It truly is one of the ugliest portmanteaus of our era — ‘puriteen’. You’ve likely heard about them, or seen it online. They’re the kids who are anti-porn, anti-sex, anti-cigarettes, anti-fun. They think living wholesome, moral lives is, like, cool. They also don’t really exist. But that hasn’t stopped ‘puriteen’ from entering the lexicon.
It is a term that is barely possible to say out loud without sounding like a GB News anchor or some right-wing American pundit claiming that the puriteens are transgendering the water supply. Much like some of the right’s other greatest hits such as “all gay men are groomers” and “abortions make the baby Jesus cry”, the idea that the kids today are prudish moralists is a complete fallacy. Today’s kids are just as fucked up as you and I were, and our parents and grandparents before us. Right?
Well, this is what I’ve always told myself. I’ve even felt sorry for them. How deeply embarrassing to be smeared as moralists, to be known as the generation that chose celibacy, the generation that gave up on alcohol and drugs, the generation that… found Catholicism? These are all, mostly, sensationalist lies generated by reactionary circles to make Gen Z seem stupid when all Gen Z actually wants to do is suck on a Blue Razz Lost Mary and make hyper-specific IG meme pages.
There is, however, a fringe group of Gen Zs who seem to be out to prove the reactionaries absolutely correct. You may have seen recently that Sam Levinson’s latest project, his television series The Idol starring Lily-Rose Depp and The Artist Formerly Known as The Weeknd, premiered its first two episodes at the Cannes Film Festival. The reviews were mostly bad, (which isn’t surprising, this is a Sam Levinson production after all). But the reaction to the divisive filmmaker’s latest project seemed different.
In a lot of the online discourse over The Idol, few of the usual criticisms of Sam’s work were focussed on — his weak writing, his sloppy stunt casting, his lack of overall cohesion — instead a lot of the criticism was aimed at the actual content of the show. Variety’s review of The Idol describes how the show “scandalized” Cannes, claiming that it contains scenes of “revenge porn photos of bodily fluids on Depp’s face” and “masturbation with ice cubes”. So far, so Sam Levinson.
Except, the quote tweets on Variety’s review are something to behold. There are currently almost 7,000 tweets of out-and-out vitriol towards Levinson and the show. One of the most popular tweets was posted by the user @cocainecross who writes that “Ep 2 is straight up pornographic” and goes on to describe a fairly normal sounding sex scene that involves “talking dirty”, fingering and cock-sucking. The quotes on this tweet are, you guessed it, also absolutely insane. Numerous users call for Sam Levinson to be locked up, some want him to rot, some claim that he has committed crimes against humanity, and a lot of people suggest that he should just go make actual porn instead.
Simply judging by the syntax and vocabulary of most of the anti-Idol tweets, the majority of the backlash seems to come from Gen Z, or at least borrows the lexicon of Gen Z in order to deride a fictional universe that seems created specifically for Gen Z (it’s been confirmed that The Idol exists in the same fictional world as Euphoria). What exactly is it about Sam Levinson’s art that he causes such a vitriolic reaction among this group? And why is there, seemingly, such a large cohort of Gen Z who find his work so morally reprehensible? He is hardly doing anything new. His work is nowhere near as unsettling as anything by Todd Solondz or Harmony Korine, and yet teenagers still love Welcome to the Dollhouse and Gummo. As a provocateur, he’s quite tame. As a sultan of sleaze, he’s just not greasy enough.
It is interesting to note that in a lot of the online backlash people tend to describe scenes from The Idol using the actors’ names, rather than their characters’. It’s not “Tedros fingers Jocelyn” but “The Weeknd fingers Lily-Rose,” which purposefully makes the scene sound far more illicit than it is. Readers are forced to imagine that it’s The Weeknd himself fingering Lily-Rose Depp, instead of it happening between their fictional characters in this fictional show. Forget trying to separate the art from the artist, we seemingly can’t even separate actors from their characters now.
As I’ve said, this is a fringe group within Gen Z. As a generation, they are lucky enough to come of age in an era where sexual consent is openly discussed, its importance more understood than ever before. In terms of sexual education and freedom of expression, they are the most informed of any generation. However, something seems to have happened that erased the line between fiction and reality for some of them. Take a scroll through BookTok and you’re bound to come across videos of readers who give laundry lists of every instance of assault, coercion, rape or abuse in a novel. Sometimes, this can be of benefit to those who would be genuinely triggered by reading about such topics. Sometimes, they are used to denigrate the book as “trash”.
They cannot recommend anyone pick up Lolita because of “the subject matter”. They will never read a specific author because they specialise in “taboo romance” between fathers and daughters. It all just seems so disjointed from the reality of how people genuinely think and how art should be treated.
The thing is, morally dubious art can be great. As long as we remember that what we are watching on the screen isn’t actually happening to us. It isn’t happening to anyone. Sleazy art has an important place in our culture. To treat it as morally indefensible or unworthy of your time or support is to fundamentally misunderstand what art is.
One can only hope that as this moralistic strain of Gen Zs make their way through their 20s that they learn this. There can be catharsis in brutality, it isn’t something to be denigrated. Sleaze can set you free.