It Has Come To My Attention That Some of You Have No Idea Where The Term Purity Culture Comes From

[osteophage]

In the controversy surrounding Cory Doctorow’s anniversary post, many people have engaged with the spirit of the thing, but I have yet to see any in-depth discussion of his choice to invoke the term purity culture. Purity culture is a term with very particular origins, and it’s not some general term for people being mean on the internet. It’s a term for a specific enculturation into a pattern of sexual abuse.

But before we get into that, let me give you an overview of why we’re talking about this again. I say “again” because — as long-time readers may recall — I posted about this subject before back in 2019. With that said, that post was written for a different audience, and there are some new facets to address this time, so let’s take it from the top.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

 

In a recent anniversary post, Cory Doctorow preemptively lambasted the criticism he anticipated for using a large language model as a means of catching typos in his blogposts. That post was brought to my attention by Tante’s post on acting ethically, which gave rise to a lot of responses. Among them are posts by Leon, Bix, Brennan, Mathew, Baldur Bjarnason, Emily Bender, and Zoylander Street, as well as further discussion at the 32-Bit Cafe. At this point, other people have engaged the substance of the debate thoroughly enough that I’m inclined to set the main issues aside as already covered, though if you’re interested in my own outlook, you can glean some of that from what I’ve written before on LLMs and the indie web and LLM output.

For this post, what I want to focus on is not just what Cory Doctorow was saying but specifically how he chose to say it. Here is a direct quote:

Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are “fruits of the poisoned tree” and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in. […]

Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices.

This is what we’re looking at here. As I said, the main message has already been discussed, so let’s not get distracted. We’re here to talk about purity culture.

Purity culture is a term for a turn-of-the-millennium American Christian evangelical movement focused on a specific teleology of sex. Sexual mores around virginity may be nothing new, but when we talk about purity culture, we talk about specific organizations, language, and practices such as True Love Waits, abstinence pledges, purity rings, and the rhetorical emphasis on “sexual purity” as part of a life trajectory toward marriage. Since this subculture also includes a hefty stigma against divorce, these elements combine into the understanding that once you are married and have begun a sexual relationship with a spouse, no matter how that person treats you, in God’s eyes, you can never leave.

Describing this phenomenon as “purity culture” seems to have been popularized in the 2010s by a Patheos blogger named Libby Anne, who was writing from a critical perspective as someone personally impacted. Here’s Libby Anne’s own recollection of how the term spread:

I began using the term in 2011 in an attempt to describe a range of teachings centered around purity, from modesty teachings to teachings about dating and sex. I published a page titled The “Purity Culture” the following year in order to showcase the numerous posts I was writing on the topic.

Up until a few years ago, I saw the term primarily in the blogosphere, used by individuals like [Dex] Anderson, Rachel Held Evans, and Samantha Field. This is important because it means that the term was shaped, forged, and popularized by young women who raised in evangelical homes, and not by outsiders—we were writing about something we knew, and had experienced.

For those unfamiliar, I expect that the severity of this phenomenon may not be entirely clear, so let me spell this out: When we talk about purity culture we talk about young people being pressured to get married and stay married on the basis of sex, no matter what. We talk about a culture that says sex is supremely important and obligatory. We talk about a culture that says it’s wrong for a wife to say no to her husband. We talk about a culture of misogyny, trauma, and degradation. We talk about a pattern of sexual abuse.

Once you understand the basis for the existence of a term like purity culture, then you can grasp the significance of Cory Doctorow’s declaration: by using this term to preemptively attack his critics, Cory has likened the criticism of LLMs to a culture of sexual abuse.

Sexual abuse is not what Cory’s post is about, but even so, it’s worth noting that sexual abuse is not completely off-topic, either. When we talk about the generative bot industry, we talk about unprompted and unwanted sexual responses, including toward users who are underage. We talk about bot-generated text that recommends sexual interactions with children. We talk about the sexual harassment of everyone and anyone, including teens and children. We talk about indiscriminate data scraping that gathers child sexual abuse material and generates even more. We talk about chatbots that instigate and exacerbate interpersonal abuse. We talk about burdening workers with sexual trauma. We talk about sexual accusations against those who raise concerns. We talk about sexual humiliation, violence, and cruelty being accelerated on a mass scale. We talk about a pattern of sexual abuse.

The subject of sexual abuse is not really the place I would prefer to start when discussing the practice of using LLMs to catch typos, and if you’re of the same mind, then ask yourself: Why did Cory bring it up? In asking this, I am not asking “Did he have any idea what he was saying?” The bigger question is “How does something like this even happen?” What is the broader arrangement of variables that it takes for a man to confidently declare that objecting to his use of LLMs is tantamount to a culture of sexual abuse?

There is a larger discussion to be had about that, but at minimum I think there are two conclusions we can draw here.

The first takeaway is that despite operating downstream of feminist criticism and drawing on its rhetorical power, Cory has not substantially put himself in community with the kind of people who might teach him where this term comes from or how to use it accordingly. To the contrary, he is fueling a discursive environment where people become suspicious of the term itself and begin to think of it as unnecessary.

The second takeaway is that, whatever Cory Doctorow thinks a large language model can do for him, evidently this mistake is one that it did not catch.