#purity culture

[dottyistired]

fuck elon musk but the privating of likes on twitter is a really interesting exposure of the absolute panopticon culture going on there

there are droves of people freaking out that they can't check people's likes before following them anymore (something i have never done or thought to do??) because "what if i accidentally follow a predator?" the pedopanic is ramped to the MAX. if you want to have privacy you must have something shady to hide.

with the general culture of "oomfs you follow this Unperson u have 24hrs to unfollow or you will be unpersoned as well" idk why i'm surprised it's considered normal to pilfer through ppl's liked posts to justify harassing them. the lack of choice on users' part whether their likes are public or not (a feature tumblr has had for years) is shitty design but i can't help but be intrigued by the panic of purity-obsessed weirdos as a feature that gave them an illusion of control is taken away

sorry guys, life isn't that easy. shitty people will exist alongside the righteous and will often be indistinguishable. the idea that you can fully avoid them by stalking their shit is not a healthy thought process. make peace with privacy.

[lgbtlunaverse]

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

[mswyrr]

[dukeofankh]

I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

[lazaefair]

"Fiction is not a 1:1 reflection of reality" and "the U.S. military doesn't support and finance American action movies and video games for fun" are concepts that can and should coexist

[odekiisu]

Call me whatever names you wish, but I think this is a much better (and healthier) attitude than “anyone under 18 should never be allowed to see any sexual imagery ever”

(For reference: this was at the Tom of Finland exhibition, containing actual, queer, kinky af pornography. There were definitely some young people there, perhaps in their late teens. There was even a parent with their baby who was probably too young to understand anything at all. And guess what, all those people are probably going to be fine.)

[ID: a sign saying “Please note: there is no age limit, but the exhibition is not recommended for children due to the explicit sexual imagery it contains. Parental or guardian discretion is advised.”]

[animentality]

[carbonatedeverclear]

purity culture ruins people’s ability to engage with works that deal with serious issues and it’s disheartening to see people entirely miss the point of a work because they are guided by a knee jerk reaction towards disgust and I need to ramble

so, I’m reading a book called Jawbone by Monica Ojeda and it’s a very interesting horror novel that centers around puberty and teen girls and their relationships to their mothers. One of the bigger themes in the book is the idea of shame revolving around sexual development. One of the main characters is a young lesbian who is developing feelings for her best friend and has a mother who is incredibly homophobic and disapproving and in part of the book there’s a scene where this character talks about her mother catching her masturbating and the way that she is disgusted by her daughter and kind of this horror around being viewed as having lost your innocence from experiencing something that is common and should be mundane. sexual development is seen as a horrific and sinful action and that causes this character trauma through the rest of the book surrounding the way that her mother looks at her and how her mother is going to react when she finds out that she’s gay it’s a book that deals with a lot of topics around sexual shame. For example, another character is so terrified of the sin of masturbation that she keeps herself from masturbating by imagining being raped by men in her family who she cares about because it disgusts her and keeps her from achieving sexual arousal. the book itself shows that the action of the character masturbating when she’s six years old is an innocent action. It’s one that comes from curiousity and just what happens when you have a body. The book is very clear that the act is being sexualized by the adults around her and their reactions feel violating.

So it is infuriating to then go from reading this book to trying to read reviews of this book and finding that the first review on Goodreads is a one star review that just says “in this book a six-year-old masturbates 🤮” participating in the same disgust with the natural sexual development of young girls that the book itself tries to depict as a horrifying and violating way to view children and puberty 

[saintmachina]

It’s okay to opt out of art you know is going to upset you, but it is ALWAYS valuable to check in with yourself and ask “why do I think this is making me uncomfortable? Can I perhaps see the value this art could bring to others? What might these feelings teach me about myself?”

The disturbing, taboo, and difficult are explored in fiction as an invitation to look at society, interpersonal relationships, and the self in new ways. Art is under no obligation to be “moral” or didactic, only to facilitate intense emotions and big discussions.

Greek tragedy was bloody and heart-wrenching, but it facilitated emotional catharsis, which helped keep society functioning. Early Gothic novels were lambasted as salacious and immoral, but their use of the taboo allowed them to engage with power, gender, and class in powerful ways.

