The author’s second novel zooms in on what an artist should be.
Early on in Brandon Taylor’s elegant and restrained new novel The Late Americans, a poet named Seamus imagines the world to be a kind of diorama or dollhouse with “some enormous and indifferent God” peering down at him. Everyone else he knows is in the dollhouse too, moving about their lives under God’s judging stare, “like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans.”
Part of the project of this novel is to turn the readers into God, showing us the automated movements of Taylor’s late American characters as they glide precisely along their clockwork tracks, worrying about money and having sex and making art. In creating that kaleidoscopic, panoramic view, it succeeds — but it sometimes falters on the details.
Like Taylor’s two previous books, The Late Americans involves the intertwined lives of young people, mostly queer men, on a Midwestern college campus. In this case it’s the University of Iowa, where Taylor got his MFA. (“What I love about campus fiction,” Taylor remarked in a recent essay, “is that it provides a world in miniature whose rules and laws and rigors can be stand-ins for the rules, laws, and rigors of the broader world.”) Seamus is in the poetry program, seething with fury at his classmates’ shallow political writing. We also meet students in the dance program, an ex-dancer turned finance student, townies, a lone visual artist.
The book is built daisy chain-style. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, generally one who featured as a minor character before. Many of the chapters can stand on their own as completed stories, and the strongest link between them comes from ominous, threatening Bert, a local closeted gay man who occasionally sleeps with and occasionally attacks the out students of the university. He lurks in the background of the action like a Chekhovian gun that will never properly go off.
Meanwhile, Taylor’s point-of-view characters tend to be united by their anger toward social pieties they consider aesthetically unpleasing or illogical. Seamus is furious that his classmates dismiss his poetry about God and flesh and the mysteries of the cosmos as insufficiently anti-colonialist. Fyodor, a local who works at a beef-processing plant, resents his vegetarian boyfriend Timo for hating Fyodor’s job even though Timo is pro-death penalty. “That’s cruelty. Isn’t it?” Fyodor asks.
These characters are angry in part because they are trying to find beauty in the world and in their work, and everything that thwarts them is an enemy: other people, the limits of their artistic abilities, lack of money, their own bodies. Their connections to each other are vexed and imperfect, made fraught by barriers of identity. Fyodor and Timo are both mixed race, which is “thrilling” to Fyodor, but on the other hand Timo’s family has money, which makes him “very naive.” Ex-dancer Ivan is mixed race and poor, while his boyfriend Goran is Black and adopted by a wealthy white family, which makes Ivan tend to forget Goran is Black.
This polyphonic narration makes The Late Americans feel closer to Filthy Animals, Taylor’s 2021 short story collection, than to Real Life, his 2020 novel. Real Life was exceptional for its close, almost claustrophobic investigation of the psyche of its lonely, tormented protagonist. The Late Americans, by design, has nothing so immersive to offer readers. Instead, as we delve into the mind of each character in turn, it starts to become disconcertingly difficult to tell one from the other.
These characters all talk in the same ways. They have different thoughts, but they express their thoughts in the same kind of language, using the same kind of framework. They blur together.
Taylor is at his strongest with his most isolated characters. Bea, the only character not to appear by name in any other chapter, is an artist who talks to almost no one but the children she tutors at her day job. (“If you killed yourself, would anyone feel sad?” one of them asks her.) Her particular sorrow is distinct, and so is the tiny redemption she finds from human connection, from her art, from the natural world.
Otherwise, The Late Americans is a novel whose ideas and images linger longer in the mind than its characters do. Days after reading it, I think frequently of Seamus’s fantasy of God “prying the house open,” with his “Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.” The precision of the word prying, with its connotations of intrusion and physical force; the cosmic wonder of the idea of God looking down with a Gorgon’s head — how thrilling. How fascinating. What craftsmanship.
Already, though, it’s become hard for me to remember which character had that fantasy, or which of Taylor’s books I read it in. I closed this book craving something distinct that I never found.
From $1,000 sneakers to $450 bakeware, our lust for expensive things has hit new highs.
