So, in my circles, the phrase "purity culture" refers to the harmful & abusive attitudes & behavior around sex & sexuality in religious communities (especially within evangelicalism).
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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.
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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 religious trauma is hard enough to explain to people at the best of times. Plenty of folks don’t take it seriously.
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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
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@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
@artemis and this was getting off lightly because of being assigned male
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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.
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.
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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.
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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 powerfully said and very much agreed
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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 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
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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.
@mastodonmigration @artemis I've heard it used this way as well, here in the UK. The left of the Labour Party were constantly accused of it for not uniting with the right-wing entryists, whose calls for "unity" were of course completely bogus: it was *they* who were refusing to show any, while relentlessly dragging the party rightward.
But anyway, I've seen three people on the fedi getting upset over Cory's co-option of the term, so won't be using it anymore except in its original context.
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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 as someone else raised in purity culture -- you've emphatically expressed my thoughts.
As far as I can tell, the people using it are people who gawped at us from the outside. And given our current religious nationalist situation this is not a historical notion.
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@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
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@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 -
@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@mrs_malice @artemis Which, to be clear, does not mean I think he was right to use it - I am sorry you have to hear it over and over now in a context where it doesn't belong to begin with. It's not appropriate.
I just thought the entire thematic structure of the blog was overtly religious, and I'm surprised it isn't being discussed more from that angle. It's definitely odd.
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@kevingranade @artemis hahaha, that's such a valid joke! I'm keeping it, and use it with a very serious face in serious conversations (I'll laugh very loud inside my head, though)
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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 it's been used in Doctorow's way for years – not relating particularly to LLMs, but more to describe Tumblr's teenage neo-puritan movements of queer kids who reinvent the Hays code from scratch and don't realise they're perpetuating queerphobia, and even before that to describe Twitter's leftist infighting between people vying for the title of Most Leftist Person Without Flaws at the expense of each other and bullying each other out of movements and spaces for trivial perceived infractions.
Almost ten years back now that I heard it for the first time.
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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 In French, we distinguish between religious purity (pureté religieuse), and activism purity (pureté militante).
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@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
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@mrs_malice @artemis Which, to be clear, does not mean I think he was right to use it - I am sorry you have to hear it over and over now in a context where it doesn't belong to begin with. It's not appropriate.
I just thought the entire thematic structure of the blog was overtly religious, and I'm surprised it isn't being discussed more from that angle. It's definitely odd.
@scott @artemis I hear you, and I appreciate you pointing out the overall religious tone & motifs. And I still think he misused the term. It does seem he was in some morality-based frame of mind, which frankly makes his invocation of purity culture against me/us that much more insulting and out of place.
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@artemis it's been used in Doctorow's way for years – not relating particularly to LLMs, but more to describe Tumblr's teenage neo-puritan movements of queer kids who reinvent the Hays code from scratch and don't realise they're perpetuating queerphobia, and even before that to describe Twitter's leftist infighting between people vying for the title of Most Leftist Person Without Flaws at the expense of each other and bullying each other out of movements and spaces for trivial perceived infractions.
Almost ten years back now that I heard it for the first time.
@artemis and crucially, those are not entirely separable from the evangelical meaning. Because the same kids on Tumblr who will bully one of theirs off the internet for not disavowing a "problematic" show quickly enough or for saying something that can somehow, some way, be interpreted as insufficiently revolutionary, will also do so for shipping two fictional characters with a three year age-ap or for writing fan fiction that involves even vague allusions to kink.
The two are intertwined.
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@artemis and crucially, those are not entirely separable from the evangelical meaning. Because the same kids on Tumblr who will bully one of theirs off the internet for not disavowing a "problematic" show quickly enough or for saying something that can somehow, some way, be interpreted as insufficiently revolutionary, will also do so for shipping two fictional characters with a three year age-ap or for writing fan fiction that involves even vague allusions to kink.
The two are intertwined.
@artemis the "if you at any one point had dreadlocks or a Harry Potter tattoo or your girlfriend does the dishes you are an irredeemable fascist hellspawn" mob has reconstructed christofascist sexual morals from first principles and violently enforce them in the name of "progress".
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