Does Cancel Culture Only Apply To Women Or Something?

Cancel culture has been around for years now, serving as a means of holding people with a lot more power and influence than us accountable for their actions. However, this online phenomenon has gradually become more vague and misdirected, and now unsurprisingly it’s morphed into little more than a smear campaign used to target female celebrities. 

Obviously women can make mistakes, and women can be bad people, and in those situations it is important to call them out, especially when they have huge platforms of impressionable fans. But what constitutes a mistake worth cancelling someone over? At what point does a celebrity become a bad person who doesn’t deserve attention? And why are we holding female celebrities to a concerningly higher standard than their male counterparts?

Pop singer Chappell Roan has been under fire from all sides since she stepped into the spotlight a couple years ago. This is mainly due to her openness about struggling with the constant attention that being famous brings, and her hatred for the paparazzi. She’s obviously not the first celebrity to publicly share these feelings, but nevertheless she’s been called rude, ungrateful, undeserving and sensitive.

Many people have accused Chappell of attention seeking by making a scene any time she’s in front of a camera, while others say she should’ve prepared herself for media attention if she wanted to be famous. Recently she faced a huge amount of hate after soccer star Jorginho Frello claimed that his wife and his young stepdaughter were harassed by one of Chappell’s security guards while eating at a hotel. This ended up getting debunked (the security guard did not work for Chappell at all), but not before the pop artist faced a huge amount of backlash and was accused of ‘hating children’. 

 

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A post shared by ･ﾟ: *✧ Chappell Roan ✧*:･ﾟ (@chappellroan)

Chappell Roan isn’t the only female celebrity to fall victim to cancel culture for no valid reason. Other celebrities like Rachel Zegler and Millie Bobby Brown have also been subject to a lot of hate online for simply expressing an opinion about their own work or even just for looking a certain way. Doechii and Jessie Buckley were attacked online for saying that they don’t like cats. While of course many celebrities of all genders make mistakes in public and lose their platforms for good reasons, it seems like a lot of these female celebs are being shamed for even slightly deviating from the social norms they were assigned. They’re not doing anything wrong, they’re just not behaving in a way that the public deems appropriate for a woman. 

Male celebrities on the other hand seem to receive a lot more grace after they make mistakes, and these ‘mistakes’ are very often a lot more serious than the ones women make. They’re actually felons. Everybody knows how seriously Chris Brown hurt Rihanna while they were together, and yet even after all these years he still manages to sell out arena tours. Amber Heard was mocked, ridiculed and shamed during her trial against Johnny Depp while he was praised and sympathised with, even though they were both guilty of being abusive towards each other.

Singer Tory Lanez, who literally fired shots at rapper Megan Thee Stallion during an argument, still has a huge amount of supporters who actually argue he did nothing wrong. Cancel culture has become so twisted and misused that an actress or singer coming across as “annoying” or “stuck up” is just as worthy of being cancelled, if not more than, compared to a male celebrity who has genuinely committed a horrible crime. 

 

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Everyone is allowed to have their own opinion, and when we’re constantly being shown the lives and thoughts of these celebrities all over the internet, the chances that we will disagree with them on at least one occasion are pretty high. A celebrity might say something that you really don’t like, that actually does hurt your feelings, and it’s ok to acknowledge that or stop supporting their work. However, we need to work on our triage skills if we want cancel culture to actually be effective and mean something. You could be the biggest cat lover in the world, but you should still understand that a woman saying she’d much rather have a dog does not warrant the same reaction as a man assaulting somebody. You can find a woman annoying without equating it to an egregious crime. We don’t need to be so dramatic.

Let’s put that energy into actually holding the real criminals accountable. Male celebs, whether they work in Hollywood or make videos on social media, get away with way too much a lot of the time, and it’s probably because we’re too focused on micromanaging everything that women say and do. Men who have assaulted and traumatised people don’t deserve to make millions off their music or acting, and when we actually use cancel culture the way it was intended we have the power to take that away from them. Content creators who use their platforms to spew bigotry and take advantage of younger, impressionable fans don’t deserve to have a platform in the first place, so cancel them.  

If your public image has a huge impact on your career, as it would for an influencer or artist, then you should understand that you are automatically held to a much higher standard when it comes to your actions than regular people are. That’s just a fact. But if we really want to catch out the bad guys (or girls) we need to step back and assess where we went wrong with cancel culture. The sooner we stop swarming female celebrities for minor mistakes or just a difference in opinion, the sooner that people who are really taking advantage of their platform face the consequences.