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my "where did the puriteens come from" take is: how much is this actually an issue?

it may be a bubble effect, but it seems like every time I've seen puriteen/"anti"/sex-scenes discourse on i.e. Twitter, the purity enforcers are in a drastic minority. there'll be an OP who is is being adversarially QTed up to main character status, maybe two or three people defending them--and literally twenty times as many people calling them assholes and posting that meme where the man and woman consent but Jesus doesn't.

some of the kids taking the anti-sex stances are extremely... vociferous... about it, and there might be somewhat more of them than there were a few years ago, but it still looks to me like a small loud movement, not a big generational shift

EDIT: I might have worded this poorly. I think what I mean isn't "so it isn't a big deal", but "so it isn't something that needs explaining in terms of young people's overall relationship to sexuality."


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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

My issue is they don't really need to be a majority in order to have a real impact. I've had people tell me they had people blow up at them just for following me, and in some cases that means a real loss of income.

That's why I think piling on the puriteens is important regardless of how prevalent they are. They do a lot of this because Twitter incentivizes callout posts, so it's good for them to see there are negative consequences for trying to ruin people's lives over nothing

i interpreted it as also being about just general discomfort with sex, not actively against it, but just not being given a way to explore it. I think that goes along with the idea that because of how some elements of society are structured, people do not grow comfortable with the idea of leaving their comfort zone and being okay feeling not entirely safe and cozy and comfy all the time. Like ofc feeling safe and good is nice, but sometimes thats not what you need to grow as a person. I think the puriteens conversation focuses too much on the anti-sex part and not enough on the smaller but still real ways that society has changed the ways people grow up and learn about parts of the world.

My garbage take is that puriteens are mostly the feminine-coded version of James O'Keefe and other right-wing media douches; it's the Evangelical Theater Kid impulse ('I want very badly to do media stuff/participate in fandom, but in order to do that I have to spin it somehow as a bold political project or Witnessing For The Lord™ for my parents/rich uncle/groomer to say yes and unlock the money faucet'), but networked and less resourced.

If you look at what the puriteens actually do (spend a lot of time online looking at fanart and reading fanfic and consuming popular media to have Takes about it), that probably clues you in to a lot of what they really want. Some of them probably really do want no/fewer/less explicit sex scenes - so they're free to have shared culture with people outside their broadly Evangelical bubble.

(You don't see a ton of Mormons in this culture because by and large they do a pretty good job of self-censoring their media intake or running services to censor it for them.)