Finally, I must impress upon the reader that dark art can indeed have an element of lurid thrill to it, and that’s also fine, because humans love to be titillated and scandalized by a wild fictional premise in the safety of their own homes.

Live a little.

[isaacsapphire]

Haven't seen anyone else addressing how the "feminist" preference for being eaten by a bear over meeting a man alone in the woods is in large part about purity culture and terror of rape.

Like, this whole thing is an obvious reference to older tales where the virtuous maiden flees the wicked men and gets eaten by a bear or fell off a cliff, but at least she died a virgin!

I miss where there was at least a feminist contingent that thought that being raped wasn't a fate worse than death.

[drinksglue]

For those who might be confused, "if a work of fiction makes you uncomfortable or upset, stop engaging with it and continue curating your viewing experience" still applies even if said work is made by someone you hate.

[writinginthesecrettrees]

Ok, I'm gonna be REAL controversial for a second:

Saying "incest and underage fics are ok because it's usually CSA survivors recontextualizing/processing their own experience" is just purity culture lite. It's like saying "Birth control should be legal because some people use it for non-birth control related purposes" or "abortion needs to be legal because women can die without it."

Yes, these are TRUE and IMPORTANT things. But kind of... not the point?

Kind of giving way to the antis, the puritanical right, the misogynists who just want to control women (because you KNOW they aren't thinking about trans men or nonbinary people when they legislate abortion).

Lemme see if I can explain: by saying "look at this VALID and IMPORTANT reason someone might have for doing the thing you don't like," you are saying that there are invalid reasons for it. That some people shouldn't do it.

You are saying that it is objectively wrong, and that exceptions must be made for it to be okay. And putting aside the fact that NO ONE should have to disclose their personal trauma for judgement, that no one should have to disclose their personal medical history to a judge or legislator before receiving treatment... you are conceding the point.

I refuse to concede anything on this.

I like fucked up fic, I like being able to fuck without getting pregnant, I like that if my birth control fails I can still make a choice about whether or not I want to be pregnant and give birth. I WILL NOT go into my reasons on ANY of this. Because YOU do not have a right to that information, and I am also protecting the privacy of everyone else who does not want to share their reasons.

[ghostlyerlkonig]

"But the art is gross!"

Come'ere and let me tell you a story.

When I was in my senior year, a painting of mine got into an art show at a university museum. I was wild crazy excited and wrote out my artists statement in one night about the piece. I painted it based off a photo I took of a local reservoir during a particularly bad time and my statement spoke about being queer in my city and finding peace at places like the reservoir. I painted it with pallet knives and acrylics.

I was forced to remove any mention of my queerness from my statement due to the "sexual nature" of it by people at my school. There was nothing sexual about it.

Obviously, I did it, with some pressure from others. but when I drove up to see it there, I could not feel proud of it there. Compliments felt hollow. I was told they placed it at the front because they loved it. But it was censored in a way that made it lesser to me. Often I wish I would have refused.

Censorship doesn't stop at "icky" things. It crawls and devours like ivy until everything is dead. Nothing remains.

[renthony]

I have once again seen an aggressive do-not-interact banner with a long list of super-niche terms (some of which I genuinely have never seen before--I don't know what all your damn discourse acronyms mean, tumblr), followed by "and other basic DNI criteria."

"Basic DNI criteria" is a meaningless statement. What is "basic DNI" criteria to one subgroup on tumblr is complete nonsense to others. Define what the hell you actually mean by it or don't bother with a DNI at all. Be specific and precise in your language instead of relying on vague euphemism.

"Basic DNI criteria" is just about the emptiest form of virtue signalling you could engage in, because it doesn't mean anything. It stands for nothing. It's the equivalent of a sign that says, "Warning: Do Not." It's completely hollow.

If you put "basic DNI" in your posts/bio, I'm pretty much guaranteed to block you on sight, lest I get accused of violating a boundary that was never clearly expressed in the first place.

I find the efficacy and utility of DNIs to be nebulous at best, but if you are going to use them, at least make them actually communicate something. "Basic DNI" will literally never, ever mean the same thing to any two people, no matter how obvious you think it should be.

[autolenaphilia]

The anti-kink moral crusade rests on a lot of transmisogynistic assumptions.

