Goes Without Saying - ‘woke’ cancel culture: the ~policing~ effect

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

sephy and wing are over party!! welcome to the episode where we call out cancel culture, and probably cancel ourselves in the process. in this episode of Goes Without Saying, sephy and wing discuss holding celebrities accountable, and the importance of making mistakes as a fallible human being. from reductive ‘instagram catfights’ to performative allyship, we’re not holding back. cancel us already!! join the conversation every monday. speak your mind on our instagram! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Nature. I've got a gay rooster named Francois. Is so gay. These rams are gay. I'm studying gay animals. Does that mean I'm gay?

So why don't more people know this? I'm Owen Ever. I'm Lane Kaplan-Levinson. And this is a field guide to gay animals. A podcast about queerness in the natural world. The animal kingdom is queer and we are a part. Find a field guide to gay animals on Spotify, Apple. Or wherever you get your podcasts.

Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Here we are for another episode of Goes Without Saying with Sefi and Wing. I am the lovely Wing. This is the lovely Sefi. Sefi, give us a beautiful hint of your voice. Hi. So beautiful. And today we are maybe cancelling ourselves. We're talking about wokeness, policing culture, holding people accountable, the nuance that is and isn't afforded to all of these situations and whether it's only a matter of time until this podcast

is no more because we have been cancelled and you may have been cancelled too if you've been affected by cancelling this episode is for you nice nice this is the joke we needed okay yeah perfect i think this episode is really i'm not gonna lie we've already recorded it and i thought it was really nice i feel like it's the convo that i would want to listen to i'm happy that we had it it feels quite freeing i feel like i haven't heard people speak quite freely about cancellation without being scared we go quite in are you saying we're revolutionary i'm saying we've started a revolution are you saying we're the figureheads of the anarchy i'm saying i'm the mockingjay and you're my peter okay imagine

there's two people about to record a podcast on cancel culture and they're too scared to start the podcast in case they get cancelled. Because that's what's happening. That's the reality of what we're doing right now, yeah. It's quite terrifying because the more you talk about cancel culture, almost the eyes kind of peel back and they're all on you and it's suddenly like, shit, it's our turn now. Yeah. But I'm fine.

Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine to be cancelled. Yeah, do it. Steffi and Wing are over party. I can't wait. Who's coming? You're all invited. What are you going to wear? Oh my god. Let's get the champagne out yeah party poppers so cancelling hey pretty crazy it is a crazy fucking world we found ourselves in and also

kind of just like the woke competition and the policing lifestyle should we go in with somebody's message and put the blame on you guys there was one that i really liked a dm that i've saved because there's one person in this that they mentioned they they call out names and there's one person in this that i particularly want to talk about because you know i have a relationship to this person don't say who you think it is yet okay okay okay not a relationship with this person never met them no i wouldn't imagine that you had a relationship but a lifelong since i was about 10 have been obsessed with this person who now is atrocious and was always atrocious. Work out from these names which one you think it will be because they're about 10 people.

It's like Adolf Hitler. I've been obsessed with him since I was 10. Since I was about 10. Honestly, some of the names in these. Cancel culture is truly a place for people to sit behind a computer screen with a superiority complex and tell people that they're awful based on one thing that they've done wrong and haven't heard the full story e.g what's happening with unjaded jade right now however properly cancelling someone e.g jk rowling or trump or pete evans is that's what i'm obsessed

with jokes is important it's important because they get de-platformed and discourse is started about why the information they're putting out is wrong but then again how many times has shane dawson that's the one wink wink james charles jeffrey starr etc being cancelled and people are willing to forgive them super easily possibly because they're white wealthy men yep basically no one is perfect cancelling people specifically influencers with a social consciousness who are clearly trying their hardest and make mistakes is ridiculous and is just people trying to feel powerful when they're just fucking sad all in all cancel culture sucks but de-platforming people is important when a person is genuinely a detriment to society mic drop yeah should we end it there

ultimately this cancel culture policing whatever it all feeds back to like morality and ethics. And ultimately, everyone's moral compass is going to be slightly off. But I think the problem we have with cancel culture at the moment is that you've got a group of people, say, who could largely have the same morals. But instead of finding like the common enemy and starting a revolution and like trying to change the world for what they would view as the better they start looking in on each other and trying to kick people out of the group or trying to prove that you are the the untouchable one and i think it's often people that have some racism in their family or have some homophobia in themselves and things like that that try and look at other people to try and make themselves like convince themselves that that doesn't exist

within themselves this is the problem is and this is what we say quite often is like if you're raised in a society where there is like patriarchy it's homophobic it's racist it's ableist it's all of these things of course you've internalized those because you live here too like you haven't been given you haven't been dropped off by a stalk from the void you don't exist in a vacuum yeah you don't exist in a vacuum you are like an amalgamation of everything that you've been shown did you watch the framing britney documentary i know you haven't watched it yet because well if you had we would have spoke about it not yet because the uk is just where can you fucking find it so many fucking articles cosmopolitan fucking everywhere going

how you can watch it you didn't fucking say in the article fucking everywhere going how you can watch it you didn't fucking say it in the article bitch they say how you can watch it and they're like wait how can i watch it though how you can watch it top tips wait two weeks well i found it um on like a britney fan site like a brazilian britney website it was really good but anyway if you have seen it great but if you haven't the gist of what I'm about to say is that you're watching kind of a sequence of events from like starting from like the 90s and the early 2000s, which I mean, I'm 24, you're 24.

