The End of Offence: Is It Time to Cancel Our Cancel Culture?

By Alex Rix

If you have ever been on Twitter, then you know what cancel culture is. It’s the Pompeii of internet phenomena that solidifies all in its wake, turning people to stone where they stand at their most problematic point of existence. Whether we are demanding a head on a spike to ward off racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, classism etc. or trying to hold people accountable for not learning and growing with the times, cancel culture is rife. 

We must stand up for those who are belittled and dehumanised both in modern times and historically. We stand no chance of thriving if we continue to divide and diminish our joint humanity. Am I angry at how these groups of people have been and are continually treated? Abso-fucking-lutely. I too want to see the end of it.

But we have started holding people’s past actions to the standards of today, and we use those actions to judge them as people now. If we don’t like what someone did twenty years ago, regardless of what they have to say about it now, we get out our pitchforks and we dub them a monster. We boycott their projects, their voices, and we actively ignore the person they are now. 

Cancel culture is a product of the era: of the big guns that online anonymity gives us; the untapped rage of decades of unchallenged oppression towards minority groups; and the sudden ability to directly respond to the people with big audiences. 

Sadly, sometimes people don’t grow and they’re not sorry. Dave Chappelle has a colourful history of inciting rage and despair amongst marginalised groups. Most recently, he did so by using Netflix to say proudly, ‘I side with the TERFs’. The point of Chappelle’s special was to speak out against cancel culture and the war on freedom of speech. Here’s the thing: he’s entitled to the right to say whatever he wants. He isn’t entitled to a platform as big as Netflix. You can become the poster child for transphobia if that is what you so desire, but you don’t get to complain that people don’t like it, that platforms won’t host it or that (to many) the safety and wellbeing of a long vilified community is a priority over your right to tell a shitty joke. 

He spoke out in favour of another recently cancelled public figure, J.K Rowling. The Harry Potter universe was a haven for millions of people who felt different. Then the woman who created that hope became the beacon of ignorance. She wrote an essay about not letting trans women use women’s bathrooms and then wrote a book about a man pretending to be a trans woman to commit crimes. 

So, we cancelled her. A full-blown adult woman was (and still is) spreading ignorance and misinformation to a massive audience. If you have read the essay and you stand by the pressing of the big red cancel button, I reckon that’s pretty fair. I do too. 

‘Usually, the people who think that of me have only heard of me second or third hand; they’ve never listened to anything I’ve said or read anything I’ve written.’ These words were spoken by Jordan Peterson during an interview with Russel Howard on The Russel Howard Hour. 

Didn’t he say that men and women would never be equal? And didn’t he support purposefully misgendering trans people? Didn’t we cancel him?

To this I ask: where did you hear these things? You can take word of mouth and run with it and decide the man’s an ignorant bigot. You can watch a thirty-second clip of a two-hour lecture and decide you know exactly what he meant when he said that you can’t force people to use certain words. You don’t, though, not if you didn’t really listen. 

Jordan Peterson spoke out against censorship, not because he doesn’t think that your pronoun should be respected but because telling people what they can and cannot say legally is a very slippery slope and setting a precedent for personal censorship is a gateway to Orwell’s nightmares. 

If I hear someone purposefully misgender someone, you can bet that I will correct them every time. I will explain to them that I don’t think they are being funny or smart, that they’re being purposefully hurtful to no end and that it’s caused me to have no interest in an ongoing relationship with that person because our values clearly do not line up. In short, I’ll call them a ****. You can do that, too. That’s the beauty of freedom of speech. 

I sit with my privilege enough to know that my calling someone out for misgendering a trans or non-binary person is an entirely different situation to said trans or non-binary person having to do so. Given any opportunity to do so, I would add myself as a buffer into that situation, lend my voice should that person desire it and support them in the face of hatred. It doesn’t change, however, that many wanted to cancel Peterson for something he didn’t really say. 

I know that we live in the era of three-minute videos, but do we really believe that time is ever enough to fully illustrate a complex point or opinion? Clearly we do, and that’ll be our downfall. We have forgotten the importance of context; we have disregarded the necessity of giving people a chance to explain themselves. 

Enter: Jenna Marbles. Possibly the most well-known, much loved and sincerely missed collateral loss of the cancel culture movement. ‘For now or forever’, and she departed Youtube after a ten-year career. Jenna Marbles is a perfect example of a creator who had already shown immense growth and a completely revitalised set of values by the time the horde came. 

Bo Burnham said in a podcast (and I paraphrase) that he thinks the reason he has evaded capture by the cancel culture vultures is because people can tell when someone is truly ashamed of their past and the things they have said or done. He pointed out that not even the most holier than thou members of the CC Brigade are the same as the person they were ten years ago. It’s obvious that Bo has grown immensely since he began his comedy career at sixteen, and the same goes for Jenna Marbles. 

Jenna Marbles could have been the face of something positive: an example of how much people and culture had changed in a decade. Instead, she became the biggest lesson to us that cancel culture is as dangerous as it is beneficial. That we became cancel hungry and our insistence on holding adults accountable for the misguided actions of their child selves will lose us the things we love. 

We don’t necessarily have the power that we think we do. The bad people don’t care if they’re hated, but the good ones do. Hence the absence of Marbles and the resurgence of Shane Dawson.

We can try and police what people say, but it takes away the opportunity to respond, to try to educate, to share the experiences and perspectives that may ultimately change someone for the better. The viciousness with which we demand penance from those who, oftentimes, we judge for a small out of context snippet stops conversations before they have a chance to happen. 

There are some people in this world who found fame because of or despite terrible behaviours, values and words. Holding people accountable for these and asking them how they sleep at night when they haven’t changed at all despite the changing world around them is one thing. Treating people who have shown growth, maturity and compassion as they’ve grown older like they’re still kids in the early 2000s is going out for blood. It’s punishing progress, not appreciating it. 

Cancel culture will not see in the end of offence or bigotry. It will create a bigger divide, burn bridges for discussion and birth defensiveness and anger. 

We’ve seen so many people change for the better. I’ve seen myself change for the better. Despite thinking I was right then, I see now that I was wrong, and I can only imagine more of this will come in the future. I’m sure you’ll see it in yourself, too, if you look.