The main part I object to in this essay is the ideological carveout. The author is seemingly willing to defend the #MeToo movement because it was in the service of a mission "to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions", and "cancel culture" (I'm also putting it in quotes as I agree it's a very loaded term) because the backlash to it was helpful to the right and detrimental to the left. If you agree with the reasoning, then, all of the behavior being criticized is okay? In that case I don't see how or why anyone would ever change their behavior. The author's friend who wanted her to apologize to the hairdressers probably has a strong belief that being sexualized at work is a serious problem faced by women. From the right, many Christians strongly believe that criticizing behaviors like premarital sex is part of the social immune system that keeps family and community bonds strong.
I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies while ensuring that your own behavior is never subject to criticism. The essay displays an awareness of the tension, but decisively chooses the partisan path.
> "to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions"
Sure, but it makes no sense to equate institutional abuse with genuine erotic connection among equals, which is what OP seems to ultimately be advocating for. The two are polar opposites. And the OP is not arguing that sexualizing people in the workplace is a good thing; her stance is that she never even sexualized the person to begin with. She's talking about her inner thoughts, not her overt behavior.
I'd push back on drawing a sharp line between "institutional abuse" and "genuine erotic connection among equals". As the essay points out, the MeToo campaign did use call-outs against individuals in service of its goal. Some of those callouts were alleging criminal conduct, but on the other end of the spectrum you had much more dubious stuff, or completely unsubstantiated rumors that some person was "bad". I agree that stopping institutional abuse is a noble goal, but the MeToo practice of naming and shaming personal friends in anonymous spreadsheets is the type of thing that builds the internal panopticon: what if our personal circumstances changed so that there's a power imbalance, or someone misinterpreted them? If you accept that practice on political grounds because it's a useful weapon against the "enemies of liberation" (as the author put it), can you really claim to want people to change their attitudes about sex? It doesn't work nearly as well if we stop seeing sexual behavior as inherently scandalous.
I wasn't sure if I should mention this, but there aren't much articles that talks about the negative consequences that metoo campaign had. It had some real consequences beyond just some dubious stuff.
Here in Sweden there is the "Adam case". A couple went through a bad divorce in the later part of MeToo, and the mother of two boys accused the father of sexual assaulting the older boy that was then 7 year old. The court found no evidence of the event, and because of some other aspects, gave full custody to the father. The mother then in the appeal changed the story and claimed that the boy and the father together sexual assaulted the other child, a 3 year old boy. Again the court found no evidence and marked in their decision that the new claim was not believable.
Then social service decided that in contrast to the court that the boy was a danger to other children and put the child in a treatment facility and denied any association with his father or any other member of the family. The boy was also denied access to school and for the most part any contact with other children. This went on for 5 years.
At that point a new social service worker got the case as the previous worker went on parental leave. The new worker found that neither the boy, father or the claimed victim statements had been referenced in the decision and it was exclusive based on the mothers claims. Just like the court findings, there was no evidence to collaborate any of the events. The new social worker decided thus to revert the decision and let the boy return to his father. However this was quickly reverted by his superiors, and the new social worker got removed and put on other cases. At this point investigating journalists got the wind of the case and made a fairly large documentary about it. The media publicity triggered an internal review at that social worker office.
A year later the internal review found, like the court and the new social worker, that there was zero evidence of any sexual assault and that serious mishandling had occurred in this case, especially by only considering the claims of the mother. The boy was finally reunited with his father, by now 6 years later at which point he was 13. No one has been charged with any crime, although the social service office has officially apologized to the family.
I wouldn't go that far. The message from MeToo that echoed in Sweden at the time was to "believe all women", "men are guilty until proven innocent" and "the legal system has failed us so it is time to take matters in your own hands". People acted accordingly and years later we can se the results.
The social worker did have a position of power, but they also has a review board that approved the decisions. The review board are political selected in Sweden and exist to prevent social workers from abusing that position of power. The problem in the Adam case was the zeitgeist. We can also see this in the reaction the superiors had when the new social worker took on the case.
