Read on Twitter
Okay, since a few ppl expressed interest in a primer on the way the purity culture wave has snowballed over the last couple years, here it goes. If you read ANYTHING in this tweetstorm, please let it be this: it is not just queer teens being innocuously annoying by posting
“you’re fetishing mlm, fam” comments. It is: doxxing queer artists who make NSFW content (their homes and places of work), organizing/executing targeted harassment campaigns against those artists, sending onslaughts of death threats and suicide baiting. We all thought it was just
a minor annoyance at first too, but it’s been multiple years of this now so I think it’s worth it for non fandom writers and artists who create queer NSFW content to pay attn. They went after fandom creators first because it’s an easy target, but I see it spilling into discourse
on original work now and while it’s easy to say “well, they can’t really touch original creators, they don’t have a whole lot of power,” I would like to bring you to my next point. Yes, most of them are teens on the internet who might very well just grow out of this and be
embarrassed later, but… there are also a lot of grown ass adults (mostly TERFs, quel surprise, right?) who see an opportunity here to indoctrinate and basically be at the helm of a rad fem movement that censors queer artists and queer sexual content.
It’s some Andrew Dworkin-type anti-porn nightmare shit. And for all my fellow queers who are either old enough to have been around the block or are young but just educated in queer history: I don't need to remind you about the long, terrifying history of pp trying to paint
queer folks and their sexuality as perverted and disgusting and in need of being eradicated. I see a LOT of the old dogwhistle language cropping up in these purity wave folks: calling ppl "degenerates," throwing out the word "p*do" at anyone who makes any content they deem
"problematic," regardless of what kind of content it is. I won't tag anyone without their permission because I don't want to retraumatize any victims, but if anyone is looking to hear from artists who were targets, I'm sure some will chime in if they see this & feel up to talking
Also, another sort of "look over here, look over here" tactic I see is ppl responding to this stuff by saying "well, fandom isn't above criticize, content can be criticized." And yes, it can. But death threats, doxxing, lobbying for AO3 to be shut down? That's not criticism.
*above criticism
Ugh, I'd delete and try again, but when it's far down a thread it tends to start and error loop lol. Anyway, all of this is one of the reasons I distanced myself from being a designated fandom account. Doing any amount of professional writing shit and then
Ugh, I'd delete and try again, but when it's far down a thread it tends to start and error loop lol. Anyway, all of this is one of the reasons I distanced myself from being a designated fandom account. Doing any amount of professional writing shit and then
having one foot in fandom while it's all burning down like this was beginning to be so hard to navigate. And it still is hard. And my mental health has been shit so there's also a balance to be struck between fighting this fight and feeling too exhausted to enter the social
media soup. But today I feel okay, and so I want to take some time to talk about this again. Because I'm seeing a lot of ppl on the tl who are just now noticing purity wave and they have missed a LOT of what happened up to this point.
