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12/09/2022 - puriteens dont exist
Mood: Awake. Pretty neutral.
Thankie to the people who have been reading through some of the stuff I put on this capsule. I very much appreciate the guestbook messages. I wasn't expecting anyone to actually discover this so I'm glad someone other than me is enjoying and finding value in what I have to share. More of you should point me to your own capsules if you have any. I'd love to see what other people are putting out there.
I was going to give a short update on my life but honestly I haven't been doing anything interesting. It's just more of the same. I HAVE been considering finding a new job that pays more than minimum wage... but uhh, I haven't looked too far into it. I hate resumes and cover letters, so it's only the matter of my own willingness to put up with corporate bullshit stopping me.
On to today's topic. I've been thinking alot about how Catholicism is seemingly rotting the brains of the many ex-Catholics I run into online. Mind you, I have experienced these people in real life, primarily through strange work interactions where I get told "Jesus is coming" for no reason. But online they are an entirely different breed, usually packaging themselves in the garb of someone who is on the cutting-edge and unafraid to express themselves. I think you can see this alot in this new phenomenon of "cancel culture".
I don't mean to sound like an old white transphobic comedian, but cancel culture is a real thing. Now, nobody I can think of other than actual real pedophiles/rapists have been actually "cancelled", but the attitude that people who have committed no crimes should be condemned is a real one. If you're a social media user, you know that day after day someone becomes the User of the Day in that they've somehow done something wrong that needs to be punished or apologized for. Poor old Joe Twitterman has to step into the confessional, confess his sins, and beg from forgiveness from........ who, exactly?
In the end, the apology is almost always seen as insufficient and people begin to wish for deplatforming or something else. Joe has committed a sin, and for that, he must be punished and condemned to hell- er, excuse me, Twitter jail. Off to Mastodon you go, sinner!
Do you see what I mean though? We can't sit and act like everyone being caught in the crosshairs is of equal importance. I've let go of the fact that an old (nonblack) friend used to casually say nigga since he DOESN'T do that anymore. Call me a coon if you must, but I simply do not have the time to get worried when this is the same guy who fed me and let me crash at his house when I had nowhere else to go. I smacked the guy for it back in junior high, so I feel like that's BEEN resolved. And you don't see me boycotting Rob McElhenney's involvement in It's Always Sunny for wearing blackface during certain episodes. I'm 10000% more interested in vilifying known sexual abusers, but somehow people decide they aren't interesting enough to force an apology out of. Not than an apology would help anyway.
This is where the title of this entry comes in. There was a brief bit of time, I'm talking 15 minutes, where I thought a "puriteen" was a real thing. You hear alot about the kink at Pride discourse, for example. Just stay with me on this. Within LGBTQ communities they mainly talk about things being harmful for young queer teens to see, such as topless women and LEATHER. Leather for godssake! Now for me, I wasn't interested in sexual expression really as a weirdly non-horny young man, so I was like "Yeah. I think sexual stuff should be kept behind closed doors." In that regard, I guess... yeah, I was a puriteen. But I kept my thoughts largely to myself in this regard. My opinion has largely changed in the opposite direction - we won't be getting into that though, because I've already digressed too much.
The thing you learn after a while is that there aren't really any puriteens. The teens I've interacted with on bigger social media sites tend to just not like pedophilic media, i.e. stories/images of minors getting with adults. That and they don't want to interact with adults when talking about sexual content. Teens are not puritans in any way shape or form. I knew a guy who used to, erm, engage himself in class back in high school. These kids would be having sex behind the school and in the bathrooms. As far as online goes... you guys haven't forgotten all the Reader x Character smut fics, do you? The ones the anime-liking girls at school used to talk about? Uh-huh, sure.
No, no, the real problem here is the adults. Let's go back to that kink discourse, right? The ONLY, and I mean ONLY people I've seen saying that there should be no kink at Pride are adults. These are the only age group that actually seem to care about the morality involved in sexual content/expression. This is doubly strange that it's within the LGBTQ community, a community that has been historically considered deviant and morally reprehensible because of their sexual expression. Anyway, you can see these weird puritanical gays online constantly talking about protecting the children and even policing what kind of things can be portrayed in porn.
So let me be clear for a second. I understand there is a big stupid fandom war these days about what drawn porn is OKAY to make. There are some things I find completely morally reprehensible like child porn, even if it IS only drawings of fictional characters. However these conversations about "moral porn" are so ague and cast such a wide net that they seem to find other "taboos" in porn to be morally reprehensible. I've seen people get really up in arms about things like eroguro, as if we aren't constantly inundated with gory media to begin with. Are we not all the same people who watched Higurashi death scenes and thought it was the pinnacle of art? Why is it only the erotic angle, purely through the lens of fiction, that makes gore taboo? Ugh.
In any case, I've managed to glean the fact that many of the people who are VERY open about this kind of thing were, you guessed it, ex-Catholics! It's quite depressing to see, honestly. You can tell these people were definitely very traumatized and forcefully repressed, especially considering the view many Catholics hold on homosexuality and transgenderism. It very likely was a battle to be able to express their true gender and sexual identities. While they may have let go of the concept of God the Almighty, they clearly still hold on to many of their old beliefs. They believe in condemnation of what they perceive to be sin as well as the expression of deviant sexual behavior. These people are practically walking contradictions, still holding themselves back as they try to push their beliefs so that they can hold others back too.
In case there are any ex-Catholic people reading this at the moment, I truly think you should take a moment to examine your own concept of morality and how it makes you think of other people. Before jumping on how something is inherently evil, maybe you should take a moment to consider that reaction and why you feel that way about something. I'm not saying you have to see everything as morally grey, but the fact of the matter is just that many things just... are. It's important to have an understanding of your feelings and to extend some empathy to other people.
This is coming from a non-Christian OCD-ridden guy who has struggled with scrupulosity since childhood.
God, why can't we go back to the days where Mary Sues were the big cross-fandom topic?