ETA: Deleted because it was just snark, not actual content.
Hey, great post. That’s the closest to a workable definition I’ve seen yet.
Aww, I wanted to read the snark!
I agree. It’s a fantastic set of definitions.
Since certain posters in this thread have, perhaps unintentionally, misrepresented my position, let me be clear (/Obama). All three of those (personal decision, boycott, or “cancelling” are, in some situations, appropriate.
What is not appropriate is doing one of these while pretending that you are not. For example, if someone deserves to be cancelled, we should do so openly, not pressure people while also gaslighting them and claiming it’s just a bunch of individual people making personal decisions.
And I’m hypersensitive to being accused of lying when I report an assault. And never, ever, ever getting justice when I’ve been assaulted. And watching my assailant move on to other girls and being powerless to do anything about it.
Hardwick I may as well comment on. I’m not the kind of person who goes nuts over celebrities, but he felt different to me. I listened to so many Nerdist podcasts I feel confidently that he is one of the single best interviewers out there. And I felt his public persona was very relatable. He seemed like what would happen if I were an extrovert. To call me a fangirl would not be an exaggeration.
I don’t know if that lady was telling the truth. I’m very sensitive to what crazy looks like, and she looks like crazy to me, but crazy people are regularly victimized so that proves nothing. My WAG is he probably was abusive in some ways and not in others. But I don’t actually know.
What I do know is that he’s functionally dead to me, not because I am certain he’s guilty but because this warm and fuzzy thing I once had is now a continuous reminder of my own trauma and how once again I can’t trust my own judgement.
So I do have a dog in that fight. I see a lot of people when a thing they like is threatened with disapproval, they just rationalize it away, and I can’t do that. Out of all the so-called cancellations, Hardwick hit me the hardest.
But the thing is, I don’t think it’s a good example of a cancellation. That investigation was going to be triggered by Dykestra’s allegations regardless of what the public did with that information. Also what I haven’t seen reported on this story was how many people who worked with Hardwick corroborated the depiction of him as a massive, narcissistic, vindictive asshole. Whatever the truth about his relationship with Dykstra, it opened the door to a view of Hardwick that is aggressively at odds with his public image.
And more fool I.
As to the #metoo movement, that wasn’t really supposed to be focused on naming perpetrators, but however it exists on the Internet today, it exists because the criminal justice system is wholly inadequate to delivering justice to the vast majority of sexual assault and intimate partner violence victims. When the system is broken, we can’t be surprised when people look for justice outside the system.
I’m in a similar spot with Joss Whedon, who I used to list as one of my favorite writers/directors, and now I’m just not interested in him, because it came out that he’s a gigantic asshole in person. And not in a way that I think should be illegal, or really even disqualifying as a celebrity. I still consume stuff from creatives who have done a lot worse. But, somehow, Whedon’s stuff now comes across as phony. Same with Ellen DeGeneres. A lot of her appeal was this para-social, “I’d be a cool person to know in real life, and watching me on my talk show is as close as you can get to that.” When the first part turned out not to be true, interest in the second part dried up real quick.
Is that canceling? I’m not avoiding Whedon because I’m trying to censure him. I’m not angry at him for being a prick, or trying to punish him for it. I just… don’t like his stuff any more.
This is pretty similar to how I felt about Neil Gaiman–not the “interviewer” part, but the “relatable” part, and thinking he was similar in personality to me part, if I were a lot more charismatic. Now he’s canceled, and fucking rightly so, and I hate it.
Sandmann is an interesting case. What happened was absolutely not okay, for two reasons, the lesser of which is that he didn’t actually taunt the dude he was accused of taunting. When it comes to his behavior, he was wearing the hat of a proto-fascist movement, leading racist chants, and engaging in activism designed to strip people of their rights and move the US in an even more theocratic direction. Nothing in his actions covered himself in glory, even if he wasn’t engaging in the less-important sin of taunting a Native American guy in particular.
The more important reason it wasn’t okay is that he was a kid. Teenagers do stupid things, and we need to have a ton of grace as a society toward the dumb things they did. I didn’t do anything as dumb as joining a proto-fascist movement when I was sixteen, but I did plenty of dumb things, as did you, as did every teenager out there. Maximum grace doesn’t consist of plastering a teenager’s face over international news and social media for doing something offensive. Save that for adults who have a greater level of responsibility.
So, yeah: I think what happened to Sandmann was egregious.
If “cancel culture” is a bad thing, there should be dozens of examples this egregious. There should be examples involving adults that are this egregious. Can we get, say, five more examples that are this egregious? In which someone is falsely accused of doing a bad thing–especially being falsely accused of engaging in sexual or racial misconduct–and suffers widespread death threats or similarly horrific consequences for it?