It's not so much that sexual behavior is inherently scandalous, the issue is with the broader context where a formalized hierarchy of power and a potential for intimidation are quite antithetical to any kind of genuine, consensual connection. The potential for borderline-abusive behavior in the workplace (not necessarily criminal, either) is orders of magnitude greater than any concern about "naming and shaming".
I think the author's (ex) friend believes the same about the hair salon thing. That there is a hierarchy of power and potential for intimidation in the context of a worker and a client. E.g. the guy at the restaurant being flirty with the waitress.
I was struck by this too. I initially found it offputting, but then realized that it reinforced her point: We are all subject to social media (etc) bubbles, and it's tough to see the insides of them!
By including these, she demonstrated her point with a genuine, meta example of how even someone writing about these can be unwittingly part of them.
I think some definitively good things came out of "me too". Some people got caught for repeated cases of serious abuse. There were also cases where someone faced very public "accusations" that didn't amount to a hill of beans. I think it's fair for people to not want to condemn the whole movement when it seemed to actually do something about a real problem that was intransigent for so long. That doesn't mean they have to like everything about it.
At the same time the central failure of "me too" is that it created exactly zero reproducible structures or practices to control institutional sexual abuse going forward. Everyone is more "aware", but the fundamental process hasn't changed, although some new titles might have been created. This failure results in a mixture of hypervigilance (the author's friends) and fatalism (the author), because there is no clear definition of what, exactly, is the particular social procedure that represents "me too" even in the ideal scenario.
I did find it interesting that the entire post was such an eloquent description of a generalization of cancel culture, yet the author still went out of her way to virtue signal to readers who would reflexively dismiss any allusion to cancel culture as made up or partisan. Probably the right call, since those are some of the ones who most need to hear what she has to say, but still funny.
> I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies
I mean, those aren't just meaningfully different; they're entirely at odds with each other. You can't have a liberal attitude toward sex and a puritanical attitude toward sex at the same time.
> eloquent description of a generalization of cancel culture, yet the author still went out of her way to virtue signal to readers who would reflexively dismiss any allusion to cancel culture as made up or partisan
Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept.
The proof is as trivial as noticing the people who complained about being cancelled were doing so to audiences of literally millions of people and there's no viable way to reconcile the idea of someone's ideas being somehow hidden when they had some of the highest cultural recognition of anything at the time.
Also, for the last time, stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them.
> Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept.
No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship.
> stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them
Non sequitur. The factuality of cancel culture's non-existence is immaterial here. If a piece of writing includes a tangent that serves no other purpose than to signal to a subset of the audience that the author is "one of them", that's virtue signaling.
> No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship.
There's a wikipedia article about the earth being flat and moon landing hoaxes and so on and so forth. People wanting something to be true does not make it so.
You literally prove my point by saying censorship as if that was possibly related.
The people who talked about "being cancelled" were wealthy celebrities who could spread their message as far as they wanted. Equating being disinvited from a conference with censorship is incredibly disengenous.
So is referring to it as "antisocial behavior". There are, quite frankly, very things that are more deeply a part of human socializing than telling someone else that they're wrong and should shut up.
Cancel culture being a thing is one of those memes that people spread, and much like the meme of republicans being good for the federal government, it causes real problems when people start to believe it via repetition.
This is an odd response. Wikipedia does not in any way claim that the moon landing was faked or that flat Earth theory is legitimate.
The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist? I'd prefer that it not. I'd be thrilled if everyone were nice to each other, social media were a thriving hub of only productive good faith discourse, and reddit mods had no interest in censoring everyone and everything they personally disagree with.
It sounds like you find cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge, for whatever reason, and want to project that cognitive dissonance onto others.
> The insinuation that I "want it to be true" is silly. Why would I want cancel culture to exist
People want cancel culture to be real in the same way they want jews to be spreading the black plague. It lets you take reactionary measures based on false premises.
