I think Elsagate is responsible for the rise of puritanism in teenagers on the internet. (And, subsequently, created a domino effect resulting sanitization of the internet and age-verification requirements.)
I recently watched this video on Elsagate by HannahTheHorrible, and I urge you to watch the whole video but around 23 minutes in she does a whole explanation on how that kind of content affects children and how they develop and in that moment I felt like Danny DeVito in It's Always Sunny where he's like "I finally get it."
Basically, when Elsagate videos started popping up, these teens were kids, and were likely stumbling upon and watching this kind of content. At such a young age, this content was probably scary and disturbing to them, because they weren't old enough to properly process the sexual themes within them. (and I'm sure their parents making a huge panic over those videos didn't help.)
Obviously, marketing that kind of content to kids is gross and disgusting. I have no doubt that a team of weirdo perverts was behind it.
But these kids grew up into teenagers who have internalized that fear and disgust and it grew into "anything that is NSFW is inherently deplorable and the people who make and consume it should be called out for it and shunned." Combine this with the 2020 lockdowns that resulted in people who wouldn't normally bat an eye at fandom culture invading already established fandom spaces and trying to police them to their own personal comforts, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
And these teens become very vocal about what they don't like, which most likely catches the attention of these websites trying to appease advertisers and investors, and also boomer politicians who still live in the era where sex was evil.
TL;DR
Alright I'm turning off reblogs on this now. This isn't about feminism or Fandom discourse, this is about kids being exposed to things they were too young to understand, internalizing it, and coming out the other end worse for wear and inventing new terms to unperson people for posting things they personally find icky, and people who are weirdo MAGA bible humpers taking advantage of it to pass "internet safety" laws that make it easier to censor anyone who isnt a white, cis, straight, able-bodied, Christian, conservative man, and de-anonymize the web so they track people on top of it all. Idk what the fuck you people are on but I'm nipping it in the bud right now.
