for the record -

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This summer, I'm participating in a study on ficbinding through the University of London! Here's one of my interview responses, on What On Earth Is Purity Policing And What Are They Up To? It's not a complete breakdown but I think it holds water :) ((I'll be first to admit that my response is mitigated by lack of direct citations of purity police behavior, but I try to spend as little time with them as possible. If anyone remembers the person who went undercover with an anti discord server, that was hilarious though.))

In my book, purity policing is a protestant-flavored authoritarian attitude focused on enforcing an ever-shifting set of moral boundaries by means of social intimidation and personal harassment. It is a hyperorthodoxical environment obsessed with strangers' sexualities (a classic purity policing leap of logic is to assume that if someone enjoys consuming or producing any given sexual content, they must personally unconditionally endorse it in daily life, as though consumption of fiction is in any way indicative of someone's sexual practices), and orthopraxical to the degree of considering even thinking something wrong to be a 'wrong' act in and of itself (I find the umbrage around RPF to be nearly hilarious, as the issue that purity police take, that 'it is a violation of a stranger's privacy to fantasize about them,' is a wild reframing of the entirely natural impulse to think that a professional athlete is attractive!). 

The difference between purity policing and any formal movement such as protestant sects per se is that it is entirely mob-led, without any unifying voice or clear and unique set of values. This, however, is all the better for them, as the constantly shifting goalposts ensure that their work is never done and therefore ensuring their (to their conception) endlessly necessary intervention. Anyone who fails to comply with their perception of 'correct' sexuality must be corrected, either relatively gently through requests for changed behavior or concentrated harassment. This promotes and environment of fear on the part of non-policing members such that they take the initiative to police themselves so as to stave off the potential for conflict. This internalization of surveillance is a complete success of the panopticon. 

However on a further level, I think that purity policing is itself driven by fear on the part of its enforcers as well. It is not simply that members of the purity police gain social credit from one another by reporting on transgressors, but I have a strong notion that members of the purity police who do not preform sufficiently find themselves as targets as well. As soon as something is given a moral valence - eg, kink is bad - then its practitioners take on the same: kinksters are now bad as well, as there is no difference between what someone does and who they are. The world is now populated by the morally correct and the morally objectionable, and the language of social justice enters the fray to persuade purity police that their intervention is not only important, but that they do not even have an option to refrain from stepping in. This imperative to act is not inherently toxic, but is taken to an extreme degree: once a proactive moral element has been introduced, those who observe something objectionable are obligated to oppose it in order to maintain their appropriateness. But the contrapositive also enters play, that those who observe the objectionable and do not oppose it are assumed to be objectionable as well. Therefore, members of the purity police are required to speak out, or else they are as bad as what they do not protest. There is no middle ground, only those who are morally acceptable or morally abhorrent, and the spectre of being morally incorrect is intrinsically terrifying to those who buy in to an absolutist moral structure.

((A lot of the above is a reframing of a paper I wrote a while ago about the divine gaze and the panopticon, some of my citations for which were: 
Holland, Nancy J. “‘Truth as Force’: Michel Foucault on Religion, State Power, and the Law.” Journal of Law and Religion, vol. 18, no. 1, 2002, pp. 79–97., doi:10.2307/1051495.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, 1963. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Routledge, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1975. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Coakley, Sarah. Religion and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Johnson, Dominic. God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 
Maier, Harry O. "Staging the Gaze: Early Christian Apocalypses and Narrative Self-Representation." Harvard Theological Review 90.2 (1997): 131-54.
Proverbs 15:3 - The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. KJV))

Also, this coming semester I'll have the same professor I wrote that paper for, again! We have fairly different personal views but she cares so much about her students, so I'm looking forward to being her student again :)