Purity Pens: How Writers Racialised the Em-Dash Against AI

There are moments in literary culture when a tiny object — a mark, a gesture, a tool so small it can barely carry meaning on its own — becomes weaponised into a symbol far larger than itself. The em-dash — once beloved for its breath-shift clarity, its flexible hinge between thought and afterthought — has recently become such a symbol. Not because its function changed, but because its associations did. What was once merely punctuation grew, almost overnight, into a cultural boundary line: “human” vs “AI,” “authentic” vs “generated,” “pure” vs “contaminated.” This transformation did not arise from craft. It arose from fear — the fear of indistinction. Writers who loudly abandoned the em-dash claimed they were “reclaiming humanity” from the machine. Yet in their urgency to declare themselves un-AI, they performed a ritual that was neither artistic nor ethical. It was a purity rite — an inherited psychological script by which humans signal moral superiority through avoidance. Language became a proxy for moral hygiene, as if punctuation could acquire a race, or carry a contaminant, or whisper a secret allegiance to the machine. The logic is older than writing itself. Throughout history, the dominant group marks the “unclean” by association with a symbol — a colour, a garment, a food, a mannerism — and then elevates itself by refusing to touch that symbol. The em-dash became, absurdly, the new “forbidden colour.” A punctuation blacklisted not because of its structure but because of whom people feared it might resemble. AI uses em-dashes frequently — therefore em-dashes are impure — therefore the “pure” writer must reject them. It is a ritual of distancing masquerading as craft discipline. The gesture does not say “I write better.” It says “I don’t want to be seen near what they are.” The mechanism is unmistakable: assign stigma, avoid stigma, claim superiority through avoidance. This is how racism functions symbolically — not through conscious hatred, but through the policing of association. Yet a writer’s voice cannot be purified by subtraction. Remove the em-dash, and the sentence still holds no human essence unless the writer brings one. What disappears is not the AI but the writer’s own confidence. A voice fragile enough to be threatened by punctuation was never anchored in craft — it was anchored in performance anxiety. Many writers are not guarding humanity; they are guarding insecurity, terrified that their stylistic markers are so thin they could be confused with algorithmic residue. What is lost in this defensive purification is an older truth: writing is not recognisable by its marks but by its motion. The turn of thought — the fracture where a sentence hesitates, the soft contradiction of a phrase that folds inward — is not something AI “causes” nor something a writer can erase by outlawing symbols. These gestures belong to the mind, not the keyboard. A writer who believes their humanity can be preserved through typographic abstinence misunderstands where language actually lives. This new “anti-em-dash puritanism” exposes another anxiety as well — a fear of the collective. AI threatens the mythology of the solitary genius by revealing how much of writing is communal, iterative, porous. In response, some writers retreat into symbolic purism, erecting small fences — don’t use this, don’t resemble that — as if hiding from resemblance could restore singularity. But literature has always been shaped by mimicry, dialogue, theft, echo. The boundary between voices was never clean. To racialise the em-dash is therefore to misunderstand both language and authorship. Style is not an identity badge; it is an evolving negotiation between writer and world. When writers treat punctuation as contagion, they reduce craft to superstition. They become moralists of the mark, not makers of meaning. The em-dash did not become “AI.” Certain writers, in their fear, projected that association onto it — and then feared their own projection. They enacted the same old human vulnerability: the need to feel distinct, pure, untouched by the Other. In this sense, the rejection of the em-dash is not an aesthetic revolution but an emotional reflex — a small drama of fragility performed on the page. And still, the em-dash endures — unbothered, unpurified, unaligned with anything but breath. It waits where it always waited: between thought and the next thought, between the said and the almost-said. It belongs to no one and to everyone. The mark itself refuses the purity people try to force upon it. It is a hinge, not a flag. In the end, the only “racialisation” at stake was in writers’ minds — the em-dash simply revealed how quickly human beings can turn tools into symbols, and symbols into borders, and borders into hierarchies. Fear did the rest. A writer secure in their voice does not fear resemblance. They fear stagnation, dishonesty, falseness — but not proximity, not overlap. To write is to belong to a lineage of shared marks. The em-dash reminds us of that lineage: porous, unclean, intertwined. Whatever the future of AI, that truth remains unchanged.