A current —some call it a digital subculture— is shaking the internet, it’s the neopuritans, young, almost adolescents, scandalized by everything. “Cross!” (Disgusting!) is his rallying cry to express his hatred for sex, drugs and alcohol, but also for couples of different ages or for those who date short people. They see filth and hypersexualization everywhere and are quick to label any human interaction as pedophilia. In their watchful demeanor, and until proven otherwise, we are all sexual predators.
They argue on Twitter about whether being gay is normal or not; 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 she was seen smoking one day. They belong to the generation most exposed to unlimited free porn in history and yet, or perhaps because of it, they made the hashtag #Cancelporno strong. His standards are uncompromising.
puriteens (word contraction puritans AND teenager) that’s what they’re called on the internet. Puritan teenagers suffering from a kind of carnal horror and aversion to sex and intimacy. According to the definition of the Urban Dictionary, a puriten is a young boy proactively asking online to remove behavior he interprets as sexually suggestive. Other definitions speak of a very young Internet type who is annoyed by any sexual manifestation, however restrained and mild it may be. They have been seen on TikTok lecturing about the aberrational age differences they believe exist in adult heterosexual couples and on Tinder calling for BDSM paraphernalia to be banned from gay pride parades.
The first of the idol, the HBO series directed by Sam Levinson and starring Lily-Rose Depp and The Weeknd, has outraged these guardians of morality. Nearly 7,000 tweets consider the series to be hardcore pornography. User @cocainecross made a post go viral claiming the second chapter was pornographic. He backed this up by describing fairly normal sex scenes where “dirty talk” was involved. Several users then demanded the immediate and irrevocable cancellation of Levinson, wished that he “rot” in prison and others claimed that he had committed “crimes against humanity”.
Due to their vehemence, syntax and vocabulary, it is assumed that they are very young, generation Z, even if 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 zoomer replicate his universe. in the anti battle the idol, Internet language scholars observed that sex scenes were described using the actors’ names instead of their characters. It wasn’t “Tedros Fingers Jocelyn” but “The Weeknd Fingers Lily-Rose”. So everything sounded much more sordid and neo-puritan spirits were unnerved. “Forget trying to separate the artist from the work, we apparently can’t even tell the actor from his character,” an op-ed said in the publication. Vox Cultureand warned, “There’s a portion of the Internet public that doesn’t understand the difference between fact and fiction.”
This cognitive dissonance is the backbone of Neopuritan culture: not understanding that what happens in a series is fictional and causes no 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 towards the right of thought caused by the culture of the Internet and the contents that are consumed on TikTok and Twitch,” says Álvaro Pajares, writer and expert on digital culture. In his view, the neopuritan current may be a deideologized drift of the movement woke up: “A thought or emotion that emerged in the dynamics of forums and on Tumblr that generated a psychotic reading of reality. That structure was transferred to TikTok, along the way it lost its academic layer and 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 puriteens are children of the antifandom movement, the audience that unites, defines itself, and acts around a shared aversion to, in this case, sex.
As is often the case with digital narratives that arise in opposition to an idea, it is difficult to determine who the derogatory message is aimed at at any moment. puriteens, an insult that has become the quintessential weapon of the culture war between millennials and zoomer. The term is usually used by older users to disqualify younger people’s behaviors and beliefs. Among zoomers, however, the label is rarely used.
Nothing gets a millennial more excited than fantasizing about the idea that the generation that kicked them off the internet has either zero or very little, in any case, worse sex lives 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 worship sex and others hate it. From the sexual recession announced in 2018 by the magazine The Atlantic Millennials aren’t spared either, perhaps their parents or grandparents are safe.
Sign up to continue reading
Read without limits