Purity, Porn, and the Machinery Beneath It

I’ve been watching the world lately, and it doesn’t feel like chaos to me. It feels rehearsed.

Authoritarianism doesn’t crash through the door anymore, boots thudding and flags waving. It slips in quietly, wearing the soft clothes of a worried parent. It whispers about safety, about protecting the kids, about getting back to good old values and traditions. It promises to straighten the mess, dim the lights, and make everything feel cozy again.

But underneath that lullaby, the engines are still running hot: economic dread gnawing at everyone’s edges, identities scrambling for solid ground, and this overwhelming roar of too many voices all talking at once. When a system starts to wobble like that, it reaches for the one thing it’s always known how to grip.

The body.

Food. Sex. Stories. Women.

We keep pointing at the contradiction, the sermons on purity one day, the flood of sexualised images the next and calling it hypocrisy. Like we’ve caught them in a lie.

But that split isn’t a mistake. It’s the design.

Puritanism and porn aren’t enemies; they’re the same leash, just held from different angles. Desire has to be captured before it can be tamed. And in these setups, women never get to be full people. They’re symbols first: walking proof of virtue or walking proof of rot. Never just themselves, with their own messy inner worlds.

So the culture carves them in two.

On one side: the sacred mother, the safe harbour, the moral center everyone’s supposed to orbit.

On the other: the spectacle, the fantasy, the body served up for consumption.

No overlap. No grey. No room to breathe.

Out in public, the script calls for modesty, restraint, “good behaviour.” Behind closed doors or in the dark corners of feeds, the same system thrives on obsession: watching, fetishising, punishing under the cover of lust.

Same building. Just different lighting.

Once that divide hardens, the whole cultural menu starts to shrink. Authoritarianism doesn’t need to burn books anymore; it just curates the options until everything on offer tastes like obedience.

Food turns into “clean” or “poison.” Art becomes “wholesome” or “harmful.” Sex is only safe when it’s staged for one gaze. Stories lose their shadows because shadows teach people to look around corners.

And that’s exactly why, if you’re sensing the world pulling toward nostalgia, toward simpler times, toward myths with all the mystery scrubbed off, toward a kind of cultural infantilisation, it’s not just in your head. It’s the direct result of that shrinking menu, the grip tightening in response to all the complexity it can’t handle.

Women always end up at the very center of this, not by accident, but because that’s where power feels the shakiest: reproduction, desire, the shape of whatever comes next. Control women, and you can pretend the cracks in your worldview aren’t spreading.

That’s why the system blames them and craves them in the same breath. Erases them and puts them on endless display. Silences them and turns them into content.

Not hypocrisy. Mechanics.

History keeps running the same routine whenever things get too complicated, like a play we’ve all seen before.

Late Rome, folding in on itself: moral panics about women’s freedoms, art sanded down until it couldn’t bite.

Reformation Europe: the printing press explodes ideas everywhere, and suddenly witch hunts and book bans try to stuff the genie back in.

Weimar’s wild brilliance gives way to the Third Reich’s “degenerate art” purges and state-enforced motherhood medals.

1950s America: censorship boards on one side, pin-up ads drowning the culture on the other.

Every surge of complexity triggers the same reflex: simplify. And women are the first frequency turned down.

Not because they’re weak because they carry the very things these systems can’t handle: contradiction, futurity, emotional depth. The space for nuance.

Authoritarian orders can’t digest nuance. So they either elevate women into silent icons or cut them into consumable pieces.

What cracks these cycles open isn’t the biggest protest march. It’s the quietest refusal: a letter slipped under a door, a diary no one was meant to read, underground writing that insists on the full body, the full mind.

Systems lose when they can’t reach inside anymore.

Today, that clamp comes through algorithms, not decrees. It’s softer, faster, pre-compliance baked right in. Stories self-censor before anyone complains. Trauma’s allowed only if it ties up neatly. Queerness gets a cameo as long as it’s decorative. Sex is fine if it doesn’t shift any power. Ambiguity gets tagged “problematic.” Desire gets flagged.

The machine does it with a smile.

That’s why you’re seeing these little rivers running underneath: small presses dropping bundles that feel like contraband, voice notes that arrive raw, films that sneak myth back in with teeth intact.

These aren’t fads. They’re lifelines. Pressure releases in a culture squeezing tighter.

The real line isn’t left or right anymore. It’s between culture that’s used as a tool and culture that’s still alive.

Art as slogan versus art as encounter.

Sex as product versus sex as knowing.

Identity as brand versus identity as signal.

Authoritarianism always bets on the first option.

But the future seeps through the second.

The work that outlives the clamp won’t be the loudest or the most careful.

It’ll be the work that refuses to flatten itself.

Stories with real voltage don’t ask permission.

They just slip through the cracks and keep going.