Everytime people bring up "cancel culture" they're using it as a justification for silencing an opposing viewpoint. Thats why they want it to exist, so they can justify a reaction to it.
What happens is that someone says something, then someone else criticizes them, and they try to shutdown that criticism by invoking the concept of cancel culture.
That's the part I object to. Criticism is just as valid as the initial speech and we need to protect it, doubly so when so frequently the ideas people are trying to protect are so objectively abhorrent.
I don't find the "cancel culture inconvenient to acknowledge"; I find talking about it as if it's real gives cover and justification for other antisocial and otherwise negative actions.
I cannot stress enough that telling some asshole to get out of your house and stop saying racist slurs is a perfectly norma and good social interaction that's healthy for society.
I just want to point put there that your argument's exact same rhetorical structure could be (and has been) used to deny "rape culture":
E.g.
- "Rape is illegal and prosecuted, so how can we have a 'rape culture'?"
- "That's not rape culture, that's just individual bad actors"
- "People criticizing women's clothing choices is normal social interaction"
- "Rape culture is a partisan feminist concept like [insert dismissive comparison]"
The parallel is that both involve:
1. Demanding an impossibly narrow definition (complete silence vs. systematic legal tolerance)
2. Dismissing patterns as "just normal social behavior"
3. Focusing on whether the most extreme version exists rather than whether there's a meaningful phenomenon worth discussing
4. Using the term's political associations to avoid engaging with the substance
The irony is particularly sharp when you argue that "telling someone to shut up" is quintessentially social while simultaneously arguing that coordinated efforts to damage someone's reputation/livelihood for speech don't constitute a distinct social phenomenon worth naming.
Social media is full of politically motivated bullying, harassment, and censorship. That should be readily apparent to anyone who's ever used the internet. That's what cancel culture is, not a dispute with rude houseguests.
I'm not sure why you're so insistent on denying this that you'd compare Wikipedia — and everyone quoted on the subject therein, including presidents from both parties and the former pope — with antisemitic conspiracy theorists.
Who are you implying I intend to silence? I'm commenting on it because I oppose cancel culture, which is the opposite of wanting to silence opposing viewpoints.
People who use the term "cancel culture" are trying to silence their critics. If this isn't what you intend, you may wish to reexamine the words you use and how you use them. Because you keep bringing up wikipedia, lets actually quote from it:
> n October 2017, sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein led to the cancellation of his projects, his expulsion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and legal consequences, including a conviction on charges of rape and sexual assault.
Is this the cancel culture you're so vehemently against? People disassociating from Harvey Weinstein because of his history of sexual abuse?
How about the next one:
> In November 2017, comedian Louis C.K. admitted to sexual misconduct allegations and, as a result, his shows were canceled, distribution deals were terminated, and he was dropped by his agency and management.
Is this more of that cancel culture you're trying to get rid of?
I'll pick an example I like from that page:
> According to Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan professor of media studies, canceling someone is a form of "cultural boycott" and cancel culture is the "ultimate expression of agency", which is "born of a desire for control [as] people have limited power over what is presented to them on social media" and a need for "accountability which is not centralized".[3][42][43]
There's some abstract talk about "mob justice" and "disproportionate response" but that is so far from reality that attempting to use it as a guideline for what's actually happening is laughable.
In the actual, real world, cases, rich and powerful people with nearly infinite access to spreading their own speech are complaining about being disinvited from college speeches or even fired from their tv show.
Here's a follow up: in your definition of the word and your understanding of reality, do you claim the jk rowling was cancelled or experienced cancelled culture and if so was this a bad thing?
You're attacking a straw man. I didn't say I supported Harvey Weinstein, and I don't have any strong opinions on J.K. Rowling.
Why are you so focused on wealthy celebrities? They're a tiny minority of the population and inherently the ones least harmed by cancel culture. You can't really doxx a celebrity, and trying to have them censored or financially ruined is a much larger hurdle than for ordinary people.
