you don’t need purity in the material you consume
you have a brain, you are capable of critical thinking, you can sift through the material and keep what is edifying for you and discard what isn’t
flaws don’t necessarily make material worthless
all right i queued this last night because i was already posting a lot and didn’t want to flood anyone’s dash but you guys i need to talk about this more.
like, okay. i grew up REALLY STRICT christian. like. every piece of media i consumed underwent a fine-toothed comb by my parents to be sure there wasn’t anything “sinful” in it. I got into a tearful, screaming fight with my mother over whether I was allowed to watch a piece of educational children’s material on PBS because one of the characters said “damn” once.
(I’m still not sure they did. In retrospect, I think my purity-focused mother misheard something and, having her suspicions confirmed that you couldn’t trust any “secular” source not to be sinful, reacted accordingly.)
(Pay attention, that parenthetical was also relevant.)
Do you know what my teenage rebellion was? Listening to the oldies station in the car when I had my driver’s license and could go places on my own. That was my big fuck-you to my parents: listening to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel and the Fifth Dimension when they couldn’t tell me how I shouldn’t be listening to them because the creators of that music were drug-addled, free-loving atheists whose own disregard for God and religion might just infect my impressionable spirit. Like I was gonna listen to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and go do LSD and become an atheist. This was my teenage rebellion in the year 1999.
I’m 35 now. And all right so I became agnostic. But I didn’t become a drug addicted prostitute because I loved listening to psychedelic rock music as a teenager. (And you know what? Even if I had become a drug addicted prostitute, I’d still have worth as a human being, so dissect that one.) And it wasn’t even the psychedelic rock music that turned me agnostic: It was Christianity itself. But that’s another story altogether.
My point here is: Y’all are on here acting like my goddamn parents, “don’t watch this” and “don’t listen to that” because this character does XYZ problematic thing and this author said ABC ignorant thing two years ago at a con when they were put on the spot in an interview. If you watch this movie where a teenager falls in love with someone five years older than them, you’re going to become a pedophile! If you read this book by an author who once used an outdated term for someone in the trans community, then you’re a transphobe!
Y’all need to sit the fuck down and stop acting like nobody ever taught you to think for yourself, because I know damn well that you’re capable of critical thought and you don’t need your media chewed up and spit into your mouth like a baby bird. And I’m an adult and I sure the hell don’t, so stop telling me I’m going to choke because I’m consuming something complicated, complex, and not already pre-morally-dissected for me.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Grew up under the thumb of my Baptist Christian Grandmother, and everything I consumed via tv, movies, music, books, or games, had to be screened to make sure she approved so my “soul” could be saved.
I grew up in the 90′s, in the era where Pokemon was encouraging satanism, Harry Potter was teaching witchcraft, Power Rangers encouraged violence, and video games inspired school shootings.
My grandmother was almost every bit of the mother in Waterboy to a T. If she didn’t approve of what I liked, it was clearly the devil and I needed to stop liking it. This shit didn’t even stop when I was in my twenties.
I get summoned for jury duty and I’m told it’s going to be a long drive and a long ass process so I bring a book. Now at the time I was in the middle of reading the Percy Jackson series, knowing my grandmother (who had to drive me) I knew she wouldn’t approve of me reading a book series about other gods, so I instead bring the Zombie Survival Guide a neat little fake instruction booklet. Apparently, even that wasn’t safe for my poor innocent developing early to mid 20 something impressionable brain because zombies were the foot soldiers of satan.
Even before me, my dad had to deal with similar shit with his mom. One day he came home from school and almost all of his rock band and movie posters were torn down from his bedroom walls and thrown away because his mom thought they were too evil. And no, this wasn’t the grandmother I was living with.
It is surreal as fuck to have survive life under my grandmother and get out from under her, to be 30 and log onto the internet and see people my age or younger claim how better they are than the “boomers” then do the exact same puritanical policing they did over the exact same topics for almost the exact same reasons.
“You can’t like this because it’ll turn you into drug addicted prostitute.”
“You can’t like this because it’ll corrupt your soul.”
“You can’t like this because it’ll mean you’re ist/phobe.”
“You can’t like this because it’ll mean the whites/straights/men/cis will win.”
Same shit different day and name.
