not about much

«The botany professor,» from Kkokei Shimbun, October 20, 1908. she's wearing a kimono blouse or haori, edwardian skirt or hakama, gibson girl bouffant, a lacy high-collar blouse with cravat and brooch, and a pocket watch with chain

Victorian tea gown that clearly started as a kimono.  It still has the long furisode sleeves, but now they’re gathered at the shoulder and turned around so that the long open side is facing the front instead of the back.  Similarly the back is taken in with curved seams to fit the torso and pleated below that for the skirt.

Woodblock of a woman in a a bustle dress made with colorful patterned fabrics and examples of how a woman could style her hair with it.

More prints to showcase hairstyles, two women wearing western wear and two women wearing kimonos.

This next one’s modern, but it involves hoopskirts so I’ll add it in because it makes me so happy.  There’s been different styles of wedding fashion that take kimonos and give them a more modern look.  Often this involves taking a kimono and then cutting and resewing it into a new dress.  Very pretty, but it can’t ever be worn like a traditional kimono again.  But now there’s another trend where the bride wears a hoopskirt with a white skirt, then you take the kimono and drape it on.  The back of the kimono covers the front of the dress, the long sleeves fall across the sides or the back, and you still wear an obi with it.  The result is pretty and the kimono itself doesn’t have to be altered at all.

And because you mentioned steampunk, I have to add in these two:

Idiotic. Really did not appreciate the authors bewildered sneering tone. The references to gooning as a political movement a la MAGA and the "gen z tea party" were frankly bizarre, and they betrayed some critical misunderstanding of the subject.

"healthy gooning, as any gooner can tell you, is an oxymoron" these are the words of someone who cannot see past normativity. This is, crucially, said in response to a popular gooner talking about a healthy relationship to said kink. The author repeatedly doesn't believe that people can have a non-harmful relationship to a their wacky meme hypno kink.

The central fantasy of gooning, and why I think it routinely evades "normie" understanding, is that it is a meta-kink. It is a fetishized, WWE fantasy version of the idea of being addicted to pornography. They literally get off on telling journalists they are addicted to porn.

The vast majority of people are perfectly capable of shutting down their goon cave and going to work like normal people. Naturally there are gooners with a maladaptive relationship to gooning, but any sufficiently popular hobby will contain those with a socially maladaptive relationship to said hobby. Go to literally any large video game subreddit and you will find people with a deeply maladaptive relationship to that game.

The other massive obvious, neon-sign point that the author glances off but ultimately does not investigate, is that Gooning is a fetishization of the commerical. Nobody goons to normal looking people, you goon to the idea of people as a product. The ultra-tailored, edited, artificial persona that some sex workers inhabit creates a heightened, exalted reality, which the gooner finds appealing. These are the oiled up bodybuilders of gay porn and advertisement, and the airbrushed slimthick baddies of both porn and commercials.

One of my friends also enjoys an asexual safari into the wonderful niche kink communities of the internet. He told me once that he found a gooner who just cut right to the heart of the matter, and only posted videos of himself fucking a McChicken sandwich, an idealized, constantly advertised commercial product. That is the core eros of Gooning. It is a libidinal response to a socially atomized world dominated by advertising.

This is also why gooners are obsessed with Egirls. Another thing the author touches on but does not investigate. The bicycle was both a moral panic and sex symbol. They allowed chaste young women a new degree of autonomy. Now they can travel further away to hold jobs, and by god they might even meet men unsupervised. How erotic! The Egirl is a similar figure to the female bicycle owner. It is a new class of young women with a degree of social, financial, and sexual mobility. Crucially, many of these young women are twitch streamers. They inhabit a character, and the performance of that character is a product. Many people loudly condemn these women as socially dangerous, and as we all know from reading Georges Battaille, anything forbidden becomes erotic.

Many gooners engage in the kink because of broader social anxieties. Sex is messy and effortful and people are busy. How many women do you know who would like to date, but just don't the time or energy to navigate the anxieties of their partner turning out to be some loser chud? How many trans women are afraid to go outside? History is happening outside! And history is a dangerous place! I can understand why people might want to turn their brain off and crank it into a meditative state for 45 minutes.