on the musk app, there’s an interesting conversation going on about nuns. the sex positive liberals are saying it’s progressive and freeing to sexualize nuns, because catholicism is all about purity. if you criticize the fact that these liberals are simply reifying the male supremacist ideology of the very complementarianism that exists within religious doctrines, by praising the act of “defiling” women, they call you a “puritan.” while upholding religious “defilement” of women may appear to be rebellious, the function still fits well within the parameters of patriarchal regimes.
either the woman is a form of property that is groomed or socialized into covering up because her bare skin is religiously “impure,” or she’s a “defiled” form of property and praised for accepting and desiring male sexual domination because it appears to disrupt a religious norm. her function as property is not subverted in either scenario. heterosexualism as a regime that demands male domination and female submission remains in tact. liberals are easily duped into supporting misogyny if it is lazily obscured by the backdrop of an orgasm and dressed up in feigned “radical” posturing to present themselves as more enlightened than their conservative rivals.
i think this is the gist behind some liberal misuse of “puritanism” as an accusation, especially online among the real kink community and the fandom nerds who just want to assuage their guilt for writing simulated child pornography about their favorite shonen anime boys on fanfiction websites. puritanism is an ideology that demands female submission, where women can’t sue for divorce, where they must defer to their husbands if they’re married, where sex is a fundamental right of husbands, etc. liberals don’t oppose “puritanism” on the basis of its foundational, male supremacy, they oppose it because it is simply too divergent to their preferred expression of male supremacy.
they too are content with a system of patriarchy that is different only in aesthetics—by upholding “consent” as a device that completely neutralizes critique of power dynamics and renders said dynamics invisible. consent purifies, if you will, all sexual violence and social domination. they don’t want an antidote to it all, they want to be the next arbiter of it all. if you catch my drift. liberals just want a secular form of male supremacy. they want to replace, reproduce and re-articulate the sexist norms of religion in a way that is palatable to their own ethics yet still sexist, and i think it’s important for feminists to do the hard work of unraveling what this looks like with as much fervor as they do with right-wing enforcers of the same system. where’s that classic post that says “left wing, right wing, the whole bird hates waman.” i fear the author was a prophet. 😎
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