this whole purity culture juice leaking from anti posts makes me so sad?
(aside from also being super wild to me as someone who didn’t grow up in an environment where religious shaming over thinking the wrong thoughts is a thing)
like, as a kid of 8 or 9 I used to sneak to my mom’s bookshelf and secretly read excerpts from whatever I found there, thrillers, drama, you name it.
If I found something I didn’t like or was squicked by, I pulled a face and but the book back and moved on with my life. If I found something I did like I came back and reread the pages in question.
When I was 9 or so and had to stay home bc I was sick, my mom put Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F.) on my bedside table bc she knew I’ve been coming back to that one a lot despite my attempts at stealth, and she was like, “I know you want to read this, so you might as well just do. We can talk about it afterwards.”
There were drugs and not everything about them was always 100% bad and an obvious cautionary tale bc it’s a biography and Real Life isn’t black-and-white at all times. There was also sex work because that’s how the protagonist had to finance her addiction at some point.
It’s a heavy book, it doesn’t sugarcoat things, but the aesthetics of some things intrigued me nonetheless, from the safe distance of almost two decades and a couple hundred kilometers away.
And when I was done reading, my mom and I talked about it.
Like we chatted about Der Vorleser (The Reader) and Das Parfum (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) when I had to read those in school years later.
And about Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles when both of us got into those and the thrillers I got her for Christmas but usually read before she did as well as Goethe’s Faust when that became a topic at school.
And yet I never aspired to groom an actual teenage boy to be my lover when I’m older, never considered killing an actual human being, never felt like it was okay to rape someone IRL as long as you’re “whoops, sry” about it afterwards, just because I read about it - more than once even from the murderer’s/rapist’s p.o.v.
What I’m trying to say is, the understanding that consuming (and creating) fiction in which Bad Things happen (or are even done by the characters you’re supposed to care about) has NEITHER impact NOR makes a statement about your morals or actions IRL, was such a BASIC part of my growing up that I’m literally unable to wrap my head around purity culture/anti thinking.
And while I’m appalled and angry at the harassment stemming from it and annoyed at it poisoning previously enjoyable fandom spaces,
most of all I’m just so terribly terribly sorry for these young people.
I can’t imagine what it must be growing up being afraid of your own thoughts, of fictional kinks, of not experiencing the Proper Amount Of Disgust in the face of problematic fictional content. And how it must feel to be so obsessed with niché fiction that hurts you when you read it, that you can’t stop seeking it out anyway, despite it being easier than ever nowadays to avoid.
I hope you all grow (or work yourself) out of this vicious cycle at some point.
stormborns
germansingergirl