Of course it’s no surprise, since it rests on ideas from the moralizing arguments about bdsm made by radfems in the 70s. The only change is that they are being massively hypocritical and inconsistent about which kinks are bad now, as I pointed out before. Now it’s only certain kinks, like consensual non-consent and fauxcest, that are bad because they “fetishize abuse”, and not bdsm as whole, despite that being inarguably true about bdsm.

And that’s purely to broaden the appeal of such arguments, so that even self-described “leatherfags” can moralize about fauxcest. The morals and principles are frankly just “It’s okay if gay men call their boyfriends “daddy”, because I find that hot, but if a trans lesbian couples pretend to be sisters it’s evil.”

And you can’t really appropriate the radfem arguments about kink without taking their transmisogyny onboard, since they stem from the same transmisogynist bio-determinist root ideology. Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire explained trans women through a lens of pathological sadomasochism. Years before Blanchard’s autogynephilia concept, radfems have seen transfemininity and kink as the same thing.

The image of the trans woman painted by radfems then and now, is of privileged males appropriating the pain and suffering of real wombyn, and playacting this suffering for their own perverted sexual amusement. And that is the same image painted of trans women with incest and cnc kinks in modern callout posts. They just remove the explicitly terfy language to make it less obvious. Instead of making a mockery of misogyny in general, we are instead accused of mocking the experiences of the survivors of sexual abuse.

And that boils down to the same thing. Survivors of sexual assault are often as a group assumed to be afab. This ties into a specific transmisogynist discourse. It’s one that argues that afab children are more often sexually assaulted, and that trans women are not targeted by sexual violence pre-transition, and comes to the conclusion that this proves that trans women are male socialized and privileged. This is the fairly nasty transmisogynist undercurrent here.

And it’s proven when in discussions about the transmisogyny of callout culture, a common cliché line in response is that “clearly some people’s worst oppression is being told they are freaks for shipping incest.” This treats transfems as ultra-privileged and transmisogyny as not real at all.

Of course in reality, transfems are disproportionate targets of sexual violence even in childhood and pre-transition. And many survivors of childhood abuse have these problematic abuse-fetishizing kinks, and use it to deal with their trauma, including many of the kinky transfems being called out.

And even if no one involved in the sexual roleplay and fiction being criticized have trauma, the trauma of other non-involved people is not a good argument for its destruction. It’s a reasonable demand to ask for triggering material to be tagged properly so you can avoid it, it’s unreasonable to demand it shouldn’t exist.

Yet transfems are expected to accede to the latter demand. And I think this is because of what May Peterson calls transfeminized debt. It’s how we trans women in feminist circles are expected to be perfect women and perfect feminists to be acknowledged as women at all, instead of as monsters to be destroyed. Of course because nobody is perfect, this leads to every trans woman eventually being thought of as a monster.

We are treated as having to pay off the debt of male socialization/privilege to get basic human rights. And this in practice means conceding every disagreement with TME people, and agreeing to every demand they make of us. Or else we get the hot allostatic load treatment.

And that’s why kinky transfems are expected to fulfil the ridiculous demand from certain puritanical TME people that “I’m not involved in your kink, but I have trauma relating to it, so you can’t do it.” And are treated as evil monsters for not fulfilling it. It’s clearly transfeminized debt and transmisogyny, we are treated as privileged perverted monsters, inherently exempt from sexual violence. And that is used to justify sexual harassment, in the form of callout posts for our sex lives.

[headspace-hotel]

random thought:

I think "sex is just another activity you can do with a person" arose as a response to the conservative christian "sex is the most Sacred Important Thing Ever and you HAVE to do it Correctly and only Within Marriage or it's The Most Damaging Sinful Thing That Tarnishes You Eternally." Which definitely needed to be criticized.

however when I see it expressed as like "sex isn't a special activity or inherently different than other things" I think. Well it is though?

I mean that being allowed into the intimate boundaries of another person's body inherently has more responsibilities (making sure the other person feels safe, caring about their comfort and pleasure, communicating clearly) than like...going on a walk in the park with that person

Which really just more starkly highlights how twisted purity culture is? "Sex is an activity with special significance" should mean, "If you are being really intimate with someone and you don't care about their pleasure and wellbeing and listen to their wants and needs, you could really, REALLY hurt them," not "If you have sex with anyone except the single person you've gotten married to and are committed to for the rest of your life, gross fungus literally grows on your soul."