All-Consuming Purity Culture
There's something going on lately that has a lot of people my age worried.
We're worried that those who come after us have been conditioned in a way we didn't expect and don't know how to combat.
All-consuming purity culture.
A progression of anti-sex, anti-kink, anti-deviant mentality of people who continue to grow up in unprecedented times.
It's very important to note that these persons are not driven by justice.
It's not at all about "SJW" mentality.
So if you think that's the issue here, I'm afraid we have a bigger problem.
In fact, they're BIG fans of injustice as a tool, or a weapon: they're VERY quick to decide "actually this person deserves every bad thing that can possibly happen to them, because I found out they had a problematic steven universe headcanon on tumblr".
They’re not operating on any theory of harm prevention or mitigation, or even pretending to.
Rather, they've hung their entire sense of self on the single thought:
"I'm a Good Person."
They believe that because they are a good person, anything they think must THEREFORE be the good and correct thing to think.
Furthermore, anyone who thinks even SLIGHTLY differently is categorically wrong and evil.
And anyone thinking differently within their communities is an obvious, glaring cancer.
A cancer threatening to make their perfect, correct, pure stance look even just a LITTLE bit dirty.
Anything that makes them uncomfortable, anything that squicks them, they take as an objective moral test.
They think if they can make a vague mental connection between X and Y, then they must be connected, because being wrong about that would make them not-a-good-person.
(It's not as if they don't have precedent- "The greater the probability of harm, the less grave the harm need be to justify coercion; the greater the gravity of the envisioned harm, the less probable it need be." - Joel Feinberg, 1984)
That's how we get "if you think Cheetarah is hot, that's just as bad as literal animal rape and you shouldn't be trusted around animals."
And "if you think a character that at one point was depicted as a child is hot, you literally have uncontrollable urges to rape children and you shouldn't be trusted around children."
And "if you think another person is attractive, that's just as bad as raping them, because they did not consent to being perceived by you in a sexual context and you shouldn't be trusted around anyone."
These chasm-spanning leaps of logic sound straight-up cocoa-clocks, in isolation. They are. But they follow from “I am a Good Person, and Therefore the Things I Think are Good.”
If these assumptions get normalized—whether by the Salem Court of Oyer and Terminer, or by the House Un-American Activities Committee or a Harassment Campaign on Bluesky—they make those with a better grasp on reality feel like they can have just a little logic leaping. As a treat. It shifted the overton window of fantasy.
"If you draw pictures of X/
write a story about X/
have a mutual we’ve accused of X/
made a post about how harassing people for suspicion of X is going too far;
then we must assume that you want to do X.
Everyone knows that.
It's just so obvious.
It's nothing crazy like those crazy right-wing people think.
It's common sense.
We ALL agree.
Right?"
There's something going on lately that has a lot of people my age worried.
We're worried that those who come after us have been conditioned in a way we didn't expect and don't know how to combat.
All-consuming purity culture.
A progression of anti-sex, anti-kink, anti-deviant mentality of people who continue to grow up in unprecedented times.
It's very important to note that these persons are not driven by justice.
It's not at all about "SJW" mentality.
So if you think that's the issue here, I'm afraid we have a bigger problem.
In fact, they're BIG fans of injustice as a tool, or a weapon: they're VERY quick to decide "actually this person deserves every bad thing that can possibly happen to them, because I found out they had a problematic steven universe headcanon on tumblr".
They’re not operating on any theory of harm prevention or mitigation, or even pretending to.
Rather, they've hung their entire sense of self on the single thought:
"I'm a Good Person."
They believe that because they are a good person, anything they think must THEREFORE be the good and correct thing to think.
Furthermore, anyone who thinks even SLIGHTLY differently is categorically wrong and evil.
And anyone thinking differently within their communities is an obvious, glaring cancer.
A cancer threatening to make their perfect, correct, pure stance look even just a LITTLE bit dirty.
Anything that makes them uncomfortable, anything that squicks them, they take as an objective moral test.
They think if they can make a vague mental connection between X and Y, then they must be connected, because being wrong about that would make them not-a-good-person.
(It's not as if they don't have precedent- "The greater the probability of harm, the less grave the harm need be to justify coercion; the greater the gravity of the envisioned harm, the less probable it need be." - Joel Feinberg, 1984)
That's how we get "if you think Cheetarah is hot, that's just as bad as literal animal rape and you shouldn't be trusted around animals."
And "if you think a character that at one point was depicted as a child is hot, you literally have uncontrollable urges to rape children and you shouldn't be trusted around children."
And "if you think another person is attractive, that's just as bad as raping them, because they did not consent to being perceived by you in a sexual context and you shouldn't be trusted around anyone."
These chasm-spanning leaps of logic sound straight-up cocoa-clocks, in isolation. They are. But they follow from “I am a Good Person, and Therefore the Things I Think are Good.”
If these assumptions get normalized—whether by the Salem Court of Oyer and Terminer, or by the House Un-American Activities Committee or a Harassment Campaign on Bluesky—they make those with a better grasp on reality feel like they can have just a little logic leaping. As a treat. It shifted the overton window of fantasy.
"If you draw pictures of X/
write a story about X/
have a mutual we’ve accused of X/
made a post about how harassing people for suspicion of X is going too far;
then we must assume that you want to do X.
Everyone knows that.
It's just so obvious.
It's nothing crazy like those crazy right-wing people think.
It's common sense.
We ALL agree.
Right?"