you donāt need purity in the material you consume
you have a brain, you are capable of critical thinking, you can sift through the material and keep what is edifying for you and discard what isnāt
flaws donāt necessarily make material worthless
all right i queued this last night because i was already posting a lot and didnāt want to flood anyoneās dash but you guys i need to talk about this more.
like, okay. i grew up REALLY STRICT christian. like. every piece of media i consumed underwent a fine-toothed comb by my parents to be sure there wasnāt anythingĀ āsinfulā in it. I got into a tearful, screaming fight with my mother over whether I was allowed to watch a piece of educational childrenās material on PBS because one of the characters saidĀ ādamnā once.
(Iām still not sure they did. In retrospect, I think my purity-focused mother misheard something and, having her suspicions confirmed that you couldnāt trust anyĀ āsecularā source not to be sinful, reacted accordingly.)
(Pay attention, that parenthetical was also relevant.)
Do you know what my teenage rebellion was? Listening to the oldies station in the car when I had my driverās license and could go places on my own. That was my big fuck-you to my parents: listening to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel and the Fifth Dimension when they couldnāt tell me how I shouldnāt be listening to them because the creators of that music were drug-addled, free-loving atheists whose own disregard for God and religion might just infect my impressionable spirit. Like I was gonna listen toĀ āLucy in the Sky with Diamondsā and go do LSD and become an atheist. This was my teenage rebellion in the year 1999.
Iām 35 now. And all right so I became agnostic. But I didnāt become a drug addicted prostitute because I loved listening to psychedelic rock music as a teenager. (And you know what? Even if I had become a drug addicted prostitute, Iād still have worth as a human being, so dissect that one.) And it wasnāt even the psychedelic rock music that turned me agnostic: It was Christianity itself. But thatās another story altogether.
My point here is: Yāall are on here acting like my goddamn parents,Ā ādonāt watch thisā andĀ ādonāt listen to thatā because this character does XYZ problematic thing and this author said ABC ignorant thing two years ago at a con when they were put on the spot in an interview. If you watch this movie where a teenager falls in love with someone five years older than them, youāre going to become a pedophile! If you read this book by an author who once used an outdated term for someone in the trans community, then youāre a transphobe!
Yāall need to sit the fuck down and stop acting like nobody ever taught you to think for yourself, because I know damn well that youāre capable of critical thought and you donāt need your media chewed up and spit into your mouth like a baby bird. And Iām an adult and I sure the hell donāt, so stop telling me Iām going to choke because Iām consuming something complicated, complex, and not already pre-morally-dissected for me.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
