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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@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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@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.
@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.
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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
i also grew up with purity culture (Evangelical Christianity)i think language is much more nuanced and fluid than is often admitted
that said, i think he's actually just using the wrong term. what he's referring to is called "purity politics"
i think he's also wrong about it fitting this situation, which is more about having clear political principles
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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.
@amberage @artemis I came in to say this too - as someone raised near the original evangelical version (Texas/ Southern Baptists and Pentecostals) but who has been on Tumblr over a decade. Doctorow adopted it FROM there, as best I can tell. Originally there did seem to be discussion of how the Hays Code reinvention culture was fundamentally failed exvangelicalism (taking the young person out out of the church enforcement environment but not the church enforcement mindset out of the young person), but as with anything else, even before LLMs, there is a tendency toward semantic weathering on any precise language, where people try to expand it to other contexts or adopt it casually without a full understanding of the meaning, and before long colloquial usage has come to reinforce the status quo rather than interrogate it.
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@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.
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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.
@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
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. -
@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.@artemis oh yeah, Doctorow's talking BS. He uses it in the liberal usage of "anyone who has more rigid morals than me must clearly be a nutjob commie". In a way, he's taken the Tumblr/Twitter meaning of it without understanding it, confused having ideals and sticking with them for the competitive prog-posturing that phrase describes elsewhere, and thrown it at people who don't like him shilling ChatGPT, and that's it.
I remember similar debates a couple years back about whether "NB" meaning "non-binary" could co-exist with "NB" meaning "non-black". Never found out how that hashed out though, quit Twitter around that time because of Musk.
Carving out a space in language for ourselves and finding out someone else has, too… it's difficult working around that. I'm not sure I have a "right" answer.
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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 I've seen "purity culture" used a lot within the ostensible left to denounce critics and criticism. It was a big part of the "dirtbag left" who were a major influence on DSA around 2014-2015 (some of whom went outright fascist).
I think it did start as a deliberate comparison of critics of internalized sexism, racism, etc., to Purtians and evangelical Christians.
It was used to bury a lot of important critiques on both sides of that comparison.
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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 oh of course it's fucking doctorow, of course that's why i keep hearing this stupid argument about not being nice enough to "leftists" who embrace fascist-friendly values
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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 you are so right! It becomes everybody's problem, even here at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
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@artemis I've seen "purity culture" used a lot within the ostensible left to denounce critics and criticism. It was a big part of the "dirtbag left" who were a major influence on DSA around 2014-2015 (some of whom went outright fascist).
I think it did start as a deliberate comparison of critics of internalized sexism, racism, etc., to Purtians and evangelical Christians.
It was used to bury a lot of important critiques on both sides of that comparison.
Every political subgroup seems to use it eventually and yeah, Blecchh!!
See also: “Gaslighting” used for every fucking difference of opinion, regardless of how consequential it actually is. No, I didn’t “gaslight” you about Stein and Honkala getting tossed in the clink for hours on HRC’s and Obama's watch, Jerkfaces. It’s a documented event which actually happened.
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@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.
Hi,
First of all, albeit that I can only imagine your trauma, you have my compassion.
As for the 'hijacking' of your term, imho we may be dealing with a tradition of suppression that goes back far before the inquisition.
Pope Franciscus tried to address misconducts in the church and even he was not able to change it. I believe we can and it starts with acceptance and compassion with our fellow beings in their dwellings. They don't know better, but they will, in their time. -
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.
@artemis It happened to “fake news”, it can happen to you
but that’s fine, fight back with “Sexual Purity Culture”, then drop the “sexual” like a shortened honorific after a discussion begins. -
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.
@artemis yep it’s not helpful
but that’s because it’s part of Distraction + Delusion + Despair
Stay on point, stay engaged with your audience
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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 *nods vigorously*
Taking your label is not a different war; it’s the same war.
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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.
@artemis surely we had agreed “virtue signalling”/“virtue policing” was the term for what he’s describing? We’ve been using it that way for years, whether or not one agrees with particular accusations.
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@artemis I've seen "purity culture" used a lot within the ostensible left to denounce critics and criticism. It was a big part of the "dirtbag left" who were a major influence on DSA around 2014-2015 (some of whom went outright fascist).
I think it did start as a deliberate comparison of critics of internalized sexism, racism, etc., to Purtians and evangelical Christians.
It was used to bury a lot of important critiques on both sides of that comparison.
Purity is bad regardless of who does it. It's bad because it enables sexual oppression, and literal oppression, and persecution of minorities, and homogenization of diversity. The same diversity keeping us from all simultaneously dying of the same virus. It's bad when people rely on purity to halt progress, because it goes beyond stopping people from doing bad things. It's bad when people rely on purity to further progress (you only get to argue with me if you are a Rationalist). Purity just... sucks. We want good things, not purity, and purity culture distorts reality until people are throwing away good things because they are labeled "disposable."
So please do talk about fascism, and the role Christianity (and also Mormonism) plays in forcing it on modern society. Please talk about the assholes claiming some Christ fellow said they get to murder trannies for not being pure enough. Please expose all the abuses of church authority that seem to disproportionately happen to young boys, covered up to make things look more pure.
Purity's more than that though. Telling us not to talk about software purists is like telling us we can't talk about the military, because that's something the Holocaust survivors need exclusively to communicate what the Nazis did. It's like telling us we can't talk about monocultures, because that's something reserved to the Irish since they had the potato famine. Don't be a purity purist, is what I'm saying. You can still talk about assholes using purity to trick religious nuts into voting for The Devil Himself.
CC: @artemis@dice.camp -
Purity is bad regardless of who does it. It's bad because it enables sexual oppression, and literal oppression, and persecution of minorities, and homogenization of diversity. The same diversity keeping us from all simultaneously dying of the same virus. It's bad when people rely on purity to halt progress, because it goes beyond stopping people from doing bad things. It's bad when people rely on purity to further progress (you only get to argue with me if you are a Rationalist). Purity just... sucks. We want good things, not purity, and purity culture distorts reality until people are throwing away good things because they are labeled "disposable."
So please do talk about fascism, and the role Christianity (and also Mormonism) plays in forcing it on modern society. Please talk about the assholes claiming some Christ fellow said they get to murder trannies for not being pure enough. Please expose all the abuses of church authority that seem to disproportionately happen to young boys, covered up to make things look more pure.
Purity's more than that though. Telling us not to talk about software purists is like telling us we can't talk about the military, because that's something the Holocaust survivors need exclusively to communicate what the Nazis did. It's like telling us we can't talk about monocultures, because that's something reserved to the Irish since they had the potato famine. Don't be a purity purist, is what I'm saying. You can still talk about assholes using purity to trick religious nuts into voting for The Devil Himself.
CC: @artemis@dice.camp@cy you're talking about your definition of *purity*. What do you think is the *purity culture* Doctorow was referencing?
In my reading, he was directing an accusation at the targets and victims of religious purity culture for our arguments against the use of technology that feels like an extension of it, has threatened autonomy and relationships in similar ways, and continues to undermine natural ecosystems, which the religious purists do using different methods. In other words, it felt to me like a spin, or appropriation, of the word.
*Purity culture* is so often used for religious purity culture, an established thing that involves mainstream media and other social institutions, but he was using the term the way Christian nationalists talk about people who resist Christianity being in everything.
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@artemis oh of course it's fucking doctorow, of course that's why i keep hearing this stupid argument about not being nice enough to "leftists" who embrace fascist-friendly values
@matildalove I saw him arguing here on Mastodon that his post doesn't read as (little-l) libertarian. It's, um, not as convincing as he was going for, I'm sure.
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