The Bastardization of "Cancel Culture"

TW: mentions of violence and rape

If you've spent any time on the internet these past few years, you probably have heard the phrase "cancel culture" thrown around at least a time or two. I originally had planned to never engage in the discourse surrounding this phenomenon because virtually every take I have seen on this issue has been some of the stupidest shit I've ever heard in my life. However, a recent tweet from Lizzo articulated my feelings on the matter perfectly.

While I can't say this tweet from Lizzo is necessarily surprising (I have agreed with virtually everything this woman has had to say about society), it felt refreshing to finally see a nuanced opinion on this area of contention, and inspired me to finally engage in this shitstorm of discourse and give you all my full, unfiltered feelings on "cancel culture".

I distinctly remember when the word "canceled" emerged as a slang term. I was a senior in high school (about six years ago. . .woof) and my friends and I jokingly said it all the time, but not at all in the way it's used today. Rather than calling out someone's bigoted behavior, saying "omg you're canceled" was a common response to one of our friends making a silly little mistake: like walking into a pole or forgetting their wallet when we went to get boba. Over the years since then, I've watched the word morph into how we talk about celebrities who have done horrible things, and more egregiously, being used in extremely serious and professional settings (like the House Floor for example).

As frustrating as it's been to watch our leaders genuinely be concerned with something as ridiculous and benign as "cancel culture", making being an American citizen feel more and more dystopian every day, it's important to remember that this widespread mania didn't just come out of nowhere. Fox News (America's most watched news network) bears by far the most responsibility. If you've ever had the displeasure of watching one of this channel's various programs, you know that they have a habit of covering stuff that, well, doesn't fucking matter. Instead of reporting actual news about what is going on in the world/country, their biggest concern is "the culture war", which is basically their idea that the left has a hidden agenda within all of mainstream society that aims to "cancel" people and things for not being "woke" enough (another word I absolutely cannot stand). The people who create these shows and the people who watch them cannot be bothered to engage with real news like the social inequities of our country and the policies that enforce or fight against them because these folks are living in an entirely different world. They don't have to think about these things the way the rest of us do because nothing is actually on the line for them. The boredom that comes with living such an unbothered and privileged life has caused them to focus all of their attention on this "culture war", things like: "the left are trying to cancel gas stoves", "transgender teachers exist", and "M&Ms have gone woke by possibly alluding to some of the brand's characters being gay"--and that was all just this last week!

Now, you may be thinking, "Ashley, the people who watch Fox News are obviously crazy. What does this have to do with me?" And you're right, they are crazy. But as I mentioned earlier, Fox News is America's most watched news network and The Tucker Carlson Show is America's most watched news program. As much as we want to believe that this is just a small subculture of weirdos, this is unfortunately as mainstream as it gets, making the hysteria surrounding "cancel culture" something we simply cannot ignore.

My main qualm with "cancel culture" is that it literally just isn't real. For years, we've been having discussions about whether or not the mistakes people make earlier in their lives should dictate their ability to succeed in the present. While I am a strong advocate for second chances (I am a prison abolitionist and rehabilitation over incarceration just for the sake of punishment is at the heart of this issue), no one who has been "canceled" by the "woke mob" has ever faced any real form of discipline for their actions.

A fine example of this is Jeffree Star: a white makeup artist from Orange County, CA (typical) who got his start making music on MySpace and YouTube in the early 2000s. As his journey of cultivating a large internet following continued, he did a number of things that were, to put it lightly, despicable. A video from around 2004-2006 shows Jeffree violently screaming at a group of black women walking down the street, harassing them and calling them the n-word [https://youtu.be/6DbXafcp_ZA]. In a skit Jeffree and his friend made in 2006, they make "jokes" about throwing battery acid on a black woman to lighten her skin tone [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4l67gr]. More recently, in September of 2018, text messages were released where Jeffree Star talks about fellow makeup artist and YouTuber, Jackie Aina (who is, you guessed it, a black woman), calling her a "gorilla" along with a variety of other racial slurs. With these instances in addition to a plethora of others, surely this man has been deplatformed and punished accordingly in regard to his success, right? Wrong. The 36-year old currently has a net worth of $200 million and his many business ventures continue to thrive. But omg cancel culture is the worst right???!!

Another perhaps more relevant and somehow more egregious example is the internet's new favorite loser: Andrew Tate. In case you've been living under a rock for the past few months, Andrew Tate is former professional kickboxer from Romania who recently came to great fame for reinforcing incredibly misogynistic talking points (women are property, nonvirginal women are "used goods", rape victims must "bear responsibility", etc.) for the sake of "preserving masculinity" in our modern culture. Despite being banned on Twitter and other social media platforms for hate speech, upon Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, he's back--and managed to accumulate over 1 million followers in 24 hours. While many internet commentators have insisted we just ignore him and stop giving him the attention he so desperately craves, a Vice article from January 11, 2023 reveals that "just ignoring him" actually isn't the appropriate response at all. In leaked audio and WhatsApp messages from 2014, Andrew Tate told the woman he was seeing at the time, "I love raping you" and "Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn't like it the more I enjoyed it. I fucking loved how much you hated it." Even with ample evidence from the original victim, two other women coming forward from around that same time, and a clear admission from Tate himself, British police suspended the case because there was "an ounce of doubt". If a man can make a whole brand for himself out of being violently misogynistic, literally admit to raping a woman, and have the police let him off the hook with his mega-huge following and a net worth of $700 million and you still believe that "cancel culture" is plaguing our society, then I don't know what to tell you. Get your head out of your ass and get the fuck off of my blog.

If I haven't already made this clear, I find it very disturbing that talking heads and politicians spend so much time covering the dangers of "cancel culture" and those affected by it, while reserving none of that same empathy for the people and communities that were harmed by the "canceled" individual in the first place. I'm not talking about the average person who tweeted, "omg that's so retarded" when their favorite sports team lost when they were 14 in 2009; these are people who absolutely deserve to be "canceled". While I believe everyone deserves the opportunity to change and grow, why would any of these folks even consider that when they're clearly doing just fine with the way things are? Our institutions (both socially and politically) always have and always will protect rich and powerful men. Full stop. End of story. Being outraged when public figures behave like monsters isn't "censorship" or "the woke agenda"; it's the least we can do.