The pandemic was a period of mass unemployment and economic hardship for many Americans. It was also a riotously popular time for buying luxury goods.
“2021 and 2022 were blockbuster years for the luxury industry,” says Lauren Sherman, fashion correspondent at Puck News. “The biggest years they’ve ever had — ever.”
Shoppers devoured designer leather handbags, limited-edition sneakers, classic watches, and holy grail prestige beauty products that went viral on TikTok; practically every type of luxury brand saw its sales swing up during the pandemic. Part of the explosion is due to the fact there’s a lot more upscale stuff to buy. Luxury was once confined to traditional categories such as clothing, accessories, wines, and cars. No longer. In the past few years, there’s also been an insatiable appetite for high-end kitchenware and other home goods — a $420 Le Creuset dutch oven, a $1,500 Breville espresso maker, a $1,500 Thermomix blender, a $110 Aesop candle smelling of vetiver, frankincense, and wealth.
Analysts have a nebulous definition of what constitutes a luxury good, but it’s usually an object that not only has a sky-high price but also promises quality craftsmanship and an air of exclusivity. It shouldn’t be something everyone has. Yet more and more Americans across ages and income brackets are getting swept up in the world of extravagant products, driving the industry to an incredible boom.
Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton — LVMH for short — this year became the most valuable luxury company in the world, surpassing a market cap of a half trillion dollars in April. The owner of brands such as Dior, Givenchy, and Tiffany, it now floats in the uppermost stratosphere of the world’s biggest companies, among names like Meta, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon. This year, Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, even overtook tech emperor Elon Musk as the richest person on Earth with an estimated $232 billion at time of writing, according to Forbes’s real-time billionaire ranking.
It’s not just Louis Vuitton handbags that are selling like gold-garnished hotcakes. While the rate of growth in the sector has slowed slightly in recent months, a whopping 95 percent of luxury brands saw profits fatten in 2022, according to a Bain & Company report. Hermès, maker of decadent silk scarves and the infamous Birkin bag, saw a record 38 percent jump in profit from 2021. Richemont, which counts Cartier, Chloé, and Montblanc among its brands, saw its fiscal year 2022 profits rise by 61 percent. Kering (Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga), Chanel and Prada, Burberry, Luxottica, and OTB (which owns Maison Margiela, Marni, and other luxe brands) — they were all up, too.
Meanwhile, in the broader economy, other industries have been struggling to recover from the hit they took during the pandemic, while also battling persistent supply chain issues, labor shortages, and stock value plummets. “There are two key factors as to why luxury is bucking current trends,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at the analytics and consulting firm GlobalData, which conducted a consumer panel of US luxury spending last year. “One of them is economic, and one of them is psychological.”
Economically, the math is simple: Rich people, the most obvious consumers for luxury goods, don’t balk at price tags. The luxury industry is often described as “resilient,” meaning it doesn’t get buffeted by economic headwinds quite as much as other industries do. “That, to be honest, has always been the case,” Saunders says.
The psychology of why we buy designer products also eschews typical economic sense, because the motivation to buy is about status. The higher the price, the more status you’re theoretically buying.
Which is why it’s not just rich people buying rich people things. A not-insignificant portion of luxury growth comes from middle- and low-income consumers. According to GlobalData, Americans with a household income of less than $50,000 make up about 27 percent of regular luxury consumers. That’s almost as big a group as luxury consumers with an income of $150,000 or more.
Even in rough times, the luxury industry usually enjoys a well-cushioned profit margin. That’s the nature of its business. The Business of Fashion reported that, in 2022, Louis Vuitton had an estimated margin above 50 percent. Compare that to Apple, the most valuable company in the world, which had a profit margin of around 30 percent last year.
“At a fast-fashion or a regular retailer, profit margins on clothing at best are 20 to 30 percent,” says Sherman. But the fat profits at LVMH and elsewhere have become more common as the industry became increasingly corporatized, she says. “Prior to 1990 especially, this was an industry run by individual families.”