I remember, I have memories of this time. Watching this documentary, it feels like so long ago that a young, literally like a 19 year old girl would be quizzed about like kind of like a boob job in such an overt way and like justin timberlake has said some bad things about you do you want to answer them and it's like uh what yeah in kind of the grossest way and it's really easy to think we have come so far but that that time is still in all of us yeah because my six-year-old self was doing that was mimicking that and i am still that

same person i haven't changed obviously i have changed massively but i'm still that person that has internalized all of those things still playing pokemon still playing pokemon still playing sims still loving harry potter despite the author being transphobic here we are mess of messes of people it's a big mess well this is why i wanted to talk about this message in particular because the fact that she mentions i mean we've been wanting to talk for ages about shane dawson and the fucking mess that is that kind of youtuber community i was so happy that this was brought up in terms of cancel culture because i remember at the time i was like i'm not even ready to discuss shane dawson because it has been well you'd kind of been groomed by him right like you were kind of a victim I was groomed by Shane Dawson to be honest but I it's funny how willing we are to forgive someone when we know we all knew he was releasing that fucking palette with fucking

Jeffree Star blah blah we all fucking knew his history but there was this huge narrative of he's changed he's changed he hadn't changed's no way. There's no way. He was still making all the same jokes. But it took this huge cancellation for us to see it. So I do see the case for cancellation in terms of you need a big social movement to make people look at the old stuff, look at his paedophilic behaviour, look at his racism, look at his fatphobia, look at all of these things. And yes, it's nuanced. But there is a case for that when it's white men getting away with things they should not be getting away with. And's disgusting and there are 12 year old girls with an attachment to him i built up an attachment with someone that is asking 10 year

old girls to twerk on the internet when i was 12 and i've continued to support him throughout my life with my views and with my likes but do we need a public movement to generate change no we don't yeah but also like yeah i mean obviously yeah there are pros and cons but do we need a public movement to generate change no we don't yeah but also like yeah i mean obviously yeah there are pros and cons but do we need a like a social movement to get someone to change because the problem is and a lot of people said on the stories which if you want to be in the combo come to our instagram at sephie and wing and we do stories all the time about the upcoming episodes and you give amazing insights that are far superior to anything we could talk about yeah we need to do a we need to kind of really make a moment of go to

our instagram so many people are finding us through the podcast go to our instagram at sephie and wing i'm wing by the way this is wings voice and this is sephie's voice stunning people were getting quite confused i think we do have i think people are getting confused people are getting the wrong end of the stick yeah they really are which is fine if i'm getting compared to anyone if i'm getting confused with anyone wings getting messages saying when did she know she was bisexual so we need to clarify who's who yeah but do we need a like a big social movement to generate change in one individual so a lot of what people were saying on the stories is that the problem is we're so ready to cancel people that

we actually have no idea about their behaviors really we don't know anything about them but we find it difficult to broach these topics amongst our friends like i know countless white people i really do know countless white people who were in like group chats with other white people where racist jokes will be made and they will not call out their friends but you would happily be like oh i'm not supporting grace fit anymore because i heard she like was not nice to one of her workers in her factory it's like well hang on hang on a sec is that i heard you last night yeah i heard you last night in your group chat sorry so maybe if we the problem the problem is then the more people get cancelled the more people get scared to have these real conversations with their

friends because you don't want to offend anybody you don't want to insult anybody and also you're insecure in your own morals you're insecure in your own goodness or not that you don't want to you know people don't want to have these conversations in real life they want to turn the lens on everybody else and say everyone else is cancelled and i'm fine and i'm just going to go away and like hide and never speak out about anything or blah blah blah this is what I mean by cancel culture or the idea of cancelling people becomes a way for privileged people to convince themselves that they're on the right side when often you're not on the right side in your life how in what ways are you on the right side of this when there when there are kind of there was I don't know how much we're going to

say about this but there was recently some fragmentation let's say in our bubble of the internet and people would often come to us or like how how what's what do you think about blah blah blah yeah which i love because we're all trying to work it out so basically over the if you follow us and if you're in this space you probably already know that over the past couple of months, there's been a bit of a blow up in terms of like the biggest kind of influences in this space. And it's being kind of called in the media as like a cat fight between two women, which is obviously... Which just undermines everything. To reduce it, yeah, to like a kind of two girls throwing their...

Books out of the pram. It's just ridiculous yeah exactly i think if you are finding yourself as a white person turning to non-black influencers to figure out how you should feel about a black woman being like publicly shamed and bullied we let's yeah let's stop there you can't like just and also you don't need maybe if you're not sure that's go away like you don't need to you don't need to be sure yeah you're not the fucking prime minister you're no one's asking for a fucking press conference from you i think what is important is that i know at the end of the day when i turn this microphone off and we stop recording i know i'm a good person

i'm happy with my morals and i'm happy with my behaviors and i know that i'm kind to people and blah blah blah and i know the same of you and i give myself well i give you seffy the benefit of the doubt because i know you the white people in their group chats with the other white people give the other white people the benefit of the doubt because they know them so you can give yourself the benefit of the doubt but know that you're doing and just be you could have confidence in the fact that you're doing enough and i also think and i said this to sephie and i don't know if i said this on the podcast but are you really that upset about a black woman being like shamed and not being credited for her work are you really upset about like a 21 22 year old white woman being cancelled and like bullied or are you just upset that your social group that

you looked to to form your opinions on has now split off and you don't know what to believe anymore now you don't know your mob has been broken your echo chamber has been broken and you need a quick fix to see which one is right who's wrong here when realistically there is no right and wrong black and white in that way what is wrong is a black woman being bullied and potentially having her work stolen but also what is not right is cancelling women that you would do the exact same behavior exactly a lot of the people that i see cancelling this person i don't know how specific we're going to be here i think be specific i'm ready to be cancelled but a lot of the people i see saying let's cancel let's cancel it's like don't tell me that if you were offered multi-thousand pound deals you wouldn't be doing the exact same thing or less that isn't

right that isn't right but don't fucking tell me that you're a saint yeah you're not and this is why you have to know in yourself and you do have to think like okay i'm like don't just say oh yeah i'm great like blah blah if you if you kind of know like actually you've got the evidence that you're not but this is why these things carry on is because it's easy to look back on history and point the finger it's easy to be british and look back on like american segregation and think oh they've put all the pictures in black and white so it was ages ago and like i know that if i was there i would be in the right i would be in the one person no you wouldn't you wouldn't necessarily i was saying to my boyfriend the other you wouldn't you wouldn't necessarily i was saying to my boyfriend the other night like if you were in um like kind of ancient rome so you've got

a not even so you've got a society of 5 000 people and you're in it and the 4 999 of them are gay what you think you're going to be the one straight one no of course you're sucking dick day and night we're just here emulating what we see yes bend over boy bend over now like it brings it back to so much of the things that people were saying a lot of people were using the phrase mob mentality and that's it it's conformity of every who's the person we're cancelling now this person everyone go and drag them which that is obviously the least productive thing because whilst we're all doing that within our kind of relatively left-wing progressive quote unquote circle,

the fucking right-wing fucking Tommy Robinson nutters, they're banding up. So what are we doing wasting our time doing this when actually Boris Johnson is voting to cancel free school meals? Fuck this. Like we're literally fighting over shit. Being angry at people who are on your team.

