A current —some call it a digital subculture— is shaking the internet, they are the neopuritans, young people, almost teenagers, scandalized by everything. “Gross!” (Disgusting!) is his rallying cry to express his hatred of sex, drugs and alcohol, but also of couples of different ages or those who go out with short people. They see lewdness and hypersexualization everywhere and are quick to label any human interaction as pedophilia. In their vigilant behavior, and until proven otherwise, we are all sexual predators.
They debate on Twitter whether or not being gay is normal; on TikTok they express their hatred against Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, but also, and with the same force, against the musician Matt Healy, Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend, because “he leads her astray”; or against Jenna Ortega because one day she was seen smoking. They belong to the generation most exposed in history to unlimited free porn and yet, or perhaps because of this, they have made the hashtag #Cancelporno strong. His standards are inflexible.
puriteens (contraction of words puritans and teen) is what they are called on the internet. Puritan adolescents who suffer from a kind of carnal horror and aversion to sex and intimacy. According to the definition of the Urban Dictionary, a puriteen he is a young boy who proactively asks online to remove behavior that he interprets as sexually suggestive. Other definitions speak of a type of very young Internet user who is annoyed by any sexual manifestation, however contained and slight it may be. They have been seen on TikTok moralizing about the aberrational age gaps they believe exist in adult heterosexual couples and on Tinder calling for BDSM accessories to be banned from gay pride parades.
The premiere of The Idol, the HBO series directed by Sam Levinson and starring Lily-Rose Depp and The Weeknd, has outraged these guardians of morality. Almost 7,000 tweets consider the series to be hardcore pornography. The user @cocainecross viralized a post where he claimed that the second chapter was pornographic. He argued this by describing quite normal sex scenes in which he “talked dirty” to himself. Several users then called for the immediate and irrevocable cancellation of Levinson, wished him to “rot” in jail and others claimed that he had committed “crimes against humanity.”
Due to their vehemence, syntax and vocabulary, they are assumed to be very young, generation Z, although on the internet you never know. If they are not, they at least want to appear so, since they borrow the lexicon and codes of the zoomers to replicate his universe. in the anti battle The Idol, Internet language scholars observed that sex scenes were described using the names of the actors instead of their characters. It wasn’t “Tedros fingers Jocelyn” but “The Weeknd fingers Lily-Rose”. Thus everything sounded much more sordid and neopuritan spirits were enervated. “Forget trying to separate the artist from the work, apparently we are not able to distinguish the actor from the character from him either,” said an editorial in the publication. Vox Cultureand warned: “There is a part of the Internet audience that does not understand the difference between reality and fiction.”
This cognitive dissonance is the backbone of Neopuritan culture: not understanding that what happens in a series is fiction and does not cause real suffering. This confusion, increased by media illiteracy, explains the regression to very conservative positions on sexual matters. “In some very young people there is a shift to the right of thought caused by internet culture and the content that is consumed on TikTok and Twitch,” says Álvaro Pajares, writer and expert in digital culture. In his opinion, the Neopuritan current may be a de-ideologized drift of the movement woke: “A thought or an emotion that emerged in forum dynamics and on Tumblr that generated a psychotic reading of reality. That structure has been transferred to TikTok, along the way it has lost its academic layer and has acquired the self-referential tone typical of that platform of micro-identities and micro-stories”, says the author of Memeceno (La Caja Books). Other theories suggest that the puriteens are children of the antifandom movement, the audience that unites, defines itself and acts around a shared aversion, in this case, to sex.
As often happens in digital narratives that arise in opposition to an idea, it is difficult to determine to whom the derogatory message is directed at each moment. puriteens, an insult that has become the quintessential weapon of the culture war between millennials and zoomers. The term is usually used by older users to disqualify behaviors and beliefs of the youngest. Among zoomers, however, the label is rarely used.
Nothing makes a millennial more excited than fantasizing about the idea that the generation that ousted them from the internet has a zero or very poor sex life, in any case, worse than theirs. José Díaz, president of the Spanish Association of Clinical Sexology (AESC), assures that sexual activity has been in free fall for four decades. It doesn’t matter if some venerate sex and others hate it. From the sexual recession announced in 2018 by the magazine The Atlantic Millennials are not spared either, perhaps their parents or grandparents are safe.
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