In the 1980s, Arnault took the corporate raider playbook popular in the US at the time and applied it to French luxury — including by laying off 9,000 workers when he took over the conglomerate that owned the fashion house Dior. But instead of buying up companies and then quickly selling them off in pieces, Arnault kept his acquisitions, amassing a portfolio of 75 brands in fashion and other sectors. Other luxury conglomerates have followed in Arnault’s footsteps, gobbling up a diverse array of brands in several luxury categories. Buying up all these brands bolsters more consistent profits, because even when one category has a poor quarter, others could have a record-breaking one. It also ensures a certain level of market dominance; if someone wants to buy luxury, chances are they’re going to do it from a brand in the LVMH portfolio.
Luxury brands, however, aren’t immune to economic downturns. During the Great Recession, the market shrank by 9 percent. That’s what makes its leaps during the pandemic so remarkable. “It has held up a lot better in the current downturn than it did in the financial crash last time,” says Saunders.
Perhaps it’s because many brands have simply taken to increasing their prices to new heights. The average price of luxury items has spiked by 25 percent since 2019. Luxury accessories prices on the online retailer Farfetch rose by almost 39 percent between February 2020 and May 2021, according to the e-commerce analytics company DataWeave.
“Four hundred bucks for a pair of shoes used to seem like a lot of money,” says Sherman. “Every pair of shoes is a thousand bucks now.”
Shoppers of all income brackets also not only spent big on luxury items, they spent more on each purchase. Data from Earnest Analytics, a consumer data analytics firm, shows that the average sale amount has jumped — in April 2020 it cratered to $269, but reached $520 in April 2022. And while Americans across the income spectrum were buying more luxury apparel during the pandemic, purchases by individuals making $40,000 or less rose the most: They were 365 percent higher at the end of 2021 than they were in January 2020, before lockdowns began in the US.
Saunders suggests there are several reasons the luxury market is stronger this time around. For one, we’re not in a recession — at least not yet. The Covid economy was also a strange beast; it absolutely devastated some sectors for a while, and both its human and economic toll shouldn’t be understated. Recovery, however, has also happened quickly. The economy of luxury goods, Saunders notes, is far different now than it was in 2009. “We didn’t have the resale market,” he says. “Players like The RealReal, Poshmark, they just didn’t really exist in the way that they do now.” The explosion of luxury resale and rental platforms might not have directly fed the sales of luxury brands, but they engaged a new generation of consumers — it’s an easy entry point into the world of its aesthetics and sensibilities.
And then there’s this truth: A lot of the spending, Sherman says, has been thanks to stimulus checks giving middle-income Americans more discretionary income in a time when there were fewer avenues to spend it. Some of it was due to newly minted crypto wealth. For other shoppers, it wasn’t that they had new money to flaunt, but that the pandemic lockdowns had caused a sort of slingshot effect — as lockdowns eased, the floodgates of the pent-up shopping that people didn’t (or couldn’t) do opened. Amid a mix of drivers, the bottom line is that Americans couldn’t get enough of premium goods amid a destabilizing economic crisis.
“Luxury goods have become a big part of pop culture,” says Sherman. “Now it’s a social thing. When I was growing up, having an interest in fashion — especially in America — was seen as a hobby or a niche.”
The modern luxury economy has become a part of not just pop culture, but youth internet culture. People find out about trends online, and shop online, then sell old pieces online so they can buy a new statement item … online. According to The RealReal’s 2022 report, millennials sell and buy more than any other generational cohort — and together with Gen Z, they make up 41 percent of the site’s more than 28 million members.
Members of Gen Z, in fact, are making their first luxury purchases earlier than millennials did — at around age 15, according to Bain & Co research. The same research projects that millennials and younger generations will make up 80 percent of luxury spending by 2030.
This might seem like an odd projection, given the countless reports of young people’s finances lagging behind those of their parents. One Morgan Stanley report suggested that young adults may have more disposable income because a greater number of them are living with their parents longer due to skyrocketing rent. The accessibility of buy now, pay later platforms also makes it easier to finance a $5,000 handbag. Maybe a mortgage feels too out of reach to even dream of, but paying for an exorbitantly priced Nike x Supreme Air Jordan collab in installments? Doable.
