In November 1990, the Womyn of Antioch, a student group at Antioch College, published a list of demands in the campus newspaper, threatening “radical physical action” if those demands weren’t met the following week. Enraged by women’s stories of on-campus rape, they wanted a wholly new code of sexual conduct, one that required verbal consent at each step of sexual intimacy, regardless of how many times the couple had been intimate. Antioch met the demand, and a sleepy Yellow Springs, Ohio, liberal arts school of 500 students became a national laughingstock. To some, they were overzealous liberals gone ridiculously draconian. To others, like SNL, they were deeply unsexy naifs overconcerned with date rape—fun-killers, basically. To almost everyone, their prim boundary-drawing seemed unnatural and incorrect in a context defined by its spontaneity, emotionality, and complicated relationship with taboo. Kind of like comedy.
The comedian Dave Chappelle is a longtime resident of Yellow Springs. His father was an Antioch College professor. In 2004, Dave Chappelle released a sketch, “Love Contract,” whose subject was formalized consent policies like Antioch’s. Wearing a red silk robe and holding a clipboard, Chappelle requires his would-be sexual partner, played by a perplexed Rashida Jones, to fill out a lengthy contract governing their encounter, asking her, among other things, to check a box if she “declines anal.” The sketch hums the same tune Chappelle belts out in his new Netflix standup special, Sticks and Stones. He sees “cancel culture”—progressive Americans’ attempts to police culture, to draw lines around what ought to be acceptable in humor and sexuality and online conduct—as ridiculous. A laughingstock. Even morally wrong.
Not so ironically, Chappelle’s criticisms of cancel culture have prompted people to declare him canceled—most notably for the potshots he took at the alleged victims of Michael Jackson and R. Kelly, the #MeToo movement, and the LGBTQ community, whom he refers to as “the alphabet people.” His cancelation positions him in an ever-expanding rogue’s gallery of people and things deemed “problematic” in the progressive internet’s court of public opinion.
He joins internet culture criminals as various as Logan Paul (who filmed a dead person in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest and posted it to YouTube), Kanye West (who said, among other things, that slavery is a choice), Gucci (who made several items of clothing deemed racially insensitive), Shania Twain (who said she would have voted for Trump if she weren’t Canadian), and Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Mulan (because star Liu Yifei stated that she supported Hong Kong’s police force rather than its protesters). To Chappelle’s detractors, his cancelation is a clear-cut moral issue like all the others: Chappelle used his platform to punch down, to layer jokes on top of other people’s suffering, and therefore should no longer be given that platform.
Still, many—maybe most—people seem to agree with Chappelle’s ideas about cancel culture, even if they wouldn’t make the same jokes. Canceling “cancel culture” has been a popular meme since “cancel culture” started, which was probably sometime in 2016. By 2017, Pop Sugar was advising its readers that the phrase would soon be irrelevant. A year later, The New York Times condemned the phrase and the culture.
Today, complaining about cancel culture and urging your audience to reject it is practically a standard introduction on YouTube. “If you guys are part of cancel culture and you want to cancel everybody and just cancel me … it’s such a negative thing and it’s not cute. Don’t do it!” says YouTuber Brad Mondo before the one-minute mark of a recent video titled “Reacting to James Charles Bleaching His Hair.” (What content follows this disclaimer? A controversial teenager bleaches his own hair. Mondo, a professional hairdresser, says that it looks sort of bad. That’s it.) Lately, backlash to Chappelle’s standup special has set off a wave of think pieces, all meditating on why uncomfortable free expression like Chappelle’s is important, uncancelable. On Sunday, oft-canceled beauty YouTuber Manny MUA made the other common argument: Being canceled hurts because it’s random and can encourage bullying, and it doesn’t leave room for personal growth.
The best argument against cancel culture is that the whole thing is a myth, existing only in the furious minds of outraged social media users. People who are canceled usually don’t stay that way, and often the attention just fuels their success. Many of the canceled people whom The New York Times name-checked last year are no longer canceled—Taylor Swift, Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski, and Chris Evans seem to be doing fine. Nearly everyone, even people canceled for things that are actual crimes, is still working, still has fans, and, you know, is a millionaire.
Cancel culture may be a myth, but is it a bad one? It’s extreme, unsubtle, Zeusian. Cancel culture smites and then expects a fatted calf. Which is rude but also, since nobody’s actually getting permanently thunderstruck, low stakes. It’s a scary story, not the stormtrooper Chappelle sees.
If we cancel cancel culture, perhaps it will be replaced with something less spiteful, more nuanced. After Antioch instituted its policy, hell did not break loose. Accidentally nonconsensual huggers and high-fivers weren’t expelled or hauled off to the stocks. Campus police weren’t bursting in on couples because someone forgot to ask if they could move a hand from an arm to a shoulder. Today, the wilds of on-campus sex have a single code of ethics: the Womyn of Antioch’s. It’s wrapped in friendlier, sexier slogans, usually summed up as “Yes Means Yes,” but it’s the same set of rules. When I arrived at college in 2010, those rules were part of my orientation. After decades of work by survivor-activists like Emma Sulkowicz and calls from Barack Obama to “do more” about on-campus sexual assault, they just don’t seem outrageous anymore. Eventually, the jokes stopped landing.