#purity spiral

[maple-bow]

If social and moral norms become strict enough, will people from younger and future generations loosen them again just so that they can keep up and/or maintain their own self interest?

[haggishlyhagging]

Dear Wires,

Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group's paper "Political lesbianism: the case against heterosexuality" offended and angered me, but I'm glad they wrote it and Wires printed it because those ideas have been hanging around for years but have never been stated so baldly before.

It's also the first time I've seen feminists directly deny the principle that every woman's experience is real, and valid, — that women have the capacity and the right to make their own choices about their lives without being told what's good for them by someone else, or being ostracised for not conforming. . . .

Standard, sexist heterosexual sex with penetration as the unquestioned pinnacle is oppressive to women and tailored to men's interests, but that's not news and it's not contentious. The tragedy is that women's tentative attempts to explore and reveal and challenge standard sexual practice have been killed stone dead by the two commandments that if you do it with women you're OK and if you do it with men, you're out.

-Love Your Enemy? The Debate between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism

[troubleinonepocket]

How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral - UnHerd

A process of moral outbidding is corroding small communities from within

“People who are trying to prevent members of society from speaking the truth will often punish minor criticisms,” he told me. “Simply to send the message to the rest of society that no dissent will be tolerated and no attempt to form an opposing group — even one that differs only slightly from the status quo — will be tolerated. If you allow minor differences, you allow people to coordinate around minor differences, and that can encourage even greater opposition. If people get that sense, then the whole process can unravel.”

[arcticdementor]

Free-associating on this, I jump back to some of the stereotypical scenes in (actual, pre-20c) Puritanism, where those preaching it absolutely fulminate about the overwhelming prevalence of horrible sin, Satanic practices, &c. &c., in that Puritan cultural milieu where it seems such a thing actually existing would be really unlikely. Maybe similar to "Satanic panic" kind of stuff from 80s-90s. I feel like there's a template for belief complexes that goes kind of like: 1. Problem X is extremely bad and urgent 2. Many people around you are complicit in Problem X 3. The failure of society at large to recognize the immediate urgency of Problem X is itself a manifestation of Problem X 4. Any claim that downplays the seriousness of Problem X in any context is another manifestation of X, and probably indicates X-sympathies on the part of the claimer Which lends itself to immediate purity spirals where those who identify as Anti-Xers start to compete over how furiously they can denounce X and how urgently they can present it, running far off away from any view of reality in the process, and any attempt to get a reasonable view of how bad X actually is ends up coded pro-X and denounced.

“dedicating ruckus”

[arcticdementor]

Adrian Vermeule notes the leftist singularity (link).