Young people in particular justify luxury spending, says Saunders, with the booming resale market. “Younger generations view luxury, and indeed fashion in general, as being circular,” he says. Fork over an exorbitant amount upfront, then recoup some, if not most of it, on Depop later. The price value equation is alluring for luxury, counterintuitively especially when inflation is high — that’s when consumers with some disposable income are going to really maximize bang for their buck.
When it comes to status pieces, however, price and affordability are a little beside the point. A recent CreditKarma survey found that over half of Gen Z and millennials considered themselves to be emotional spenders — more than a third even said their emotional spending was “out of control.”
“Younger generations are much more attuned to using luxury as a way to feel good about themselves,” says Saunders. “Not just as a signal of wealth or status. It’s much more about them personally feeling good and wanting to have products that they feel engaged with.”
“There’s a lot more social media where people are showing off the brands, and they’re showcasing what they’ve bought,” he continues. Luxury goods are a language through which to communicate taste and connoisseurship on digital platforms, and brands know this. Their marketing today is geared to young people deeply attuned to internet culture, focusing on celebrity endorsement deals, collabs with artists and edgy designers, doing limited “drops” — not only with fashion, but even with kitchenware — that intensify how coveted a product is and ride the wave of virality. The penetration of streetwear and hypebeast culture globally has also been an incredible boon to the luxury industry, transforming the means of gesturing high status. Gen Z shoppers are more concerned with differentiating themselves from the mainstream, says David Dubois, a professor of marketing at INSEAD. In an age of mass-produced goods, nothing is more precious than a flash of the inimitable and bespoke.
The fact that luxury awareness and engagement has reached new heights comes with potential dangers for the industry. Luxury has become democratized and globalized. “As a result,” as Yajin Wang, a professor of marketing at the China Europe International Business School, writes in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, “the wealth signal has been diluted.”
Sherman thinks more luxury brands should be concerned about becoming too available. Like a master artisan, the luxury industry has to carefully thread the needle of growth and scarcity. Saunders recalls the mid-2010s, when a lot of luxury brands shoved out too much product. “They just devalued themselves,” he says. “If you look at a brand like Coach, for example, it was just ubiquitous in 2015. It was everywhere. They were selling stuff at a discount, they were doing flash sales.”
Since then, the industry has been more vigilant about becoming too commonplace. There are fewer discounts — some brands never do sales. Limited production runs are another tactic to bolster exclusivity. Videos of luxury brands destroying their excess inventory have gone viral on social media.
Dubois believes luxury will continue to sell incredibly well. “Inequality fuels consumption,” he explains. The pandemic has increased income and wealth inequality. But the luxury boom isn’t an aberration from this fact — it aligns with it. Studies have shown that higher income inequality heightens awareness and anxiety about class; one study analyzing Google Trends data found that Americans sought out luxury goods more during times of greater income inequality.
“The wealthy have gotten wealthier, and the poor have gotten poorer,” says Sherman. “And yet there’s a thing in our culture that prioritizes you buying a Nike shoe — buy the Jordans, buy the sneakers.” Even if it means saving up, or buying one pair to resell on eBay to finance the purchase of even more expensive shoes — “even if you’re not doing super well financially, it’s prioritized in this interesting way.”
Desire often creates a potent feeling of need, one that can be hard to reason away precisely because it isn’t rational. It’s infatuation, limerence.
What else can happen when luxury is pop culture?
“They’re in the business of selling dreams,” says Dubois. “You buy a piece of a dream.”
Puriteens, anti-fans, and the culture war’s most bonkers battleground.
How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry “gross” at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. They see oversexualization in just about everything. They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they’re ostensibly trying to police.
This dovetails with what we’re being told right now about Gen Z and sex: They’re having less casual sex, they hate dating, they’re more reserved about relationships in general. It’s easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. “puriteens.” Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who’s horrified is a teen who just hasn’t arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. Such anti-sex zeal increasingly forces sex-positive communities back into the internet’s underground. It also aids and abets the larger cultural shift toward regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content.
Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of “antis” — a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media — isn’t that they are minors who are scared of sex. It’s that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact.
To understand how we got here, we have to look at the wellspring from which much of the internet’s creative impulses flow: online fandom, where superusers gather to celebrate, write fanfiction, and create fan art about the media and characters they love. On Tumblr and Twitter, where so much fandom discourse happens, this conversation about sexual content in media has spawned an entire movement called “anti-fandom.” In the wake of the 2018 passage of the internet child protection bill FOSTA-SESTA in the US, fandom’s proudly sex-positive culture has increasingly become sanitized, homogenized, and erased — which has allowed the puritanical voices of these “anti-fans” to take their place.
This trend would be bad news in any online community, but it’s been especially heady and unwieldy in fandom, an entire culture built around feeling things strongly, not rationally. The result is one of the unlikeliest fronts of the culture war: an internet community, once the bastion of delightful deviance and subversion, being completely overtaken by a new form of purity culture often spearheaded by people who would otherwise describe themselves as politically liberal.
Though this may sound like a niche fandom issue, this modern puritanism has spread far into the wider culture, intersecting with both a broader media illiteracy and a moral panic that crosses the political spectrum.
It’s making it more and more impossible to have a healthy discourse about sex at all.
The weaponization of social justice and the rise of the “anti-fandom”
Above all else, fans are passionate. Fandom is where the internet houses some of its most engaged communities — where fans flock to celebrate their favorite stories, create fan works, carry on intense discussions, and argue over which fictional or celebrity relationships they’re shipping.
During the first half of the 2010s, that passion meant that fans were effectively cultural superspreaders, proselytizing their favorites, from Marvel to K-pop to Netflix, far and wide. Their cultural influence, especially through the Tumblr-to-BuzzFeed pipeline, was outsize. You may not have been on Tumblr then, but its fandom-infused language and culture likely heavily influenced your internet experience just the same.
Part of what Tumblr effortlessly exported, along with its fannish sensibility, was its users’ awareness of social justice concepts and language. The Tumblr culture of the early 2010s rapidly shifted an entire generation of social media users toward the left. That shift started not on Tumblr, but on LiveJournal, thanks to a widespread, year-long conversation about racism in geek culture in 2009 that became known as RaceFail. In 2010, LiveJournal became frequently nonfunctional due to intermittent hacker attacks, which sent thousands of displaced fans to Tumblr. With them, they brought all of their recent conversations about race and social justice. The result was an unexpected culture clash between the fandom teens of still-new Tumblr and the fandom adults of LiveJournal. Many Tumblr users, regardless of age and academic experience, got crash courses in progressive ideology and everything from socialism to structuralism — but that education wasn’t always easy or welcome.
“I was on Tumblr as the migration was happening,” journalist Allegra Rosenberg told me. “I distinctly remember the shift in tenor of doing fandom on Tumblr in late 2010, early 2011 as the LiveJournal adults came over, bringing with them the language of feminism, the language of social justice, intersectionality.”
“I remember feeling almost scared or offended,” Rosenberg said, “because I was like, you guys are trying to make this serious. We’re just making memes. I was just a kid and I felt kind of threatened by what I perceived to be this atmosphere of seriousness, because I don’t think I really understood what had been going on over there.”
The language of social justice may have been revelatory to many fans, but it also became fodder for zealotry and demagoguery. It frequently became a double-edged sword, weaponized by and against the people using it. Members of the alt-right started using the phrase “social justice warrior” to mockingly describe zealous Tumblr users who performed what they saw as shallow, overly aggressive, or inauthentic versions of progressive politics.
Tumblr teens also learned to weaponize this language, often through performativity that became a core part of 2010s fandom culture. This coincided with the rise of “call-out culture.” Blogs such as Your Fave Is Problematic typified what some dubbed Tumblr’s “accountability culture” by simply listing things various beloved celebrities, usually popular within geek culture, had done that were bad or troubling.
Call-out culture predated and existed independently from cancel culture. Its goal was always to raise awareness, not prompt mass harassment or boycotts, but one easily begets the other. Fans of the era adopted an eagerness to label absolutely everything even slightly complicated as “problematic,” and that easily translated into harassment of others who still enjoyed those now-tainted stories and creators.