We always talk about this actually. If you're listening to this podcast and you're engaging in a space of like women's issues in this way we all basically here don't want women to get raped and murdered that's the crux of what we're getting at here when we talk about pedophile culture when we talk about sexuality all of these things we're basically talking about the fact we don't want women to get more hurt than they have been so stop going uh actually you i didn't like the way that you didn't want women to get more hurt than they have been so stop going uh actually you i didn't like the way that you didn't want women to get raped i wanted it to be that women didn't get raped like this yeah and it's like well the rapists are about to rape us quick

stop hating each other yeah well they're doing it right now like right now that is happening so whilst you're arguing and nitpicking over specific bits of language and specific phrases that were used because people aren't educated in every way that you have been educated and people's experiences are completely vast and different whilst that is happening i mean just look to your left there's a huge fucking fucking army of people coming to rape you it's true and also like it's trisha paytas always says this which so she always says you can edit anyone if you've got content from anybody you can edit and it's that tricia paytas always says this which so she always says you can edit anyone if you've got content from anybody you can edit and it's funny because you wouldn't have to try very hard to edit her to look like a bad person but not that i think she is a bad person but she kind of does that for

herself if you right now wanted to put together parts of this podcast that made me out to be a fucking chef you probably could you could string some pieces together to make it out like i was a pilot you could string some things together to make me out to be a pedophile you could it's the bit in scooby-doo 2 monsters unleash where he says you're just trying to make it look like i think callsville sucks and they cut it up so he says on the news callsville sucks and everyone thinks he thinks callsville sucks callsville sucks but fred never said that he said you're trying to make it look like i think callsville sucks scrappy mentality so i was watching an ig tv by africa brooke who everyone is already follows but go follow and she was talking

about wokeness she did a whole post as there are there's definitely a discourse going along like three hours long that ig tv right it was like a live ig tv and it's about cancelling wokeness like the idea of being woke like i'm not woke you can cancel me whatever i hate look sorry i hate to jump in but just between takes we were just saying cancel me go on cancel me like and we were talking about dicks so it's just like look i just want to remind you that this is like you can if you place someone as an authority you're only gonna like we've all got a bit of a problem with authority so you're always gonna have a bit of a problem with the way that they decide to lead etc it's so fucking true go

on take it away africa brooke africa brooke was saying the phrase that we are hearing a lot is hold people accountable you've got to hold people accountable but she was saying what does that fucking mean the whole thing if we've got to cancel people accountable but she was saying what does that fucking mean the whole thing of we've got to cancel people to hold them accountable in what ways are you holding people accountable and she was saying that more often than not when people say hold them accountable quote unquote it means bully them dox them out them come at them from all angles which isn't productive and i agree it's not productive in that way of holding people accountable but the ways in which you can hold people accountable are in your life yeah go small scale your life is pretty small

scale don't go for fucking a girl on the internet that said blah blah blah that you don't like because trust me that will be happy well it might not be happening and that can still happen but first of all you're fucking a guy that's homophobic i'm pretty sure right now yeah yeah your dad's saying that you can't bring home a black boy and you're just letting it happen look at yourself in what ways are you fat phobic yeah in what ways are you homophobic yeah i think there's a whole thing about the holding people accountable yes yes but stop using that as like a stock phrase also you don't have the power to hold people accountable because shane dawson did all of these things and he's still in his mansion

and he can you know pretending that he's poor but he's not he's living he's living a beautiful life he can is a dip in the pool a trip to the spa and those days obviously the whole world according to moi they just pretended that they hated me for a bit yeah you can wear that scruffy t-shirt for a bit with like yeah snot stains on it or whatever but you're still in a mansion shame you're still in a mansion you still asked a 12 year old to kiss you at a book signing when you were like 28 oh look let's not let's not but yeah it's true you don't have the power to hold people accountable if they're not but you've got lots of people right now you've got the access to so many things so many people and yourself and yourself yeah hold people accountable fuck yes but it's such an easy

out of like how are you doing how are you helping how what are you doing here i'm holding people accountable are you are you have you even engaged in any way in that or is it just a quick and easy out it's kind of i'm doing the work yeah i'm doing the work in what ways in what ways are you doing that yeah it's true i had quite a beautiful conversation with my cousin the other day and he is you know he's about 31 about he is um and he's white like he's irish and gay and we had a really interesting conversation about loads of things sexuality race etc the other day and at the end of the conversation he said i thought i was really forward thinking but speaking with you and it's like you're not even 10 years younger than me and you're already i feel like you're so much more

forward thinking than me blah blah blah we were having a we had a really nice conversation about so many different things and within part of the conversation a small part of it was talking about the massive black lives matter movement of last year that's still obviously continuing now and he was having trouble with the idea that like rioting is not something that we should really talk about because and also the word riot what the framing of the word yeah exactly it's like where like where were the riots like a couple people stole a pair of trainers like fucking insane he had said that he was originally like no like of course that writing is great not great or whatever like right to talk about writing is a distraction from the actual problem and then kind of was saying um you know the aggression or blah blah blah takes like makes people not want

to learn and the way that you can learn is by empathizing and blah blah blah which i agree the way that you can learn is by empathizing with people however by the end of the conversation he was like no no because i had said that it's kind of nonsensical to project your own view of like morality and ethics onto somebody else if i had been raised i've been raised with the emphasis of like stealing is wrong and i still steal every now and then like do you know i mean like i've been raised with all of these values are we really saying that yeah i think so are we coming out as thieves i think we? Like, I've been raised with all of these values. Are we really saying that? Yeah, I think so. Are we coming out as thieves? I think we're coming out.

