#meaningful differences between thoight and private/personal conversation and action

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

If I may...I think the problem is also amplified on various ends by two separate phenomena: 1) on the end of "people saying really gross shit to celebrities online by @ing them or even just obviously sexual shit like talking about mommy milkers in the mentions of some random person's tiktok or selfies that you find hot unprompted", it's also fueled imo, by the good old problem of people kind of thinking "if I say it on the internet it's not real". There is some truth imo, to the idea that people saying nasty or overly familiar things sometimes (not always there are plenty who KNOW its bad and are doing it on purpose AND it's still not an excuse ofc) just. Aren't really considering that this is a real person who will see their comments context free and thus it's easier to not just sexually but emotionally objectify someone in that like, these people kind of lose sight of the fact that if they went up to a stranger on the street irl and said this exact shit they'd get a "WTF creep" type of reaction AND they know that deep down which is why they act so different offline than online.

2. On the other front, I also think that purity culture is one of those terms certain people online need taken away like "gaslighting" because they throw it around without actually knowing fully what it really is or what it means??? I'm super glad you brought that up actually because god, I see it all the time. Like...the "you, a fellow adult, need my consent before you can wear Revealing Clothes around me or else you're a pervert and that's violating" thing or the "you need to Confess Your Sins before masturbating over someone or else it hurts them...somehow...even though ironically you're going to actually creep them out way more by y'know, telling them this shit they did not need to know instead of just rubbing one out already in your own damn room and leaving that between your ears like horny people with perfectly normal desires have been doing for as long as there have been humans and it has to date harmed nobody" - that IS very much purity culture.

But like you said, the way it gets thrown around...purity culture is a specific phenomenon usually rooted in certain religious ideas about sex and virginity and how the Wrong sexual activities can taint your moral worth and how what matters most in relationships isn't love or consent but Purity, doing things The Right Way. It's also tied up with modesty culture which I don't think would be too dramatic to say is its own form of rape culture - smarter people than me have written about it in much more depth.

But the point is, I lived a form of purity culture because of the flavor of Christianity that was my family's faith and that was my entire life for about the first 18 at least, years. I didn't even have it close to as bad as many did but it still did profound damage. And I can safely tell you purity culture is NOT "anyone anywhere not being totally down with whatever overly personal shit you want to say TO THEM DIRECTLY 24/7 just because they decided to be publically visible online or have a job that makes them famous". And as a survivor of ACTUAL purity culture, it is really starting to fucking grind my gears to see people online throwing the term around for things it does not apply to.

No but there’s something genuinely troubling about the way internet culture around sex (and the general allergy to nuance that so many social media users seem to have) has eroded the distinction between actual sexual harassment and objectification and just plain old sexual desire and attraction and any kind of sexual expression, or between purity culture and any kind of sexual boundaries, in a way that cuts both ways and doesn’t actually benefit anyone.

So you end up with people sincerely asking “isn’t this just purity culture talking?” when they’re being asked not to call strangers “daddy” or say things like “step on me” to their face. You end up with people advocating for actual sex pest behaviour in the name of avoiding nonexistent sex pest behaviour (asking people for their “consent” before you think about them while you’re wanking.) Either anything to do with sex is considered inherently good and sexualising other people to their faces is nbd, or anything to do with sex is inherently bad and nobody should so much as bring up the topic in a conversation with other adults, regardless of the tone and setting. There’s no distinction drawn between things that are actively said or done to someone or directed at them and things that a given person could just potentially come across or look for of their own accord.

And yeah, sometimes there is nuance and complication around these things and you have to use your brain in a debate around them. You can’t just say “if it could make someone uncomfortable, don’t do it” (plenty of people are “uncomfortable” seeing gay people kiss or hold hands in public, after all), or “you need everyone’s consent before doing anything that could potentially be construed as sexual” (same problem as before, and whilst this is absolutely true if it concerns things that are being done to them or actively involving them, phrasing it like that quickly devolves into the idea that you can “consent” to what another person is wearing.) So discussions of this kind end up getting sidetracked by the kind of people who think that “I don’t consent to not having everything my way” is a reasonable stance to take.

It’s just very frustrating that there are people on both sides of the debate who can’t see any meaningful difference between saying “I’d like Dennis Morennis to rail me” on their private tumblr account, or having some choice pleasant Dennis Morennis-related thoughts while getting off in their bedroom, and actively going up to Dennis himself and asking to be railed. And it’s tricky with the internet because these days you can never tell when people are trolling or not, but I think there genuinely are people who think like this. And that’s worrying.