Once fans had been given the tools of social media harassment and the moral motivation of social justice, they waged war on each other — often for things that only nominally had to do with social justice and were instead about things like fandom shipping and character biases. These fights often obscured or further marginalized actual fans of color and queer fans, all in the name of fighting on their behalf.
Soon, this tendency converged with “antis” in fandom: people who were identified primarily not through their love of a thing but for their hatred of it. Over the back half of the 2010s, the notion of what an “anti” was began to shift away from, say, K-pop stans hating on a specific K-pop star, toward broad opposition to various fandom ideologies and practices. This usually comes down to two things: sexualized content and shipping. Especially shipping.
How ship wars led to a war on shipping, which led to a war on all fictional sex
Few things in fandom are more polarizing than who a character falls in love with or ends up with or who you want them to end up with instead. More has been won and lost in the name of ship wars — fans fighting over which ship is the best — than time could detail. Specifically, in the Voltron fandom in 2016, hatred for a single ship on the animated TV show reportedly led to the creation of an entirely new concept in fandom: the idea of being “anti-ship” and “pro-ship.” The stated goal of this fight was to call out and oppose alleged pedophiles in fandom. But the actual goal was to wage war against one specific pairing by demonizing as a pedophile anyone who shipped it. (The characters in question, Shiro and Keith, were approximately 25 and 18, respectively, in the show’s first season.)
Fans devoted to this “problematic” ship gradually got shorthanded as “pro-ship,” which then became a generalized label for all shippers. In other words, if you shipped characters in fandom — which is arguably the dominant reason most people are in fandom — then you were suddenly on notice as being harmful.
To be blunt, this is bonkers. The act of wanting two characters to fall madly in love, and celebrating when they do, is a natural response to fiction. If you were, say, a person who read or watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Peeta and Katniss, this group might brand you as problematic for shipping two teenagers.
Yet shipping is also often explicitly sexual, which makes it prone to distortion by people who want a moral excuse to oppose shipping. Just as with the original Voltron fandom ship war that presaged much of this discourse, people who are “anti-ship” often start out by seeking to attack specific ships based on their personal bias. Rather than acknowledging that bias, however, they instead frame fictional depictions of sex as harmful. This allows them to paint not only the ship they hate, but all ships, and shipping itself, as harmful.
It may sound hard to comprehend that anyone could take this rhetoric seriously, but the deeply emotional and accusatory nature of calling someone a pedophile makes it wildly effective. (Multiple sources I talked to for this article told me of unexpectedly vicious personal encounters with purity culture; everything from online accusations to a real-life friend group considering ostracization over suspicions the source was “pro-ship.”)
Sam Aburime, an artist and independent fan scholar who has dedicated years to tracking anti-fandom examples, argues that the movement is part of the changing generational nature of fandom. Older Gen Z and younger millennials who learned the language of social justice on Tumblr are now teaching younger generations how to wield those concepts for ill. “I think they grew up with faux activism as it was starting online,” Aburime told me, “where it was like, ‘if you like this, or if you don’t do this, you’re a bad person,’ when it’s just cartoons at the end of the day.”
FOSTA-SESTA made this conversation so much worse
It’s not a coincidence that anti-fandom discourse, which has single-handedly reframed decades of sex positivity in fandom, has also coincided with a broader crackdown on sex positivity across the internet.
Originally, Tumblr culture’s nuanced language around politics and accountability coexisted alongside a rampant, thriving, sexually explicit counterculture. Fans and non-fans, many of whom were queer, sex educators, and/or sex workers, enjoyed a healthy relationship to sexual expression during this era. While Tumblr became notorious for hosting porn, the reality was that the permissiveness of Tumblr’s adult content policies made it a safe space for many marginalized communities.