I don't intend to silence anyone, critics or otherwise. I welcome all constructive criticism. You're just inventing a motive and arbitrarily assigning it to a phrase you don't like.
On a meta level, this whole subthread proves my original point. Whether or not you actually support cancel culture, what you're attacking right now is vocabulary. It sounds a lot like how certain people online react to the term "cisgender". Having a commonly understood term for a thing that exists isn't offensive; it's just how language works.
> Having a commonly understood term for a thing that exists isn't offensive; it's just how language works.
I repeat my claim that you're trying to wish this thing into existence by using words.
Words and language matter because they help shape how we think and what actions we take.
It's easy to notice that you refuse to actually engage with any attempt to meaningfully define the term "cancel culture" instead you just use it as a phase with no inherent meaning except the negative ones you need it to have at any given moment.
I'll repeat myself here: the idea that cancel culture actually exists is deliberately fomented by a small group of people and those people are doing this in order to attempt to protect certain ideas from criticism.
> I don't intend to silence anyone, critics or otherwise.
You say this but this is literally what the proponents of the idea of cancel culture are attempting to do. This is why they invented the term cancel culture, in order to silence people.
Yes, I get it, they're coopting terms that appear to mean the opposite of how they're using them. Shockingly, people lie a lot.
> Why are you so focused on wealthy celebrities? They're a tiny minority of the population and inherently the ones least harmed by cancel culture
Because they're literally the only example anyone can ever come up with of "cancel culture". If we're not talking about wealthy celebrities, what exactly are we talking about?
You're imagining an exchange that didn't happen. At no point have I declined to provide a definition upon request. In fact, I went out of my way to provide both a Wikipedia link and my own off-the-cuff paraphrasing.
That being said, here is my answer to your question: I would broadly define cancel culture as a culture of engaging in grassroots campaigns to materially punish, ostracize, and/or silence sources of speech which one finds disagreeable.
I'm not sure what you think celebrities being the most prominent (debatable) examples proves. That's practically a tautology. It's not difficult to find specific known impacted individuals who weren't celebrities, whom I'm hesitant to name out of respect. Having said that, here are two general examples off the top of my head:
1. Ostensibly non-political major subreddits setting automod to indiscriminately ban anyone with a past comment in /r/conservative. This quietly hits large numbers of nameless people on a daily basis, and manual moderation activity isn't much better (particularly on subreddits that are actually related to politics).
2. A recent campaign of targeted doxxing and harassment against authors of distasteful remarks regarding Charlie Kirk's assassination, including reports to employers with intent to cause financial harm. This is one current prominent example, but there are many others in relation to pretty much any controversial political issue.
I've given no indication of bad faith, so I'm not sure why you insist on accusing me of lying about my preference that cancel culture not exist. It's an anathema to free speech and privacy, and ultimately bad for everyone.
That proof doesn't hold as an argument. You're arguing that if people got a message out then it isn't cancel culture, but if people didn't get a message out because they were cancelled then people just wouldn't talk about it. It is setting up a rhetorical position where taboos can't exist and we know that they do.
Cancel culture might not exist depending on what people think it mean. The term is a bit vague. But arguing that some people managed to push past the cancellation attempts doesn't mean that there isn't anything there. We'd expect cancel culture to have some cancellation attempts that ended in failure, the authoritarians are fallible humans too. And although they tend to be good at wielding government power the extreme authoritarians do tend to be ideologically isolated and so struggle to act when people pay attention to them.
Look, "cancel culture" is almost as vague a term as "communism" and tends to be used in the same way: as a thought terminating pejorative description for anything someone doesn't like.
If we want to have an actual conversation about it we'd have to come up with some kind of working definition of the term that was actually useful enough to discuss existing examples with.
The wikipedia article on cancel culture uses an example of people disassociating from harvey weinstein and ultimately charging him with crimes related to sexual abuse. Is this cancel culture?
If a university employee invites a celebrity to come give a lecture one evening and then a bunch of students ask the university to cancel the invitation, is this cancel culture? Is it morally wrong?
