I’m a cancel kid in recovery, you could say

Intro 1 cont'd: I hope you continue to create loudly

From my book Unsolicited Advice: The Canceled Memoir of a Consent Educator

Book starts here.

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I remember in 2017 when men with massive amounts of power who’d been systematically abusing that power, often through sex, and who’d been protected by various institutions were being publicly fired nearly daily, thinking it was amazing that victims were able to finally have a voice. We called this Cancelation. And then, something shifted. Nuance crept in. Not all these stories were the same. Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, Aziz Ansari… I quickly began to wonder how any of these men could redeem themselves, what rehabilitation might look like, and who would be willing to do that work.

But Cancelation changed. It went from a way to take down giant fish who’d never faced consequences for longstanding patterns of abuse, to a way that people were turning against their neighbors. It became exile, banishment, for a 10-year old tweet, for a slip of the tongue, for ignorance, for anything anyone could take issue with, for anything you’ve ever said or done. Instead of saying, “I don’t get along with so-and-so,” or, “I had a bad experience with them,” many were taking to the internet to deem an individual evil, bad, despicable, or spreading vile rumors about them so they’d be banned from various community spaces, lose work, lose friends. People would be labeled a monster, a horrible person, or sexist, racist, homophobic, ableist, a narcissist, or anything else, which often left me wondering, “Whatever happened to regular, old not getting along?”

One of the most sinister things about what we call Cancel Culture is the way those witnessing a cancelation develop secondhand fear. Some people close to me told me that seeing what was happening to me made them, too, want to hide and go quiet. I developed my own acute fear of cancelation due to witnessing my friend and colleague’s very public cancelation a few years ago. I remember thinking, “If this is happening to her, this could happen to me. To anyone.” The harm ripples and reverberates outward, spreading fear and doubt. The preemptive, self-inflicted silencing of these voices that need and deserve to be heard is, to me, a tragedy.

I’d been writing about Cancel Culture and critiquing how the Left polices each other more than they’re willing to build bridges that lead to concrete structural and systemic change for quite some time before my book got canceled. My editor knew this; we talked about it often at our bi-weekly meetings over the nearly two years we worked on this book together. In my work as a consent educator, I ask students and Instagram followers again and again to consider how they, too, cause harm; how they want to be treated when they make mistakes; what they can control and what they can’t; how they’ve sought to punish people in their lives and participated in carceral thinking. I say again and again, “Interpret me,” “Form your own opinion,” “Think for yourself.” My work is philosophical, not psychological or scientific. Disagree, argue, forge your own inner Politic, start your own account, write your own story.

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