I've been raised with the notion that in exchange for my goodness in society, in exchange for my behaviour, I will be treated relatively fairly by my government. That is not a luxury that someone in the South Side of Chicago had in June of 2020 throughout their whole lives that's not it doesn't make sense anyway so we got to the end of the conversation and he was saying how

he thought he was really really forward thinking but there's always still more to be done and he was talking about like his experience of being gay and like just the abuse that he'd had over the years and blah blah blah it was really nice to be able to have a really frank conversation because we both knew that we weren't going to cancel one another we're always going to have a place in each other's lives and we can have a really productive and like informed conversation where you're working things out together yeah because he so he had a lot of emphasis on surrounding yourself with people that are different to you and empathizing with them is the way to understand people and the way to make change which i completely agree and i was thinking about how growing up in london in like a really diverse

like in my school even was super diverse meant that i have so i can tell the difference between me and my boyfriend who grew up 45 minutes out of london and the difference is so stark not that he's like this crazy racist person because he's really not. He's actually like really on it. But I know the difference in the way that he was brought up because you can feel it. Is this about cancel culture? I don't know. It's just an interesting chat.

I don't know. Cancel me. Quick. I completely agree that you can feel the difference in people and that's why it's not about imposing your own reality onto people you don't fucking know. You don't know what people have been through and you don't know everything about people's lives. Yeah people you don't fucking know you don't know what people have been through and you don't know everything about people's lives yeah you don't so it's quite easy

especially with people on the internet because you have the illusion that you know them you have the illusion that they're your best friends i mean i think that about so many fucking people that i listen to their podcasts or that i watch on youtube i mean i fucking had that about shane dawson it's fucking embarrassing and even yesterday you and i had a really good um combo on race with me having a bit of a breakdown being like so i'm half west asian and half like white irish to me my conversation with you a white person was so productive and affirming for me even about the parts of me that especially about the parts of me that aren't white because i know because you're my friend and you're educated and it's um useful you you can you have a place to speak i think at the moment about cancel culture and wokeness and policing is that everyone's

just everyone knows they're going to say the wrong thing because of course you're going to say the wrong thing you're not going to say always the right thing are you of course not of course you're not but that means that then you can't speak no unfortunately if you want to put in the work you're going to offend people and you're going to say the wrong thing and it's not okay to be offending people because your impact is not exclusive from your intention just because you meant to be nice doesn't mean you're not being really offensive completely you need to be prepared to make mistakes basically this is what we wrote on the poll actually when we wrote if everybody's lives thoughts and behaviors were public,

would most people be canceled? 93% of you said yes. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Nature. I've got a gay rooster named Francois. Is so gay. These rams are gay.

I'm studying gay animals. Does that mean I'm gay? So why don't more people know this? I'm Owen Ever. I'm Lane Kaplan-Levinson. And this is a field guide to gay animals. A podcast about queerness in the natural world. The animal kingdom is queer.

And we are a part. Find a field guide to gay animals on Spotify, Apple. Or wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com We're afraid to speak because it's almost this idea that if you say anything publicly yeah online or anything then you've got to come out with this like weird disgustingly formal statement like a sort of a big apology it's like no no yeah and it's like i'd look i'd rather be trying i'd rather be speaking than not because i think more is being done when we come together

and just like chat publicly and like openly about things than if you just hide away from them because i think that's the british problem as well is you hide away from racism and pretend it's gone away and actually it just becomes far more insidious and sophisticated well it's like in silence yeah let it just breed and grow exactly i think we've been having this conversation a lot recently because the podcast is growing the community is growing all of this stuff we honestly think we're kylie fucking jenna we do think we're kylie jenna but i think we've had to have those conversations where it's like are we gonna speak or are we gonna not and it's like actually as everyone voted on the thing it's we're gonna get cancelled like yeah fucking so true yeah thanks for that so we put

on the story is it only a matter of time until sephie and win get cancelled everyone said yeah and everyone said we were your problematic phase which is something but story is it only a matter of time until sephie and win get cancelled everyone said yeah and everyone said we were your problematic phase which is but yeah it is only a matter of time we've been having to have that are we willing to risk that and it's kind of like yeah because also this is something africa brooke was saying in her thing actually it's like i exist in the real world and she was like i exist in the real world and so do you by the way and it hits it's like you're not gonna fucking come to your house these people aren't gonna come to your house and go you said this specifically wrong phrase and yes you should learn if you're saying a wrong phrase you should fucking learn it you should become educated from it yeah someone making a mistake we're all doing that in our living rooms anyway so we might as

well just do it publicly and be human exactly exactly be human if it's a cancelable offense to be human and to make mistakes and want to learn and have good intentions and be a good person then to be honest cancel the fucking whole world exactly a lot of people have bigger platforms and don't give a shit they actually actively don't give a shit if women are raped they don't give a shit if black people are being killed they don't give a shit if trans people are getting beaten up yeah they don't give a fuck and they've got huge platforms so people that are trying genuinely trying and getting cancelled keep trying it doesn't sit right this is a consequence of all these conversations is the fact that and i said this to my cousin and he was really impressed which is it's obviously nowhere

near enough but it is evidence of change so yeah we should celebrate the small change but also make sure that in our own lives we're all doing as much as possible but i was saying in by the end of university every single term the first semester we went around and gave our pronouns as like an introduction like oh i'm erin like i'm doing this like i'm interested in politics because of blah blah blah and my pronouns are she and her next on to the next and that in a million years would never have happened even when my cousin would have gone to uni and he's only seven years older than me it is a symbol of change because also even the idea of pronouns would be completely foreign to

for example my grandparents or foreign to us even like five years ago it would have been like oh right okay yeah i'm learning and that's not to say that the symbols of change are like the evidence of tangible change like on the ground but that feeds into all realms of society if you are proactive in learning which i think if you're occupying a space that's talking about cancel culture and all of these topics then you are what matters is that when you stop listening to this podcast and you go to bed at night you're thinking am i that bad am i okay okay so i like this message this person said i like wokeness isn't in that it's rooted in the black concept of staying awake but cancel culture is acting like a cop.

