Also, as someone who experienced intensive purity culture from especially my family in ways that are typically only thought of as happening in hyperreligious christian households, despite my mom and dad being agnostic and atheist respectively...
It absolutely does go beyond shipcourse. I was shamed for my sexuality. I was shamed for masturbation. I was shamed for having HARMLESS kinks by ANY standards (things literally like piss). I was shamed so hard and in such insidious ways as a form of thought control that I have extreme moral OCD to this day and despite having worked incredibly hard to unlearn it and let myself be my incredibly kinky self, I STILL sometimes have panic attacks or feel the urges to start "confessing" what I'm getting off to to my parents again.
This shit damages you. It's traumatic. It nearly cost the relationship I now have with my partner because my parents so strongly were convinced they knew my sexuality innately, inside and out, that they delayed my realization of my own pansexuality, my aspec identities, my abroness, etc, for several YEARS while I worried they were right and that I wouldn't be attracted to my partner anymore once she transitioned. They told me I was just straight and into her "male body" when I came out.
For the record, she is more beautiful every day she becomes more herself.
I felt dirty for having a body. My mom USED her suspicions of my sexual abuse pre-adoption to shame me for my piss kink, to call it abnormal and pathological. When I realized that SA had happened?
She backtracked so fast she tripped over herself, because me actually processing the real trauma and having a healthy relationship with my sexuality was more than she could handle.
I'm still unlearning just how deep that toxicity managed to seep into my psyche and healing with gentle hands the scars it left behind. I'm learning to love myself in ways I never realized I hated myself.
And I see these exact same patterns mirrored in shipcourse.
I see them mirrored in the moralization and demonization of depictions of sex that when fictional, harm no one. I see people making their discomfort the problem of survivors writing pieces that clearly are saying "this is bad" to anyone with critical thinking skills. I see children being called child predators for ageing characters up or down to self-ship. I see it in light and sexy erotica for people with cnc kinks being treated as dangerous pro-rape propaganda.
I see it in words on the page being held as equally horrible as what happened to me, when even if they were in fact actually harmful in any material way, it would be plancks to the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall galactic filament of harm that is actual harm to a single actual living child.
For reference, a planck length is the smallest theoretical unit in the universe. The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is a cluster of galaxies that is the single largest object in the known universe. The scales don't even compare. This isn't even ants to planets or booboos to broken bones. This is a momentary itch to total extinction of all existing life in this universe levels of scale, in the imaginary theoretical scenario where any part of a fanfic depicting the abuse I went through could be inherently harmful in any way.
Aside from misguided survivors, who I have enough empathy for to feel more neutral, I have nothing but the coldest void of hate for those that dare to compare the two. And worse, who then have the GALL to tell people talking about other forms of valid sexual trauma due to repression, shame, and abusive control, and tell them that THEY'RE in the wrong for noting the very real similarities and in cases IDENTICAL practices between cases of institutionalized thought control used to perpetrate sexual abuse in religion and secular thought control used to shape societal attitudes around and perpetrate sexual abuse in wider society?
Who do they think they are, to reduce it to "being told Bobo the clown is cringe" (never mind the multiple cases of minors and survivors being driven to attempts suicide, or any of the other number of serious harm done. never mind the actual predators sheltered by the anti community and rhe grooming done under the guise of "protecting the children" while sharing actual sexual materials with said children and spamming gore and death threats at and even doxxing others)?
How dare they try and minimize the very real harm done by secular purity culture and the way it shapes "protect the children" rhetoric and prevents children from receiving the age appropriate sexual education that has been proven time and time again to REDUCE sexual abuse and cause more perpetrators to be caught and kids to be saved?
How dare they further speak over and silence survivors talking about the methods by which a foundation is built on which to rest rape culture and prioritize the comfort of those who've never endured such a thing over the healing and safety of survivors?
How. Dare they.
Hell would seem a kind fate for that kind of person if I believed in such a place.
But my principles inform me to say: I hope anon can learn just how wrong they are about everything. I hope they spend the rest of their life working to help the people they're truly hurting with their quippy one-liners that bely deep underlying attitudes that are working to support and uphold societal, structural real world harm.
Though the petty part of me can't help but hope that the harm they've done or allowed to be done drives them to work ever harder, chasing unattainable absolution withheld only by their own guilt, as the haunting reality of what they've participated in nips at their heels like venom-fanged hellhounds.
I know, that's not very anarchist or reform/rehabilitation justice paradigm of me. I know that part is neither useful nor kind.
But as a survivor, please give me the grace of allowing me that anger at someone who won't even acknowledge the smallest parts of the hurt that was done to me, how it all compounded and twisted in on and corrupted all the other bits and festered inside until it broke open into a cacophony of rot and spores that I'm in intensive therapy to try and root out so I can start growing in all the places that were made infertile for me as an INFANT, where most other people have had all the years of their life to nurture and grow.
And allow me to finish with: anon, go fuck yourself.
