The problem isn’t that people are being called puritans for not liking fictional porn of fictional minors. They are being called puritans because they are policing people based on their own morals. You’re allowed to not like certain things in fiction, you can even voice why you think it’s harmful. But that’s not the reason people are puritans. It becomes puritanical because people are dictating what people are allowed to enjoy in fiction based on their own personal opinion of “what is good and pure”. People are violently shaming people, publicly, based on the fact that they don’t like what other people are enjoying. And this isn’t just about fictional minors being abused or sexualized. It’s literally anything people don’t like. People are puritans because they don’t think people should depict anything that isn’t PG. Artists and writers are constantly attacked by puritans because they depict topics that, whether sexualized or not, are considered taboo by puritans. I’m one of those artists who have been attacked by puritans, and they aren’t nice people. They remind me of the exact kinds of people I used to go to church with. If you so much as do one “problematic” thing, you’re the devil according to them and you deserve to be canceled. It does not matter if you are sexualizing fictional kids, if you have a ship that depicts abuse dynamics, if you like a character that did questionable things in canon, or even if you kill off a fan favorite character in a fanfic. Anything that isn’t morally pure it the eyes of these puritans is considered to be evil.
It’s tied to Christianity even when the people in question aren’t christian because of how the church has affected our society. You can see it in everything from politics, to health care, to just basic social norms. The reason sex is such a taboo topic is because of the church. The reason homosexuality is considered “wrong” is because of the church. Any kind of kink is considered to be taboo because of the church. Anything that is morally ambiguous is wrong according to the church. The mindset that things have to fit into a box labeled “good” or “bad” comes from the church. Hmm, that sure sounds familiar. It sounds a lot like what the internet is doing when it comes to labeling things as “problematic”. And wowzers, queer people can be puritans too! It’s just a different form of it. Because, anon, queer people can be bigots and they can be white knights. I should know, because I used to be one. And I’m pretty sure I’m queer. Queer people are not excused from falling into the grips purity culture because it doesn’t always come in the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and whatever else. It’s discreet and it’s designed that way for a reason.
Puriteen, as a term, isn’t shaming people because they are uncomfortable by a topic that they have the right to be uncomfortable by. No no no my dearest anon. It’s shaming them specifically because of how they go around acting like their personal morals are law, and that everyone else needs to follow them. They are puriteens based purely on the fact that so many minors think that they own the internet and that it needs to be catered to them. The internet is a terrible place and people aren’t going to change because a group of power hungry minors are bullying them, because that’s exactly what it is. It’s harassment in the form of dehumanizing people who consume and create taboo fiction. Or really, anything that these people don’t like. The notion that calling them puriteens is at all predatory, exactly as you just said, is outrageous. Anon, do you know what predatory means? Predatory in this context is a word that is used to denote behaviors that are used to coerce people into dangerous situations, such as grooming. Do not water down that term. Calling someone a puriteen, or just a basic puritan, is usually because they are attempting to force others into their personal sphere of morality and shame others who don’t follow them. It’s not because they dislike a topic in fiction that, like I’ve already stated, they have the right to dislike. They are forcing others to also dislike that topic, whether it’s sexualized fictional minors or not. And the thing is, even when it is fictional minors being sexualized, it’s fiction. People are treating it as the equivalent of reality and that it’s just as harmful. It’s not, morality is different when used in a fictional context.
As a victim of the evangelical Christian church, specifically the cult aspect of some of these groups, purity culture is everywhere. It’s been causing harm to our society for hundreds of years. It has been effecting the fandom space in mass as of recently. People acting as if our morality must be “pure and good” in the stance of being “unproblematic” is direct proof of that. If you think that we are just throwing around terms to call people because we are mad at them for not agreeing with us, you are dead wrong. Purity culture comes in different forms. With those different forms also comes different levels of harm. The cult related trauma that I went through is because of purity culture, and it causes different harms than what purity culture in fandom spaces has caused. But they are both harmful, no matter how bad they are or how different they may seem. Both are problems regardless of the context.
