Cancelling Cancel Culture

There is no such thing as cancel culture.

This is bad news for columnists, who need to find new things to be angry at on a weekly basis to justify their pay, but it's good news for the rest of us, who'd quite like to get through to the weekend without anybody else shouting at us, thanks very much.

There's been a lot of earnest debate in the last few years devoted to the subject; long story short someone says or does somethingn problematic, or is found to have done so inn the past, and "The Internet" (whoever they are) deem them to be "cancelled" that is to say, no longer a thing, don't watch / read /buy /enjoy their stuff, they are persona non grata.

The only problem is, it doesn't actually happen.

Take, for example, Cristiano Ronaldo, a man who has essentially admitted that he's a rapist. Back at Utd with nary a mumur, watched approvingly by domestic abuse enthusiast, Ryan Giggs. No cancelling there. Likewise JK Rowling's sales have barely dipped as a result of her encounters with the trans community, and Piers Morgan is still absolutely fucking everywhere despite being a gigantic testicle made of prejudice.

Those who complain loudest and hardest about it are often outliers who are already purveying views which are so far beyond the pale that not even the Daily Mail would touch them with a shitty stick. Yer K**y H*****ns's, to name one. Or their permanently aggrieved shouters like the aforementioned Morgan, whose day to day existence is defined by being in opposition to someone or something.

There was, a few years ago, a reasonable argument to be had surrounding the practice of no-platforming at Universities, wherein the student body would refuse to turn up to events involving controversial figures, there was a reasonable argument to be made around the free speech implications then. But now, it seems to me, "free speech" has come to mean "freedom to say what I like without being criticised".

Netflix's recent show The Chair had a cancel culture storyline in which an English lecturer is filmed throwing a Nazi salute as a joke (a pretty shit one, granted, but a joke nonetheless). This is then clipped, taken out of context, he is "cancelled" and fired. What a humourless lot these students are, the programme implies, set against our lovable academic rogue. Cancel culture has gone too far. Kids today are too serious, too earnest, too puritan.

To which I can only reply, have you been to a University town recently? Do you actually know any young people? Cos I've employed plenty of people who needed gently nursing though the first part of a Sunday shift with bacon butties, before being given a friendly warning that if they turn up in that state again, I'll fire them so fast they'll wind up in the next county.

It's a straw man, it's tilting at windmills. Cancel culture is an invention of journalists outraged that they don't get to say what they like without being called out on it, and it's largely a complete confection. So why is it such a pervasive idea? Why do so many people think that "you can't say anything any more"? When you can, you really can. You have more ways of saying things than at any point in human history.

Part of the explanation, as it so often is, is social media. A friend of mine recently shared an article claiming that "The Internet wants to cancel Grease". I've seen this sort of thing before.

(It gave me chills, they were multiplying)

The basic premise of the article is that Grease is problematic, too of its time, sexist, a bit rapey, yadda yadda yadda. I read the article. It's evidence that "The Internet" wanted to cancel Grease amounted to two tweets.

Two.

Both dating from Dec 26th 2020, when, presumably it was on telly and a couple of people, already soured by too much Christmas, regarded it with a jaundiced eye and fired off an intemperate tweet. Two people from a global population of 7.9 billion and rising at last count.

Two people is not "The Internet." A better headline would have been "Bored journalist trawls desperately for quotes to fit pre-existing thesis, finds very little". But it doesn't matter, because it's in print now, and it's being shared. And then the papers, who equally want to do their journalism on the cheap and can't be arsed writing original stories, they pick it up and they run with it, and now the idea is legitimised, and people nod and say that cancel culture's gone too far. What next, which beloved part of our childhood are they coming for next?

None. No part of it. Because cancel culture doesn't exist. Go and read a book for Christ's sake.