I'm not sure if anyone cares but Hontra "Philosophy Pro" talks cancel culture on Lilly Singh's cringe talk show. Released yesterday
Natalie Wynn explains cancel culture and talks about how social media is a powerful tool.A Little Late with Lilly Singh. Stream now on Peacock: https://bit.l...
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Natalie Wynn and Lilly talk about how it feels to get canceled online.A Little Late with Lilly Singh. Stream now on Peacock: https://bit.ly/2DEPKux Subscribe...
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It's nice to be able to talk about cancel culture without jumping to extremes.
Hoo boy, dis gon be good.
It started on Twitter, particularly Black Twitter
Don't make me hate them even more.
I think where the danger is, is when it has part to do with who we're targeting.
Go on...
We're using this tool for good when we're really using it to hold very powerful people to account.
"But that couldn't POSSIBLY include little old me. After all,
I'M not most influential lefttuber on the whole damn platform."
But when it starts becoming this random person.
"See, I'm just this
RANDOM PERSON. An independent content creator struggling to make ends meet to pay for her elaborate costumes and set dressing. I may act very posh in my highly produced videos, but I'm really UwU queer trash! I literally had to beg for people's money to get 13,356 of them to support me on Patreon."
Coontra: I've seen this happen in like fanfiction communities, on Tumblr or whatever.
Lily: Tumblr? TUMBLR?!? Tumblr's so pure! Who's hating on Tumblr?!
Contra: Oh, there's a very dark side to Tumblr.
Lily: WHAT?!
Contra: But like—
[video ends]
Contra either didn't understand Lily's obvious sarcasm or completely failed to land whatever Lily was setting her up for, and they had to cut the rest of the bit. I'm surprised they left any of it in to be honest. If
that's what survives the final edit in only 3:39 of finished material, I dread to see what the unedited interview looked like.
Maybe 6:52 if you count the second part (which is inexplicably split into two videos)
Being canceled feels bad, like, it feels like you're being so misunderstood, and it feels like, you know, you're sort of being isolated and alienated and mocked and shamed. You feel like humiliated and you feel stupid and you feel alone.
She goes on to explain that the most hurtful part of being cancelled is that apparent rejection from her community...
A lot of the times I've been canceled, it's kinda a within a community thing, right, where people in the trans community basically, they decide that I'm a traitor because I messed up. And so that separates me from my own community. It separates me from, in some ways, the only sort of people I can really feel understood by.
Which leads me to wonder, was she ever really cancelled that badly?
I ask because she's shown herself to be exceptionally thin-skinned and insecure, even by Youtuber standards – by her own free admission at times.
Like in this online therapy/interview stream with Dr K, she mentions that she hated looking like "such a transsexual", saying as well that other people's criticisms are hurtful primarily
because they mirror her own inner criticisms. And that this inner criticism also causes her to act transphobic to the rest of her community.
This comes up in the middle few sections of the video (41:00 onwards). Contra mentions feeling so disgusted at herself for not looking like a perfect cis woman, to the point of not being able to watch her videos from more than 2 years ago due to looking like a man dressed a woman (her words), but that she also can't help judging other trans women by that standard as well.
It started a long time before Youtube. Like at 1:09:15 she mentions the repulsion she felt at seeing another non-passing trans woman on the Chicago subway during an earlier period of her own gender experimentation. Dr K speculates that this may in fact be caused by
envy for the other tranny's lack of selfconsciousness.
She freely acknowledges that she
was a toxic asshole in the past, due to how much she aligned her own self-critical thoughts with the opinons of trasphobes, but struggles to come to terms with these same thoughts in the present. Dr K coddles this somewhat while also trying confront it (1:31:40), saying "your toxicity comes from hurt", and that she's been afraid to acknowledge the problem of her self-hatred for so long because she judges herself for "being the asshole". In other words, she judges herself...
for judging herself.
I think this might explain why she took it so personally when the trans community rejected her:
She depends on them for validation, because they tell her she's more than just a non-passing freak. But at the same time, she resents them for being way bigger non-passing freaks than she herself will ever be. And when soundbites of hers slip out that betray how she really feels, she gets called out for and rejected by members of her community. And she catastrophises this because she worries their rejection of her is justified.
Am I right or am I right?