In dark corners of the internet, men are goading each other to masturbate in public – and on female shoppers – and post the footage

As she walked the aisles, MR said in an interview, she sensed a man standing close behind her. She turned to confront him and noticed that he was a good six inches taller than her. He was talking in graphic detail about sexual things he wanted to do to her. “You’re so disgusting, get away from me,” she told him, and hurried off to find her friend.

Still, he stayed close, and for a few tense minutes the two of them locked eyes while she waited in line to pay. When at last he left, she thought that was the end of it – until, back outside in the chill of the winter morning, she felt something cold against the back of her leggings.

The man had ejaculated on her.

“I didn’t know how to react. I wanted to kill this man,” said MR, who was 47 at the time, recalling the horror and helplessness she felt as her friend wiped her off with towels. (The Guardian has verified MR’s identity but is not publishing her full name to protect her privacy.)

Hours later, on the advice of a sister who worked in law enforcement, she fished her soiled leggings out of the garbage and took them back to the store to report what had happened. A clerk listened to her account and, not seeming to realize that MR understood Spanish, shouted to a colleague in a backroom: “Tenemos otra.”

“We’ve got another one.”

    • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
      104·
      15 hours ago

      This story is quite literally about men online that are part of the “gooning” community that encourage each other to sexually assault women in public.

        • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
          42·
          14 hours ago

          Why do you say that? The reporters found posts sharing these public assaults in gooning communities, which are not hard to find tbh.

          Over the next several weeks and months, MR would learn not only that there had been reports of similar incidents at the same store in the same timeframe – one that had been shared on social media and at least one other she heard about anecdotally from shopping center employees – but that masturbating in front of female customers at branches of Dollar Tree was fast becoming a national phenomenon, a disturbing new form of sexual assault that men were documenting and bragging about in dark corners of the internet.

          It even came with its own specialized vocabulary. Masturbating in public and surreptitiously ejaculating on random women was known as “tagging” or “sharking” – or even “cum-sharking”. Online forums praised perpetrators for being “low inhibition” or “low inhib”, and users contributing to the discussion said they wished they could summon the same fearlessness in themselves.

          Almost immediately, the lawyers stumbled on another weird dimension to the cases they were developing: an online subculture of lonely, disaffected men, known as “gooners”, who bond with one other over their shared fascination with obsessive masturbation and compete with each other to see who can keep going for hours or even days at a time.

          While most appear to pursue their self-pleasure in private “goon caves” and are not criminals, some gooners, the lawyers found, took pride in public acts of masturbation. In fact, some were committing sharking assaults at Dollar Tree stores and posting the footage online.

            • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
              6·
              15 hours ago

              It’s not an agenda when we’re talking about a specific article here.

              These men aren’t homeless and mentally ill folks just busting a nut in public, this is coordinated and shared and encouraged in these “gooning” communities of men.

                • barooboodoo@lemmy.zip
                  52·
                  12 hours ago

                  You realize your comments just help their narrative right? “Hey not all men are insufferable pricks like me!” But keep making condescending dickhead comments, I’m sure they’ll come to that conclusion eventually.

                  • TubularTittyFrogEnglish
                    15·
                    12 hours ago

                    I am not interested in fighting a war against mentally ill folks, but lots of posters here certainly are.

                • Wren@lemmy.todayEnglish
                  33·
                  13 hours ago

                  Do you make up your comments like a mad lib? It’s the only thing that makes sense since they don’t have anything to do with mine, yours or the article.