Here, I’ll start: GamerGate, and how the Right treated Zoe Quinn. That’s cancel culture at its worst, far worse than what happened to Sandmann. Folks concerned about cancel culture would do well to start looking at conservative misogynist trolls and the way they cancel women.
For me and my husband, it really gives me a lot less charitable view of his women in peril kink. Like insisting that (extremely old Buffy spoiler) Spike to try rape Buffy despite it being a really negative, borderline traumatic experience for the actors.
Same with Gaiman, who I recently praised for absolutely nailing an episode of Sandman that depicted sexual violence.
As my husband put it, you begin to realize, “Oh. This is just his kink.”
And Whedon made it doubly hard on himself by positioning himself as a feminist. Rather than just admitting he enjoys creating hot, strong women and then victimizing them.
It’s been discussed elsewhere, the whole “we establish the character is a Strong Woman by showing her deal with being traumatized” has become a bit of a tiring trope. But if the writer is not just being lazy but actually does believe that is what makes a Strong Woman, and that THAT kind of strength is the attractive kind, that is disturbing.
The problem is that if you take up the weapons of your enemies, they are still the weapons of your enemy, even if they are in your hand. They don’t mind if you hold them and do their work for them.
You can’t beat hatred by hating them more. No matter how much you drape it in the cloak of righteousness.
To be fair, the heart of many compelling stories is dealing with trauma. While you are correct that it shouldn’t be what makes someone strong, showing that someone is strong in spite of trauma can be powerful.
I don’t understand how this relates to what I wrote.
Which is why we didn’t use guns in WWII.
Nazis didn’t invent guns.
But we did commit quite a number of war crimes while fighting them.
You are saying that we only use this weapon for the right reasons against the right people. Well, that’s exactly what they say, too.
Fascism doesn’t care who does the dividing, it just wants us divided.
First, what? Where did I say that? That’s the exact opposite of what I said: I said that the specific terrible tool being posited is used in clear cases by the right, not that it was a good tool to use.
Second, though, I absolutely think that certain tools are good in some causes and not in others. If someone exercises eloquence to persuade people not to be fascists, and another person exercises eloquence to persuade people to be fascists, the first person isn’t wrong because they’re using the same tactic as the second person. That’s absurd.
I guess I misunderstood what you meant then. I thought you were saying before criticizing the use of cancelling on the left, look at how the right uses it. If that’s not what you meant, I apologize, but now I don’t know what you meant.
But that’s not what I said. I didn’t say using eloquence, that’s great. If you can convince someone not to be a fascist with words, awesome.
If you try to punish someone for views you don’t like, by pressuring others to join in the punishment, that’s not persuasion, that’s not eloquence, that’s mob justice. It will always be a tool that divides us.
And as far as using persuasion, eloquent speeches will never work. Only understanding will. You can preach to the choir all day about why the pews are empty, but unless you go to where the sinners are, they will never come to you.
They say that if ten people sit down with a Nazi, you have eleven Nazis. But maybe, just maybe, you end up with one less.
I don’t know what else to call it when all his contracts were immediately terminated – AFAIK, everything he was doing suddenly ended. At the time, no one knew if he had a career any more. Yes, he was reinstated before long as a result of three separate investigations, but no one knew at the time what his future would be. Nothing I said there was “counterfactual”.
And, yes, from everything I’ve seen, Hardwick is indeed a narcissistic asshole. If some now find him distasteful, it’s understandable. But apparently not deserving of having his entire career canceled, which his employers initially concluded would be necessary based on the allegations in the “Medium” post.
That is absolutely not what I said. You’re totally misrepresenting it. What I said was right in what you quoted. I said that Dykstra’s claim that she never meant to harm Hardwick’s career was not credible. I think it was totally disingenuous.
Do you really expect anyone to believe that Dysktra’s claim that “oh, heavens to Betsy, I never meant to harm his career” has any shred of credibility?
As for the claims Dykstra made in that article, all we know is that they were serious enough that Hardwick was immediately suspended and investigations were started (three separate ones, AFAIK). Following the investigations, he was reinstated. What that says about the credibility of her claims is up to individual interpretation. My take – purely my own conjecture – is that they were based on elements of truth, but exaggerated for dramatic effect and lacked important context.
Why would Dykstra do this? Why not? It’s not as if she was under oath testifying in a courtroom. This is social media, man!
This is a good post. But what if it’s the government doing it? That seems to be the source of a lot of debate here.
What I’m getting out of this is:
Donald Trump (along with the rest of MAGA) is the single greatest instigator of cancel culture in America today, and possibly even in American history. Some would say that is not cancel culture because he is the president, but is it still not canceling if he is firing, deporting, and incarcerating dissenting viewpoints?
Cite that his contracts were “terminated”? Suspension is not termination. Suspension during an investigation is pretty much standard practice for serious accusations.