Is the person who makes the original statement deserving of some kind of extra protection for this speech over the responding person who is trying to criticize this speech?
A cursory look at the real world, actual examples, of how people attempted to use the term "cancel culture" it was invariably part of an attempt to prevent criticism of (mostly) right wing ideas.
What actually happened was some number of right wingers tried to give speeches and got yelled at and then started complaining about cancel culture and trying to prevent future criticisms.
Like, at the level we're discussing we're talking about things like ethics/morality/social standards, right? What is good and virtuous for society to permit and encourage. Trying to "cancel" people who are "bad" by using speech to criticize or contradict or even ask people to stop associating with them is a good thing.
> You can't have a liberal attitude toward sex and a puritanical attitude toward sex at the same time.
Sure you can, they are both matters of degree and scope, but I do think going to the extent of weaponizing either is at odds with the other.
For example, I don't try to act against anyone's personal sexual or romantic inclinations, and don't think it's the place for government or anyone else, that's a freedom we all should have and defend, but that doesn't mean there aren't societal or personal limits. If any of my friends were polyamorous or in a thrupple or open relationship or anything like that, it's not necessarily my business unless it's presenting problems that visibly affect their life or mine. My acceptance of that is independent of the fact that I'm only interested in a long-term monogamous romantic and sexual relationship at the moment, which has in some cases seemed more conservative. If my romantic partner decided she wanted something else, she's of course welcome to explore that on her own terms by ending our romantic relationship.
I guess the nuance really comes down to where the aspect of "morality" comes in, where it's directed, and whether that's fundamentally at odds with a sense of true liberalism.
In one instance for example, I found myself prompted to defend monogamy in opposition to someone who would clearly think of themselves as a progressive, and might arguably be liberal in disposition, but was railing against monogamy because she'd had bad experiences with the people she ended up with in those relationships. She was making a grand moral argument, and I responded with a contrary argument, but I don't think that's incongruent with either of us being liberal.
Nothing about what you just described is puritanical or illiberal. You can have conservative personal behavior without attempting to exert undue control over the behavior of others.
I don't do drugs or want other people to do drugs, but still don't think it's my or the government's business if people do so. That's a textbook liberal position on the issue.
That's why I qualified puritanical and liberal with matters of degree, rather than being diametrically opposed. Having a large scope liberal attitude towards sex enables my inward facing, relatively puritan(ical) disposition to be a choice rather than mandatory and I don't care to demand that of others. I could very well be someone else with a different strict set of moral standards for me and my immediates with a slightly different scope and still be liberal. It seems to me that only when one weaponizes it does it become puritanical and illiberal; you want the same strict moral guidelines for everyone else that you impose on yourself.
But they are diametrically opposed. It's not puritanical that I don't do drugs or that you're monogamous. What's puritanical is trying to impose those personal choices upon others.
It would be equally illiberal to mandate that everyone do drugs or be polygamous. The illiberality is the imposition itself, not the quality of the imposition.
This ideal seems like it works, up until you see the actual actions and effects of conservative parties within politics. Then you realise that actually, only a minority have that position, the vast majority of conservative parties are authoritarian and LOVE sticking their hands in peoples' business.
Whether the ideal works and the extent to which it's commonly held are two different issues. My view is that both major parties in the US are somewhat illiberal, but average out to a moderately liberal status quo.
Despite many flaws, e.g. the Wars on Drugs and Prostitutes, the US is arguably still the world's greatest stronghold of liberalism (for the moment).
The War on Drugs is actually a perfect microcosm of how illiberal policy doesn't work. Instead of learning our lesson from the War on Alcohol, we doubled down and funneled untold billions of dollars into Mexican drug cartels via US markets — funding the very problem we wanted to solve. By contrast, our more liberal tobacco policy has been a huge success.
I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies while ensuring that your own behavior is never subject to criticism. The essay displays an awareness of the tension, but decisively chooses the partisan path.