So, in my circles, the phrase "purity culture" refers to the harmful & abusive attitudes & behavior around sex & sexuality in religious communities (especially within evangelicalism).

I'm seeing discussion of Cory Doctorow's use of the term "purity culture" to mean something like people who are (supposedly) so obsessed with being perfectly ethical that they harass others and...I dunno...halt progress. I guess he's not the only one who uses it that way, but it's news to me.

It's really frustrating having a term people like me use to describe the trauma that shaped us picked up & used in some vague & non-specific way for no particular reason.

If you Google the term, you'll see references to the meaning I am using. People can come up with another term for their annoyance at people who have opinions about what they should or shouldn't do.

Don't steal terms from trauma survivors. We're using those.

It's really frustrating having a term people like me use to describe the trauma that shaped us picked up & used in some vague & non-specific way for no particular reason.

If you Google the term, you'll see references to the meaning I am using. People can come up with another term for their annoyance at people who have opinions about what they should or shouldn't do.

Don't steal terms from trauma survivors. We're using those.

It's really frustrating having a term people like me use to describe the trauma that shaped us picked up & used in some vague & non-specific way for no particular reason.

If you Google the term, you'll see references to the meaning I am using. People can come up with another term for their annoyance at people who have opinions about what they should or shouldn't do.

Don't steal terms from trauma survivors. We're using those.

I don't try to be a language purist who insists words & phrases can only ever be used in certain ways, but...sometimes we have come up with useful terms for things we really need to be able to discuss & think through & it's just not *helpful* to have them hijacked for non-specific purposes where *any number of other words* could be used instead.

Purity culture created a lot of the worst aspects of my religious trauma. MY WHOLE LIFE was purity culture. Everything I did, every interaction I had before my mid 20s was shaped by it.

Would it be so bad to just let us survivors of religious trauma use a combination of words which really didn't get used much at all for anything before we coined it & started using it? Nobody was using it for much, we started using it & now apparently it's a popular term for something almost completely separate.

Purity culture created a lot of the worst aspects of my religious trauma. MY WHOLE LIFE was purity culture. Everything I did, every interaction I had before my mid 20s was shaped by it.

Would it be so bad to just let us survivors of religious trauma use a combination of words which really didn't get used much at all for anything before we coined it & started using it? Nobody was using it for much, we started using it & now apparently it's a popular term for something almost completely separate.

@artemis with how long i got prayed for the demon to leave my body because i was outed, and treated like a mistake forever after by my dad

So, in my circles, the phrase "purity culture" refers to the harmful & abusive attitudes & behavior around sex & sexuality in religious communities (especially within evangelicalism).

I'm seeing discussion of Cory Doctorow's use of the term "purity culture" to mean something like people who are (supposedly) so obsessed with being perfectly ethical that they harass others and...I dunno...halt progress. I guess he's not the only one who uses it that way, but it's news to me.

Purity culture created a lot of the worst aspects of my religious trauma. MY WHOLE LIFE was purity culture. Everything I did, every interaction I had before my mid 20s was shaped by it.

Would it be so bad to just let us survivors of religious trauma use a combination of words which really didn't get used much at all for anything before we coined it & started using it? Nobody was using it for much, we started using it & now apparently it's a popular term for something almost completely separate.

Please understand: we need the term "purity culture" in part because we need to be able to talk about the Christo-fascist takeover of our government.

We need to be able to talk about & understand the way purity culture plays into power & oppression, its relationship to white supremacy, its influence on people's thinking, & how we can counter this shit & do something different.

You may not think it's relevant to you, but it is, because Christian Nationalists have made this EVERYBODY'S PROBLEM.

So, in my circles, the phrase "purity culture" refers to the harmful & abusive attitudes & behavior around sex & sexuality in religious communities (especially within evangelicalism).

I'm seeing discussion of Cory Doctorow's use of the term "purity culture" to mean something like people who are (supposedly) so obsessed with being perfectly ethical that they harass others and...I dunno...halt progress. I guess he's not the only one who uses it that way, but it's news to me.

@artemis

Good points. Have seen 'purity culture' also increasingly misused to describe leftists who refuse to vote for Democrats that they view as insufficiently true to leftist principles and policies.

We need better terminology for both these things.

Please understand: we need the term "purity culture" in part because we need to be able to talk about the Christo-fascist takeover of our government.

We need to be able to talk about & understand the way purity culture plays into power & oppression, its relationship to white supremacy, its influence on people's thinking, & how we can counter this shit & do something different.

You may not think it's relevant to you, but it is, because Christian Nationalists have made this EVERYBODY'S PROBLEM.

@artemis In French, we use "pureté militante" which would loosely translate as "militantist purity" ie the feeling of superiority derived from being a perfect militant/ally. It also covers the crippling effect on people trying to be perfect + the acts of violence exacted by people who feel superior through the supposed perfection of their belief/actions

@artemis Thank you! He misused it, and now the Mastodon discourse is doing the same by mirroring his misuse without correcting it. Surely he was trying to invoke purity spirals & purity tests – which are completely different & separate from purity culture!

See also:
https://mastodon.world/@mrs_malice/116109416963649565

@mrs_malice @artemis I am not convinced he misused it entirely - the blog post is an odd collection of religious motifs:
- creationism; “fruits of the poisoned tree”
- evokes original sin vis a vis Shockley; "all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley"
- baptismal motifs; "purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears"
- obviously the purity culture reference

@remi @artemis I read "purée militante" at first and was like, hell yea they know the score.

So, in my circles, the phrase "purity culture" refers to the harmful & abusive attitudes & behavior around sex & sexuality in religious communities (especially within evangelicalism).

I'm seeing discussion of Cory Doctorow's use of the term "purity culture" to mean something like people who are (supposedly) so obsessed with being perfectly ethical that they harass others and...I dunno...halt progress. I guess he's not the only one who uses it that way, but it's news to me.