Puriteens, Anti-Fans, and The Culture War’s Most Bonkers Battleground. . .How did the internet become so puritanical? | Vox

". . .The downside is that the wider crackdown on sexual expression, especially in the United States, is only getting worse. That bodes ill for the internet and all its citizens, especially since media literacy as a whole is also on the decline. As purity culture spreads, the idea of depicting fictional harm as equivalent to real-world harm grows and spreads along with it.

Then again, if anyone can creatively respond to a culture of increasingly absurd attacks on ingenuity and imagination, it’s an army of passionate deviants who’ve historically been vanguards of the weird, the queer, and the subversive. They’re sexual rebels and literary freedom fighters.

If fans can’t kick that nonsense to the curb, who can?"

Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet

Puriteens, anti-fans, and the culture war’s most bonkers battleground.

By Aja Romano@ajaromano  May 23, 2023, 6:00am EDT

Ohni Lisle for Vox

How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry “gross” at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. 

• They see oversexualization in just about everything. 
• They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. 
• These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they’re ostensibly trying to police.

This dovetails with what we’re being told right now about Gen Z and sex: They’re having less casual sex, they hate dating, they’re more reserved about relationships in general. It’s easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. “puriteens.” Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who’s horrified is a teen who just hasn’t arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. 

. . .Such anti-sex zeal increasingly forces sex-positive communities back into the internet’s underground. It also aids and abets the larger cultural shift toward regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content.

Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of “antis” — a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media — isn’t that they are minors who are scared of sex. It’s that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact. . ."

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