That all changed with the passage of the child protection bill FOSTA-SESTA in 2018. FOSTA heralded a sweeping crackdown on online adult content; as part of the fallout, huge swaths of the sex-positive internet were wiped out in the name of protecting children. Among those decimated communities were sex workers and sex educators on Tumblr, as well as the legions of users, many of whom were queer and genderqueer, who sought self-expression and explored their identities through sexualized content. Overnight, via its infamous ban on porn, Tumblr went from being a notably horny platform to a site full of regressive, paranoid, wary fans who were obsessed with spotting pedophilia and illicit sexual materials everywhere and anywhere — even if the things they deemed immoral and illicit were nowhere close to illegal.
FOSTA seems to have weakened the natural resistance of fandom and internet culture at large to the US’s broader puritanical, anti-sex culture. The purity movement formally began in the ’90s within evangelical culture as a way of normalizing an abstinence-only approach to sex, especially among teens. In the modern era, the language of this movement has converged with that of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who enact a regressive approach to sex and gender expression.
“If you go into certain radfem forums, you’ll see language mirrored one-to-one,” Aburime told me, describing the way TERF rhetoric overlaps with and sometimes infiltrates fandom spaces. “It’s almost like a game — slipping some ideology secretly” into a fannish experience. “It’s misinformation under the guise of activism.” Like the US’s larger current moral panic over drag shows, LGBTQ people, and “groomers,” fandom’s culture has regressed toward sexual repression, attacks on sexual minorities, and censorship of art made by marginalized people. The shifts happening in fandom and across the internet help exacerbate this larger cultural shift.
“There’s no meaningful difference to me between a right winger who calls me a pedo because I’m trans and an antishipper that calls me a pedo because I read Homestuck,” said Farrah, a 33-year-old fan from North Carolina whose full name has been withheld at their request, referring to the famously weird webcomic. “They’re both putting me and people like me in a dangerous position.”
“It’s hard to say where fandom starts and where everything else begins,” Rosenberg told me. She identifies the root of the shift as a core of “emotion and disgust” in response to various types of sexualized content, but while this response to sexual deviance has always existed, the internet allows fans to express their disgust in new ways, and the rise of anti-fandom allows fans to pathologize all kinds of things — from garden-variety kink to age gaps and sexualized cartoons.
Another major factor in the intensification of all this is Twitter, specifically the mass migration of many fandom cultures to Twitter over the last decade. “When these cultures moved to Twitter and were exposed to literally everybody and everything,” Rosenberg said, “the stakes were higher, in being on the so-called winning team.” Twitter also allowed fans to codify and systematize harassment through the use of platform-specific tools like hashtags and mass-brigading by bots, as we saw with the Depp-Heard trial last year. As Musk-era Twitter’s abuse team has dwindled, multiple sources told me they have been using the platform less, retreating into siloed spaces like private Discord servers and locked mailing lists or Facebook groups. Yet those siloed spaces do little to solve the problems; instead, they typically reinforce and entrench all the niche ideas that led to fandom extremism to begin with.
One positive development is that Tumblr recently brought back, in a limited capacity, the ability to create NSFW content on the site. While this won’t restore the zany porn-for-all days of yesteryear, it might encourage the return of sex-positive communities to drown out the noisy, harassing fringe of haters.
Farrah, who left Twitter due to the harassment there, told me they’re still on Tumblr, and hopeful things are changing.
“I think more people are starting to realize the extremity in the culture and politics around them,” they said, “and that awareness makes them better equipped to recognize the same extremism in fandom. I’ve seen more robust calls for a return to, ‘don’t like don’t read,’ and, ‘your kink is not my kink and that’s okay,’ in the last year or two than I had in a very long time.”
The downside is that the wider crackdown on sexual expression, especially in the United States, is only getting worse. That bodes ill for the internet and all its citizens, especially since media literacy as a whole is also on the decline. As purity culture spreads, the idea of depicting fictional harm as equivalent to real-world harm grows and spreads along with it.
Then again, if anyone can creatively respond to a culture of increasingly absurd attacks on ingenuity and imagination, it’s an army of passionate deviants who’ve historically been vanguards of the weird, the queer, and the subversive. They’re sexual rebels and literary freedom fighters.
If fans can’t kick that nonsense to the curb, who can?