process of affective normalization also makes it more difficult to critically engage with the issues raised by these groups, many of which, such as isolation, suicide rates, and male depression, certainly warrant more nuanced, objective, and constructive reflection.

In 2024, Safernet Brasil recorded 4,289 complaints of online violence or discrimination against women, making it the third most common complaint that year. When focusing on content aimed at minority groups, violence against women (VAW) accounts for the highest number of reports, a trend that has persisted since 2018. Literature describes violent practices targeting women using terms such as "gendered cyberhate," "gendered e-bile" (Jane, 2017), "cybersexism" (Poland, 2016), and "gendertrolling" (Mantilla, 2013). Additionally, the literature highlights growing phenomena on digital platforms, including gender political violence and gender disinformation, which involve practices like coordinated abuse and gender-based defamation (Judson, 2021). This paper examines how Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok propose gender-based violence governance on their space. Through a documental research of their Terms of Use, Community Guidelines, and related documents, we aim to highlight aspects of platform governance regarding VAW, specifically how these platforms propose to self-regulate content within their spaces. We focus on their understanding—or lack thereof—of online VAW, drawing on previous studies that explore platform governance around topics like hate speech (Santos et al., 2023). Our analysis focuses on four aspects: types of restrictions on VAW-related content; how gender appears in the documentation; proposals for combating online VAW; and identification of other vulnerabilities faced by women in these spaces. Parcial results shows lack of specific guidelines regarding VAW and of gendered violence data in content removal reports that prevents an accurate understanding of VAW.