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.

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 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

@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.

@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.

@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.

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.

@mrs_malice @artemis Yes, he absolutely misused the term, and I understand why it is insulting to those exposed to that aspect of Christian mores.

I didn't notice till after I replied that you also picked up on the original sin phraseology, which I thought was also a clever attempt to disarm people's moral agency by claiming they were already tainted via the sin of Shockley, which is also supremely insulting - he does not have a claim to moral authority on that basis, much as he might like.

@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.

@amberage
Gotcha...I wouldn't be able to say how long it has been used in the context I mentioned, but I have used it in the religious context since I suppose 2012 (before which I was happily in the midst of purity culture & therefore didn't hear from anyone who might have used it).

@amberage
In part I take issue with Doctorow's usage because it is careless in general—he doesn't seem to mean *anything* specific by it, & then I see people saying that is a red flag phrase to them. I wasn't initially particularly upset seeing it used, but as the discourse picks up, it's frustrating to have language which I need to have to be able to openly discuss my religious trauma used in ways that will make it hard for people to hear me when I talk about it.