#❀;purity

[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.

[tearlessrain]

I mean honestly I don’t hate Harris. or Biden, who has actually done a lot of good in the last four years especially considering the mess he had to clean up. but whatever gets the “my imaginary moral high ground is more important than peoples’ lives” fucks to vote.

[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.

[mswyrr]

[fogmoo]

Lamb to the slaughter

[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]

[teaboot]

When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".

It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.

It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".

Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.

When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.

It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.

That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.

That's how you process cattle.

It's fucking disgusting.

[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 

[wolfythewitch]

👆👆😮

Protoevangelium of James you will always be famous (said with a frown)

[justafi5h]

petition to start calling antis "censorshippers"

[creature-wizard]

Again, speaking as someone with scrupulosity OCD and anxiety, this whole entire mentality of "if I vote for a presidential candidate, then I, personally am responsible for each and every bad thing they do" is essentially a form of catastrophic, polarized thinking. It's a super unhealthy way of thinking that leaves you unable to meaningfully navigate through life a lot of the time. And while you might feel morally clean, it's actually an incredibly dysfunctional way to live because you just won't take action when it could really matter, or the actions you do take don't actually have a substantial chance of changing things.

Like refusing to vote, or voting third-party even though you know the odds of a third party candidate making it are pretty much nil (or because you've convinced yourself it could totally work if Everyone Just - even though we all know there is no point in history when Everyone Just), that's dysfunctional behavior. There's no getting around it. It's dysfunctional behavior.

[coulsonlives]

"Wah, why aren't fandoms fun anymore?"

Because you keep policing people's headcanons, making fun of them and calling them horrible things, and on top of that, you're somehow claiming to be a safe space for people to express their creativity, yet turning around and harassing them anyways because you've made a billion exceptions to the "don't police people" rule and you think, like everyone else who's made their own exceptions, that your exceptions justify harassment.

So you're making fandom into a field of rat traps where nobody even dares interact with anyone, or shares art anymore, because you still might just attack them for it because they did something as simple as writing a canonically soft character as... a softie.

Let people do their "cringe" y/a romances, let people do their "gross" ships, let people write those characters as jerks or softies. Let them, and mean it when you say you'll let them, instead of soapboxing about it in a patronizing post but not really meaning what you're soapboxing about.

[tirsynni]

It's fascinating when purists are like, "All I'm finding is CP and incest on AO3! It's a hellhole!"

Like, dude... you know you pretty much curate your own experience on AO3, right? There's no algorithm. There's a good tagging system in place. If you keep finding these fics, I have to wonder what tags you're searching for.