Ah, to be young and scandalized: Who are these ‘puriteens,’ anyway?

There is a current — some call it a digital subculture — stirring the internet. They are the neo-puritans: young people, almost teenagers, scandalized by everything. With the battle cry of “Gross!” they express their hatred of sex, drugs and alcohol, but also of age-gap couples or those who date short people. They see lewdness and hypersexualization everywhere they look and are quick to label any human interaction as pedophilia. Under their watchful gaze, we are all sexual predators until proven otherwise.

They debate on Twitter whether or not being gay is normal; on TikTok, they express their hatred of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, but also, and with the same intensity, of musician Matt Healy, Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend, for “leading her astray,” as well as Jenna Ortega, because one day she was seen smoking. They belong to the generation that has been most exposed to unlimited free pornography in history, and yet – or perhaps because of this – #cancelporn seems to be one of their favorite hashtags. Their standards are inflexible.

The internet calls them puriteens and they suffer from a kind of hair-rising fear and aversion to sex and intimacy. According to the Urban Dictionary, a puriteen is an online child who “proactively demands that people curtail behavior that they interpret as sexually suggestive.” Other definitions speak of a very young internet user who is upset by any kind of sexual manifestation, however restrained and mild it may be. They have been seen on TikTok moralizing about the aberrational age gaps they believe exist among adult heterosexual couples; on Tinder, they call 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 that claimed that the second episode was “straight up pornographic,” while describing normal sex scenes in which dirty talk was involved. Several users then called for the immediate and irrevocable cancellation of Levinson and wished him to “rot” in jail. Others claimed that he had committed “crimes against humanity.”

Due to their fervor, syntax and vocabulary, they are assumed to be very young, probably Gen Z, although on the internet you never know. If they are not, at least that is how they want to be perceived, as they use the words and codes of the zoomers to replicate their universe. In the battle against The Idol, students of internet language observed that the sex scenes were described using the names of the actors instead of their characters: it was not “Tedros fingers Jocelyn” but “The Weeknd fingers Lily-Rose,” making everything sound much more sordid. “Forget trying to separate the art from the artist, we seemingly can’t even separate actors from their characters now,” stated an editorial in the publication Vox Culture, warning that there is a part of the internet audience that doesn’t seem to understand the difference between fact and fiction.

This cognitive dissonance is the backbone of neo-puritan culture: not understanding that what happens in a series is fiction, that it is not causing real suffering. This confusion, increased by media illiteracy, explains a regression to very conservative positions on sexual matters. “There is a rightward shift among some very young people, caused by internet culture and the content that is consumed on TikTok and Twitch,” states Álvaro Pajares, writer and expert in digital culture. In his opinion, the neo-puritan current could be a de-ideologized departure of the woke movement: “A thought or an emotion that emerged in forum dynamics and on Tumblr that generated a psychotic reading of reality. That structure moved to TikTok and along the way it lost its academic layer and acquired the self-referential tone typical of that platform of micro-identities and micro-stories.” Other theories suggest that the puriteens are children of the antifandom movement, the audience that becomes united, defined and active 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 epithet “puriteens” (an insult that has become the weapon par excellence in the culture war between millennials and zoomers) is being directed at. The term is used by older users to disqualify the behaviors and beliefs of younger ones; 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 no, or very poor, sex life – in any case, worse than theirs. José Díaz, president of the Spanish Association of Clinical Sexology (AESC), points out that sexual activity has been experiencing a free fall for four decades. It matters little if some worship sex and others hate it; millennials are not spared from the sexual recession announced in 2018 by The Atlantic magazine either. Perhaps their parents or grandparents are safe.

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