And it's like, exactly, yeah. Everyone wants to act as if they're staying awake and being woke. But if your wokeness is just, if you're a white person, you as a white person navigating through the online world as a policeman and pointing your finger at all of the people that you want to say are wrong. Counterintuitive. Yeah, it doesn't, that doesn't work. That's's not acceptable it's not your job to be the the woke police it's not your job to sort of police everyone's in which ways are they racist in which ways are they racist when

you haven't even investigated that in yourself taken one step in your real life to look at your own racism and even the fact that you feel like you have the authority to do that as a white woman or a white person it's so fucking true because i remember saying to you and i you have the authority to do that as a white woman or a white person. It's so fucking true. Because I remember saying to you, and I think I said this to you yesterday, this is ages ago. This was like before, maybe it was just before the Black Lives Matter like really picked up in like the June of last year.

It was just before that. COVID summer times. It was COVID summer times. Yeah, which we're about to get right into. Summertime sadness. Yeah, the summertime sadness vibes. Take two, I think is coming but anyway can't wait maybe i will see you in the summer i mean could you imagine oh don't literally when you guys see us together on the story no because when i see you in the same room honestly i can't cope oh i'm like when they see it's like yeah when also when i see

you and i'm yeah you're like let's monetize it it's like i don't want to see you unless it's a fucking camera there i'm a cash cow to you and nothing else when i see you you'll just be shaking me up and down trying to get coins out of me animal crossing dive hitting you with my shovel literally but just before all of that i remember we got one message and this was we were a lot smaller back then um and it was a white girl had messaged us i don't know if she really even kept up with us all that much probably not like she's probably not never gonna hear this she was like a couple of them whatever stephanie and wing like they're so annoying bye but i remember she sent a message of like actually like you are and i remember saying to you yesterday

like it's stuck with me since then because i was the one who read it and it's and i remember saying to you yesterday like it's stuck with me since then because i was the one who read it and it's and i remember saying to you like listen stephanie like have you ever have you ever wanted to be white don't say her name she's not here also how many stephanies are there there's a million stephanies look steph steph is about you steph honestly harry i now speak directly to you but have you ever wanted to be white have you no you haven't right because you are completely white right so please don't come to me and talk to me about how i should feel about anything about whiteness or race because you you haven't been there well i think it's that people people look and they assume oh it's two white girls yeah but they don't see the nuance

and they don't see that it may not be the case because i think it's easy to say wing you have no understanding or she's just spicy looking she's just exotic looking but actually and even this is again something with cancelling that it's like it's taken me a long time to even learn that I can speak about some experiences with race because I do experience race and culture in a way that white people is different from white people only knowing race as like a an academic phrase because you get to live as the default it's like no i lived my whole life literally like in child i wished and wished and wished that i would just be completely white which breaks my heart and i'm allowed to say that and i'm not scared of being

cancelled for speaking about rape because i think part of it is like i don't want to step on anybody's toes it goes without saying it goes without saying i don't think i'm taking up space by being like look this is my little experience and i'll shed light on it here and there here's just a little insight into my life absolutely it goes without saying that my existence is not the pinnacle of racism i'm not the poster child of oppression by any means and my experience with race in no way compares to what black women experience and what my experience would be if i was a black woman but i'm allowed to speak about the nuances of race and culture because i have experienced it

and it also the longer i don't speak about it the further i perpetuate the white supremacy in me that makes me lean so much into my whiteness so cancel me bitch i'm fucking ready steph come and get me well that's particularly annoying because also it's just assuming your identity and also getting it kind of telling you what you are and saying something that doesn't align well we get a lot of wanky messages anyway not even about right we just get a lot of people being like actually katniss wasn't performed now i can't say that well no i got some well we did get someone that said actually i went to film school too and blah blah and i just wanted to, I didn't go to fucking film school.

She didn't go to fucking film school. You've assumed that I went to film school. And this is the problem with cancelling people on the internet, is you just fill in the blanks. So if I give you a comment about, oh, I love Harry Potter, and you infer she's transphobic, and there are so much rooted in that. It's a massive conversation.

But let's have the convo. Yeah, let's have that convo then. Let me assure you that I'm doing all that i can it's also funny though because it's not very often we've never got you're transphobic because you like harry potter not yet it's always the message always comes from a cis white woman or a man more often than not but it always comes really does somebody that is sitting within their privilege yeah actually it's transphobic that you would like Harry Potter. Well, it comes from a lot of guilt as well. It's totally white guilt.

It's white fragility. It's the idea that it's like, no, it's you. It's you. It's pointing the finger rather than looking at. I didn't ask you to speak. Like, I'm not saying, oh, you're white. So you're like, Stephanie, you're probably more fucking racist than me. Like, I'm not saying that because I think you didn't need to come to my DMs.

You don't need to prove anything. This isn't about the optics of who you are. This is about your actions in your day to day. Exactly. This isn't a black tile moment. This isn't the black square moment. This isn't post a black tile and then move on to your racist life. Yeah.

It reminded me, remember we were talking about Shane Dawson. I think this was like before he'd been cancelled and I was, oh no, maybe it was after he'd been cancelled and I was cancelled, quote unquote, whatever. And I was saying like... Cancelled, uncancelled, then cancelled again, then uncancelled, then cancelled again. This one's the final one though. The final cancellation, yeah.

