Perpetual Internet Discourse

If you have not seen this story yet, let me set it up for you: in Tempe, Arizona there is a coffee chain called “Bikini Beans.” It is what you’d expect. You get coffee served by a woman in a bikini. Disruptive, eh? Well, apparently in late 2024, some guy rolled up to a Bikini Beans location (I am unsure if there are multiple locations at this point) and exposed himself. As such, the staff was on alert, and in being alert, it appears another man — a younger one, named Nautica Malone — had pulled up a couple of times in a similar dick-exposed situation. He did so in January 2025 and a manager was at the drive-through window recording him.

If you’re scoring at home, this is basically a classic “this is what mobile phone tech being readily available did to us” story. In 1993, this would be a page B11 in the newspaper headline of “Man exposes himself at coffee shop.” But because this manager at Bikini Beans uploaded it, and then some other big accounts ran with it, now Nautica Malone was viral. (And not for good reasons.) Thusly, he called his brother to “roll up” and told him to meet him at a dispensary somewhere in another Arizona city (not Tempe). Then he wasn’t answering calls to clarify location, so the brother called Nautica’s wife, who gave the brother the phone share location. The brother rolled up, and Nautica had killed himself.

You can see various body-cams here:

Mr. Malone was young, married newly-ish, and had two babies, I believe. So this situation created two kids without a father figure, a widow, a destroyed family, etc.

It’s a tough one to victim blame tho, because you can blame the manager for posting it, sure. But I mean, a guy rolled up on her drive-through window with his dick out. Maybe just deal with Tempe police, sure, but I understand the idea at the heart of what she did.

You can try to blame Nautica too, but obviously he had some mental health issues as well. In his final text to his wife, he wrote “My mental been fucked up.” Indeed. Many people have recovered from very bad things being posted about them online; not all commit suicide before the Internet tide even washes fully over them. There was more going on here. The Bikini Beans thing just pushed the lever fully over the edge.

Cole Hastings did a video tying Nautica to “gooning.” If you are unfamiliar with “gooning,” it is basically self-pleasure edge play, where you almost jerk off for hours (yes, apparently hours) to move yourself into a state of basically euphoric delusion. I am not a brain scientist, but it obviously changes your connection to please and your threshold around pleasure and all that, and there are sub-Reddits dedicated to “goon caves” where people show their various seven-monitor masturbation hubs. Seems sad.

I am not sure if Nautica was a “gooner.” He might have been. Seems like a guy with some mental health breaks and maybe a weird voyeurism or generalized sexual fantasy where he had to push the edge too far. I don’t really know and cannot deeply speculate. I have only been to Tempe twice in my life, much less ever met this man.

People want to look at this and point to Demise of society. Maybe that’s true. I don’t think we want a society where men pull up to get a latte with their penis exposed. That’s not the end goal of civilized discourse and humanity.

However, guys exposed themselves in movie theaters in the 1930s, so this isn’t new, per SE.

What I think is more interesting about this one is that whenever something “viral” comes up, especially if it touches on sex, kids, relationships, decline of masculinity, or frankly death … the Internet must have a take, and there must be sides.

I think that is the exhausting part. This is an easy story: guy with mental health issues did something stupid, realized in hindsight how much he regretted it when it was flooding his Instagram, and that was the final straw for him. We don’t need takes for days on this. If anything, we need to talk to the men in our lives and legitimately get a feel for, “How close is this guy to exposing himself in a drive-through?” A lot of times we think “A married father of two would never do such a thing.” That’s folly.

People feel exhausted by the current economic climate, absolutely. And the Internet is refuge (is it?) where we can fight with strangers about meaningless things. That just adds to the cycle of exhaustion.

Touch grass, and call a male friend.