Call a bitch a bitch
From my July 2022 zine Floating: Instructions on living for the newly deradicalized, fresh out of the crazed cancel culture of neoliberal identitarianism.
This is the final essay in my zine Floating. The PDF version is available for purchase on my store. Last paragraph is my favorite thing that has ever come out of my fingertips, doesn’t really feel like mine.
So, the cancel culture thing. Are we all over it yet? I want to be. Don’t you? It’s over. That’s so 2020. Maybe I take it for granted that I’ve built a life for myself that is frankly free of identitarianism and petty hall monitors. The people in my life see through it. It’s not serious. And, sort of inevitably, my social media is fairly cancel-free. I don’t see cancellations happening very often now. People’s lives are still reeling from it, I know that. It isn’t simply finished. But it has changed. Many more people are comfortable refusing to participate, and so now something new can emerge.
What do we do after rejecting neoliberal identitarianism and cancellation, its enforcement tool? We get straight about what our morals actually are, and then we get honest with ourselves about how to live life in accordance with those morals. That, in large part, is why I am investigating Catholicism. Yes, I know there are parts of the social doctrine I do not agree with—the stance on being gay, the stance on abortion—but there is so much more to this ancient religion than that. Catholicism is a 2,000 year old belief system with a vast intellectual and artistic tradition that has much more to teach me about the purpose of being alive, I think, than my 4 year degree in social studies and infographics.
Part of how cancel culture works is by silencing dissent, which requires you to censor yourself. You stop thinking through ideas. You stop asking questions. You lose touch with what you intuitively understand to be true and good and beautiful, as the external doctrine is imposed on you by rabid opportunists and baby cops. So, you need to stop censoring yourself. Ask literally fucking bananas questions. Go big or go home. Can you sit down and explain for yourself, thoroughly, without relying on identitarian buzzwords, why the Holocaust or slavery is morally objectionable? They are. But why? Can you sit down and explain for yourself why you believe what you believe, and can you tie that to a foundational set of values and principles that guide you in everything you do? Can you regain command over your own vocabulary?
Say insane shit in private for a little while. Who cares. Call a bitch a bitch. Say the girl who tried ruining your fucking life is a 3 larping as an 8. Fuck it. Stop being perfect and let it out and notice what it feels like. In my experience, you will feel less anxious and exhausted because you actually have freedom to explore the range of your emotions without repression or shame. You’ll find your wit return to you. Then you can refine and master your rage rather than repress it. You can tame the expression to have integrity with your actual value system rather than an extrinsic pressure to censor and conform. I'd encourage you of course to move beyond the cutting expressions of anger, but I believe letting that out in private is a necessary step to de-cultifying yourself. It's a brief step towards remembering who you are and how your emotions and self-expression work.
Talk to normies. Hang out with the roughest dudes you know and laugh your ass off at how crude and unrestrained they are. Allow people in your life to be unrestrained around you. Get closer to people who are unrestrained. Find people who are loyal to love and connection above being admired or righteous in the eyes of others.
Go volunteer with seniors. Laugh with them while you listen to their favorite songs and they tell you about their first love. Dance with someone approaching the end and admire the sagging skin framing eyes that have seen more life than you can imagine. Remember we are all going to die one day and before that we’re going to be in old folks homes together and do we really want to be launching cancel campaigns over microaggressions during bingo? Come on. Take the long view. We’re going to get old and life is going to get so fucking hard, so much harder. Do we want to go out having lived a life laughing at crude jokes but treating people with genuine love and solidarity, or speaking perfectly while sabotaging each other’s lives?
Commit to letting people live. When they’re being shitty and cruel, intervene. Support the people who suffer at their hands. But don’t try to wreck them, don’t try to take away their loved ones. And let’s get real. Most people getting brutally cancelled are just women trying to run their fucking businesses and pay bills and do some good in the world who didn’t follow arbitrary rules right, and not sexual abusers. I don’t think anyone deserves to undergo an accountability spectacle because there is no due process, no humanity in it, no container or chance to change. But I really really don’t think some random, regular person with a moderately large social media following barely cracking $50k/year off her business deserves to be publicly humiliated, degraded and slandered as a white supremacist because she didn’t kowtow to some random person’s narcissistic decompensation. Congrats on making a random woman more financially reliant on her husband and probably driven to suicidal ideation. Revolutionary.
Get extremely clear on what violence and abuse are, because those words actually mean something. In fact, get really clear on what words mean. And I don’t mean that in the sense of 400 different terms for sexualities. I mean having a consistent and firm vocabulary for defining extremely basic and salient parts of social reality. Isn’t it funny how we can say “asexual” like 35 different ways but “rejection” and “grooming” and “assault” have all somehow become synonymous with one ambiguous word: “harm”?
Pay attention to people’s behavior more than to the virtues they claim. Become discerning of interpersonal patterns. People are extremely patterned. Learn about group dynamics and notice how they function and your role in them. Just keep in mind that before anything, we are people, and we do the things people have been doing to each other forever. Don’t lose sight of that because of ideology.
Forefront shared struggle rather than identity. Recognize that a shared abstract identity marker is a gateway to authentic and healthy and supportive relationships, or even to universally shared values within that group. Obviously identity groups have material or cultural relevance. There’s obviously utility in these categories. Use that for solidarity and connection, but not at the exclusion of building a coalition with everyone who shares your struggle and demands. Don’t be so consumed by a need for validation of your identity that you lose sight of how people who don’t look like, talk like, or do culture like you actually share experiences of material oppression (exploitation of labor, rent burden, debt, poor childcare, etc.)
If you have a commitment to elevating humans out of suffering, debt, exploitation and poverty, make this commitment universal. This is something all human beings regardless of identity category deserve and can rally behind.
And finally, any chance you get: Log off. Delete Twitter yesterday. Unsubscribe. So much of cancel culture is just repackaged industry power grabs from people trying to climb the ladder. More of it is just cruelty as entertainment. The internet has created a bonkers panopticon for scrutiny as a sport. It’s a global Colosseum whose gladiator matches are lining the pockets of tech CEOs preparing bunkers in New Zealand and scheming Mars colonies while the earth dies off.
The world is so much bigger than this. Never forget that you are literally a child of God and you belong here. Fuck the freaks who say otherwise, but also love them, because they too, those sadistic clowns, are also children of God. If they come to you begging for forgiveness, forgive. Let them transform and be absolved. Let those who destroyed you come undone and renewed by love, and yourself be also. That’s what we want when we reject cancel culture, right? The freedom to be and to change.
And lose not sight of the real bitch in all this: the devastating paradox of human connection. We will hurt and heal each other forever. We will exile and seethe and fall to our knees praying for the strength to carry on. This is what it is to be alive, to ache and to weep before the unimaginable cruelty of other people while yearning to be loved. In the passion of our hatred, the fury of our bitter quips, we are driven not by mere desire for separation from those who hurt us—but a crushing pain at the betrayal of our inescapable union. We are entwined, unbearably, delightfully, eternally.
Clarifying in all the best ways. Thank you Molly for writing, and thank you Anya for sharing.
Agree that last paragraph is epic. But Catholic? I do believe all the major religions were initiated by God. Lots of paths. The psychos cannot resist taking over religion and any other power positions. #1 psycho trait, liars. Consummate irrepressible liars. Take care Molly.