You can't, you can't make someone care about something if they don't. You just can't. Because I remember saying like, look, if I was Shane Dawson, I had that massive platform sitting on so much money and a massive audience and I grew up in a small town and it made me upset to be like gay or it made me upset to be feel like I was fat I could really easily like partner with Diet Coke something that I love and go to my small town and I could run these youth groups for like gay boys

who are like insecure about the way that they look just off the top of my head I remember saying that to you and i thought that's a fucking good idea and it came to me naturally because that is naturally what i would do what you would want to do yeah and maybe that is what shane dawson would do and there's lots of i'm look i'm not in that position so i don't know how intimidating it is to have the massive platform but it's not that's not what he wants to do because what he wants to do is make a video about um fucking analyzing jake paul's career it's like that's bizarre completely bizarre and platforming all these awful horrific people the crux of it is you can't you can't make people care if they don't but also lots of people do care and they care as much as you so take the lens off take the microscope off but the crucial bit is whilst

you're analyzing does jenna marbles give a shit about black people which the answer is probably there she probably does she probably does and yes she's probably not doing enough probably and those two things can coincide yeah whilst you're doing that trump's fucking inauguration's going yeah or whilst while jenna marbles is doing that you're doing far less speaking about jenna marbles not doing it whilst you're arguing about a girl whether she hired the correct diversity checker which she should have done you haven't been offered a book but if you were offered a book would you be hiring a diversity checker what would it look like exactly i don't know if that would have crossed your mind but some people that

are doing the minimum are doing more than you sorry there's something on my fucking computer screen i really wanted to get that off it looked like I was kind of like tickling your little face through the webcam. I was like, fucking get that crap off my screen. ASMR. It's from our messy breakfast that we just had. Messy breakfast. From our messy breakfast. Okay, go on then.

It's kind of, um, what are they called? Tubby. Tubby custard. Tubby custard. That's beautiful. Which one was your favourite Teletubby? Did you have one? I think I fancied someone. Oh, well, it was 100 was 100 tinky winky i think i fancied the purple one is that tinky winky the purple one because i also fancied milo a lot milo a vibe a vibe milo is fucking

spiky hair fit as fuck spiky hair a vibe so oh my god i wanted to be fizz so much from the tweenies but everyone said you're such a bella you're bella such a bella and you are bella through and through bossy boots you are honestly the amount of times i was fucking called bossy boots fuck off yeah you hate women fuck that it's not fucking real just say you hate women and go you wanted to box me in when i was three years old just say you hate little girls and go you can't you misogynist cunts you hate her you hate that child because she doesn't want to talk to the boys well she'll tell the boys what she thinks but anyway bella's an icon what was fizz's personality fizz didn't have a personality

but she had beads in her hair and a little pink flowery skirt well that's all you need really isn't it to be a young girl in the early 2000s and that was enough to be like i don't want the one with the personality. I want to be that one with the pink skirt. Jake's personality was that he was scared. Jake's had a fucking weird banana dick on his head. Yeah, yeah. It was kind of like he was on fire.

Google the tweenies. If it could just be a British thing, I don't know. I was fully obsessed with the tweenies. The tweenies, yeah. Do you know what was weird? Where were they? It was almost like a little play group. But why were there four people and two adults?

I mean, I'd love, it's kind of there in my dreams. That's, I'd love to be there. Max and Judy. Or maybe it's kind of like a childminder situation. There was one episode of the tweenies that I was obsessed with where there was a cartoon dragon. And I used to cry over the dragon and say it's the cutest thing I've ever seen and cry because it didn't exist. That's so you. That it's the cutest thing I've ever seen and cry because it didn't exist.

That's so you. That's the most you thing I've ever heard. Kind of like it gave me that Puss in Boots feeling where you know Puss in Boots holds the hat and its eyes go so big. And you know it's the cutest thing you've ever seen. Yeah. And I couldn't believe it

and I said it as my screensaver but the dragon, I'd love to see it now because it's probably not that cute. The dragon from the Tweenies, a red dragon. Should I Google it? Google that motherfucker.

If it's not cute, I'm going to it it's episode 21 oh oh god they're annoying that's cute and you wanted it what is a pet it's fucking ugly as shit i used to like cry over it weird as shit anyway cancel culture i was gonna i'm gonna follow that with my point was about caroline flack so now it doesn't really fit oh god okay no go on I wanted to talk about the fact that last year had suddenly sharp change of tone from the tweenies dragon to Caroline Flack last year there was a huge moment I feel in the discourse about cancel culture whereas everyone's known cancel culture has been fucked for years but cancel culture became a big thing in the uk anyway last year when caroline

flack died and she had basically been bullied bullied bullied by the tabloids for like the months before her death leading up to her death and there was this huge moment where it was like hold the tabloids accountable if you pardon the pun of accountable though it's classic hold them accountable but also do fucking nothing to them do fucking nothing to the tabloids let them get away with it but there was a huge moment where it was like is this gonna change is this gonna change are the tabloid magazines and newspapers gonna be allowed to talk about celebrities like this bully them to the point that they end up dying i think there was a moment where it was like an acknowledgement that this has to change women can't be having this and men can't be having this but it was specifically

targeted at this celebrity who really there was a domestic violence case there were things that she'd done wrong but there was so much nuance there that she hadn't been afforded she hadn't been afforded any nuance and she ended up um dying by suicide and it's i think and it's horrific there was a really interesting point that so many people actually made about how cancel culture only works if you're trying to cancel a woman and i thought it was quite interesting to liken it if i was at uni and i was still doing like anthropology and history and politics and those sorts of things i would liken it to the witch hunts yeah and that this is and i know everyone does that but like i'm not gonna get a fucking a star for that but no you would it is the kind of easier thing of if you

know you're cheating on your husband quite good to point your finger at your neighbor who's a bit of a bitch and get her cancelled instead of all eyes are on you yeah completely and you're now a witch and we're gonna kill you well this is the thing if you know that you wouldn't hire a diversity checker it's pretty good to look at the girl that didn't hire a diversity check and go you didn't hire a diversity checker or you hired the wrong diversity checker, which you did hire the wrong diversity checker. Yeah. But would you have hired a diversity checker?

