What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

why purity culture applies to antis

haetshepsut:

fozmeadows:

I would be vastly more sympathetic to the “the term purity culture should refer only to a specific religious system of misogyny and using it to talk about antis elides its origins, thereby devaluing a serious issue” argument if anti culture wasn’t functionally defined by using the word “pedophilia” to mean “what happens when anyone of any age writes stories where a character younger than eighteen kisses someone or is otherwise sexual.”

Like. I’m just. I’m sorry, but you cannot grossly misuse such serious terms as pedophilia or incest by arguing repeatedly that depiction is always endorsement, that there’s no difference between fictional people and real people, and that any sexual fantasy a person enjoys precisely because it isn’t real is indistinguishable from a fantasy they want to see enacted IRL, then get mad when someone points out that you’re morally policing the sexuality of strangers using strikingly similar arguments to the purity culture people.

When someone writes gory, gruesome murder stories, even if they’re written from the POV of a psychopathic killer, our first thought is not, “oh shit, that person is either an aspiring serial killer or they have bodies in their basement,” because we understand the distinction between fiction and reality. But if someone writes about dark sexual themes and suddenly you’re freaking out about their sexuality IRL? That is because you’ve absorbed puritan views about sex, ie, the idea that your sexual imagination and your sexual desires are one and the same, such that, if you indulge in “sinful” fantasies, it’s as bad as doing those things.

The reason religious purity culture is so obsessed with female chastity to the point of demonising masturbation or premarital anything is due to the belief that female sexuality exists solely for male pleasure, and therefore male approval. A father ‘owns’ his daughter’s chastity until he ‘gives’ her to a husband; therefore, she must stay ‘pure’ for their sake, because any indulgence on her part will ‘taint’ that purity. Crucially, the belief is also that one woman is potentially representative of all women: one ‘loose’ woman can make all women loose in the eyes of men, and therefore you aren’t just protecting yourself and your chastity by acting modestly, but the reputation of other women you’ve never even met. You’re simultaneously responsible for the virtue of women as a category while also being the keeper of such specific chaste value as, through you, belongs to your father and future husband. This is also why ‘pure’ women are encouraged to shun ‘impure’ women - impurity is transitive by association, such that if you, a ‘pure’ woman, are seen to associate with an ‘impure’ woman, well; that must only be because you, too, are secretly impure. This being so, it’s likewise expected that men, being more sexual creatures, will be lustful and sexually desirous, such that women are expected to curtail the presentation of their own sexuality in all forms to avoid ‘tempting’ them to sin, both against themselves and, potentially, other women; this is both deeply misogynistic and a way to blame victims for ‘leading on’ their assailants.

It’s also the exact same logic that antis use - not because antis are misogynistic patriarchs, but because they, too, argue that an individual’s sexuality must be curtailed in order to prevent hypothetical strangers from being ‘tempted’ towards their worst inclinations or, if they didn’t have those inclinations beforehand, made to ‘stray from the path’.

“You can’t ship those two underage characters - someone might use that fic to prey on a minor!” Such a thing, if it happened, would inarguably be the fault of the predator, who did not magically spring into existence the second the fic was written, even if the fic in question was actual darkfic and not just two 16yos consensually getting to second base; nonetheless, anti logic - like purity culture - will blame the ficwriter for ‘inciting’ the predation.

Bottom line: when you tell someone, “your sexual fantasies are bad and wrong, if you’ve EVER found X concept arousing in the privacy of your mind or in a fictional context, that means you want it exactly the same way IRL and are therefore either a predator or the willing inspiration of predators,” YOU ARE ENGAGING IN A LITERAL FORM OF PURITY CULTURE. The underlying dogma you use to shore up your claims is less important than the logic you use to enforce them: and that logic is, “you must strive to meet my specific moral definition of sexual purity, because if you don’t, you’ll provoke sexual malfeasance towards yourself and others, and when that happens, it’ll be your fault.”           

The rest of society absolute will and should reject yall for reading graphic depictions of sex between minors. You are grown ass adults and frankly its nasty as fuck. And no, having the very easily not crossed boundary of “children are off limits to adult sexual fantasies” does not make you some fundie patriarch. To clarify this is specifically about children. Like yall are really trying to justify why its ok to have the same fantasies as Woody Allen and R Kelly bc I guarantee they wouldve liked this shit too.

I was sixteen when I very consensually lost my virginity to someone a year older than me, in a place where sixteen was the age of consent; I was not a child, and even though I’m older now, those experiences and my feelings about them remain valid. If I, as an adult, read fic about make-believe teenage characters doing what I did at that same age, what does it matter? The only real person in that equation is me. You might as well argue that it’s creepy for adults to read YA novels with romantic plotlines, or to watch shows like Teen Wolf where the teenage characters have sex.

Like. Never mind the fact that, by comparing fanfic readers to Woody Allen and R. Kelly, you’re proving my point about antis not being able to distinguish between actual pedophilia that happens to real underage children in the real world and stories about fake teenagers fucking; never mind how a large number of people who *do* write sexually about fictional children are victims of child abuse themselves looking to process their trauma - why is the baseline assumption that, when *anyone* reads or writes darkfic, they must be sexually identifying with the abuser and not the victim? Not to break your brain, here, but people fantasise about dark things happening to them a hell of a lot, and that’s both normal and healthy - as is fantasising about things specifically in the context of them not being real.

Because that’s what this boils down to, really. Why do you care what someone does in their brain or in fiction if it doesn’t affect their actions or hurt anyone? Nobody’s asking you to join in, and it’s easy to avoid something if it’s not what you like. If you can’t understand why someone would or could fantasise about a particular thing in the abstract without ever wanting it in person, then go read up on human sexuality. 

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