Would that have crossed your mind? There are plenty of male authors, white male cis authors, that didn't even cross their mind and they've made millions. I don't know what it is. It wouldn't even occur to them as a thought. And they don't care. Yeah, they don't care yeah they don't care i feel like all of this comes back to this point that i wanted to make actually that slumflower said

chidera eggeroo said on her stories about it's easier to stand up this all comes back to this point i feel it's easier to stand up for like the black woman in your mind yeah it's easier to stand up for the black woman kind of 60 years ago. The hypothetical black woman, I think it was. Yes, the hypothetical. It's easy to stand up for hypothetical black women. Yeah, just and it works for anyone. It's easier to stand up for someone who is hypothetically being oppressed and you can understand that as a construct in your mind

than to identify it in yourself when you are seeing it directly play out in your life and in your circle and when there are things that you can do it's easy to say oh i'm not racist i'm not racist because yeah you might not have racist thoughts racism isn't about you're going around pointing at people calling them the n-word it's absolutely far more well it doesn't mean that you hate black people even it doesn't mean that you have any active thoughts it's more about this passive undercurrent of privilege and kind of emotions you have and vague feelings that you have that you are kind of as a white person like able to do things and

you almost see yourself as like the default it's like your your experience is the default and anything else is othered it's not meaning that you're actively going out and being racist and also it's about situations where you have to give things up like there are situations that you have to be prepared to maybe like i don't know your life but i know for me like and i can think of one like explicit example where some an opportunity was brought to me and by making it clear that it was very important to me that it wasn't that i'm not like i'm not token yeah and that i'm not gonna work for diversifying your feed and that i is there a black woman here basically and you immediately get shut down on the phone i said to him um just to make sure like if this is what i'm doing in a group what does the group look like like is this an inclusive group and he was was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I thought, you're fucking lying to me. Yeah, liar. You're fucking lying to my fucking face. Yeah. And that's, this isn't like a publicly. You're not getting any cred for that. You don't have to go around screaming. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, you don't go around screaming about the things that you do. Just make it a habit when you're learning. But, and be prepared to miss out. It's like, yeah, I really could have done with the money, but like, whatever. It's important that these things happen because if you're, look, if you're not but and it's be prepared to miss out it's like yeah i really could have done with the money but like whatever it's important that these things happen because if you look if you're not going to do it who is and i also think if you're a people pleaser like me it's like what you're going to kind of people please your way through life is that what you're going to end up

in the back of a kkk meeting because you never said no to anyone or you never set any boundaries or you never established your beliefs or stood up for anything that you actually cared about you need to be prepared to call things out in your day-to-day but look like it's just there's nuance here obviously i think more often than not it gets confused with the competition of i am publicly this i'm publicly this but i think when you're doing that so publicly there's an assumption that you're doing it privately but are you and i just think the main message the main fucking message is that it's important to think for yourself and not look to kind of white influencers or icons to be telling you what to think and also that it's so much more important to be doing this privately in your life rather than posting a black tile cancelling someone online or doing any of these

like performative or optical allyship um i believe is the term any of these things they're not they don't mean a lot they're like literally like one percent of the things you should be doing but i what people are actually doing is nothing but just them just that as if that's kind of enough or kind of you take your selfie with why i'm no longer talking to white people about race but you don't fucking read it and you don't tell your racist brother to read it and you don't do anything other than take a photo of it just because you want to look like you're doing it without actually having to confront the things within you that make you uncomfortable the reality of it yeah and those symbols of change are important it's a symbol of

change it's not change so fucking true but it's true like yeah let's just all look forward to the day that we get cancelled and if you're doing anything publicly we're gonna get cancelled too like but i know at the end of the day when i turn this podcast off i'm happy with who i am and i'm happy with my behaviors do you think cancel culture is kind of a thing that's going to like continue or do you think we've reached a peak? Because I very much viewed the Caroline Flack thing as like, fuck, this is like a boiling point and this is either going to go one way or the other now. I think we're at a boiling point for sure. Yeah.

I think we're at a boiling point for sure. But I also think it's interesting to see the turn of a generation with social media. And I know a lot of people speaking on the stories about pulling up somebody's tweet from 10 years ago where they said something homophobic is not the same as like actually interrogating whether they are today homophobic i remember seeing somebody tweet it was like a kid tweeted you know she was only 18 when she said that and she's 28 now whatever they were talking about a public figure who had said some like some homophobic things some classist things whatever when the internet was first um like emerging made yeah emerging and this person this kid had commented saying like well look they said that when they were 18 that's not an excuse because

you know i'm 13 and i would never say that and it's like yes but you're 13 in 2020 or you're 13 in 2021. So of course you would never say that. Versus this person was 18 in like 2007. So you're only, as we said, if you were in a society where 5,000 people were gay, where 4,999 people were gay, you're not going to be the one straight person. You might be, but the chances are you're going to emulate what you see

because that's what you do. And if you were 18 in 2007, you see because that's what you do and if you were 18 in 2007 you would only be emulating 2007 and i just watched a documentary a couple of days ago where i saw that the early 2000s were fucking crazy we're fucking mental and that lives in all of us if you were there you've internalized lots of different things you are a product of this gross society as long as you know that you're acting and doing what you can to move beyond the grossness i'm happy with that and in lots of ways it's like that's not enough but in lots of ways it kind of is enough like it's not enough to be acknowledging it within yourself because it needs to change well we still have the temptation to say

i promise you i'm doing enough yeah i mean like you're tempted in this episode to be like but guys i promise you like i promise i'm not that bad i know i'm saying i'm gonna get cancelled but i'm not that bad it's like of course i'm not but it's also like i don't want to be seen as giving people permission to take their foot off the gas and like not care about anyone that's the problem yeah i get you that's the thing that i want to make it really fucking clear it's that we're not by any fucking means no telling you that you're doing enough right now because actually what i think is really no sorry i'm really overstepping you're not do it do it go please go if you don't go i'll kill you another thing that i wanted to say was that what's really been i think disgusting to watch over the past couple of months is not the fact that people are coming a lot of people are

coming out and saying i'm not claiming wokeness anymore i'm not an activist anymore whatever i'm not a social justice warrior anymore fine i think that's great what i don't like is the public reaction specifically like from it's like young white women saying oh like finally like grim i knew this was ridiculous it's like just say you're knackered from caring about other people and go yeah just say you don't give a fuck just say you wanted a break because you don't really care that's what i don't really like is that people think now they have permission to not try and be decent. Well, this was one of the things with,

I mean, we're being so vague, but we're being vague about this thing that's happened in the feminist world of Instagram, blah, blah. You fucking all know what it is. Well, because I don't want to reduce it to like a cat fight because it's more than that.

No, and it's not. But one of the most damaging parts of this potentially was that another prominent figure who happened to be a black woman came forward and said actually this other black woman is difficult to work with were the words she used and that she is she is in the wrong here she is not kind of to be trusted that then gave a lot of white girls permission to be like see i knew she was a difficult woman to work with yeah but then also then these other white girls from the other side wanted to come to that other black girls dms and say how dare you put down that black woman it's like literally how dare you come to her dms how dare how dare because realistically all of these people are stunning hard-working amazing women

that is really what's going on they are trying they are in this world and they are trying and as long as you're trying you don't have to be publicly trying putting a black square on you're trying you don't have to be storying that you're trying the whole thing to me is meanwhile kind of cut screen on this side we're all arguing over here cut screen on this side yeah look at the state look at the state of it it's kind of suffragist suffragettes it's like yeah let's just pick a pick a route and go stop hating each other also you can definitely hear i'm wearing fuck this just end the episode i'm wearing a leather blazer in this episode you can definitely hear me and kind of ross gellering about the place like squeaks

mcgee that's the sort of shit i hate when i'm editing it cancel me for it cancel me for it you are so bad when you kind of um you always have your airport little case around click click click because all i hear on episode like cut that little click cut that click you're gonna hear me it's you're gonna hear me weeing in a minute because i really need to weigh you're not doing that on the podcast you're gonna piss yourself on podcast and also you've probably listened to this episode and there are loads of parts that you disagree with as such there are probably loads of episodes of ours i hope there are yeah exactly there are loads of episodes of our women speaking about internalized misogyny and you disagreed with us for 20 minutes of it or rape culture or um fucking paedophilic beauty standards or all of it you

probably disagree with us all the time good i'm sure i disagree with some of the things that you would say i disagree with my friends all the time like sephia you made a good point before we started recording that it's like my mum offends me all the time i offend my mum all the time she's my mother we offend each other we apologize like i'm i offend my best friends all the time i say the wrong thing all the time and so do you by the way absolutely so do you but there's this idea that as soon as you have a microphone in front of your camera in front of you or you that you're posting on social media that basically means as soon as you have someone looking at you whether the audience is imagined or not suddenly there has to be this illusion of perfection that you have never said a right

word you know all the terms you're on top of all the latest discourse academic journals but it's you do have a responsibility but i think most people might maybe not most people but i think a lot of people will have the responsibility because you care yeah i think a lot of people take that responsibility seriously a lot of people don't absolutely but yet here they are with a platform jake paul logan paul it's not the africa brooks of the world that i'm gonna be angry about waving my finger saying you're not doing enough no imagine imagine and i think there's a difference between like personally like not really caring for somebody and just choosing not to follow them or turning up in their dms every day to say you're not doing

enough on this you're not doing enough on that you could you could we could say that about a million things i could turn up to your dms tomorrow and say you're not doing enough for the jewish community don't you know that antisemitism is rife at the moment and you're being really um reductive about things and you're being really reductive about things and you're not progressive enough? And it would probably be fucking true because it's true for me. I'm probably not doing enough.

But lo and behold, I'm a fucking human being and I'm trying and I'm going to continue to try. As we say, you could paint me out to be a fucking pilot of a private jet if you wanted to. We could make it look like Caulesville sucks. We could make it look like Caulesville fucking sucks. You find the evidence for what you choose to believe, works in every situ it really does it's the quote of all quotes it really is well i hope from this episode what we've given you what we we hope to convey i want this to feel like one we care two but we're not scared like

i'm not scared to be human and fail in front of you i'm not scared for this to kind of come across completely wrong because the things i say in my living room come across completely wrong the things i say on the phone come across completely wrong but we're trying and we're working we can all look at ways in which we are going to make the changes in our life to be there to show up to hold ourselves accountable all these words but what do they really mean like what are we actually asking of people yeah and what are we actually asking of ourselves let's like actually do it i i really can't wait for them to hear this i i love you i fucking love you person listening i love you this obviously comes we're coming so much obviously has gone unsaid in this episode and i was just gonna say we're obviously coming from a place of privilege in this episode in life

anyway we're coming from so many different places of privilege but also it just we're coming from a place of privilege and that we're surrounded by you listening who is so amazing and like you do like this podcast is the bones of this podcast is everyone's insights every week which are not ours like it's the bones of this podcast is and i hate to say this community but it is this community and i don't have enough word it's my guy like my squad is there are real people here it's the squad yeah it's my girl's squad real like opinions and like thoughts i just think it's really nice so find those spaces but keep breaking the echo chamber and don't be too hard on yourself and don't be scared cancel culture is

such a fearful thing i think it's easy to think it can never happen to you yeah trust me no one is no one is too pure to be cancelled but according to the poll everyone thinks it'll happen to us which i can't wait i can't wait for the day i wonder what it will be i wonder what it will be that gets us um i don't want to say because it will get me cancelled by saying it i was gonna say it would be like a harry potter thing yeah probs it would be like we spoke about something and people like they shouldn't have spoke about that or like they said it wrong they didn't know how damaging it was which is true i'm so sorry i'm sorry in advance yeah what basically whatever we've done we're so fucking sorry we were joking and we didn't mean it and we love you yeah we i i just i'm really excited for this to come out and i know

we don't normally do this but i just want to say at the end of the pod, like we really do value you. Like if this is your first time listening and you enjoyed it or you hated it, you're definitely not still listening. Or if you've been here for a while, like it really is valued. If you hated it, if you're saying you hated it

and you've got this far in, I think you kind of didn't hate it. Like I think you're lying to us. I think you are in love with us. I think you're obsessed. Sefi and Wingstanstan see you next time unless we're cancelled between now and next monday then we'll see what happens we'll see maybe this is the episode that gets us cancelled and we just never make a comeback because calls or sucks calls they'll sucks guys because it sucks