There’s something decidedly familiar about ‘cancel culture’: anyone whose ever observed cliques of girls in action should recognise immediately what’s going on.
Cancel culture might seem like a phenomenon of the internet, but, while it’s been turbocharged by social media and smartphones, it long predates it. In the 1980s, back when Mark Zuckerberg was freshly hatched on whatever planet his birthing units hail from, Professor Geoffrey Blainey was finding out the hard way. A few years later, Louise Dickinson found out even harder.
Blainey’s sin was to point out, from his seat atop the mountain of historical scholarship, that rapid demographic change rarely ran smoothly for the societies it affects. In particular, Blainey argued that mass immigration, even then at rates never before seen in human history, was a recipe for social dislocation. The ghosts of the innocent slain at Bondi can’t speak, but the frightbats of the left would out-bellow them anyway. Blainey was swarmed by the Red Guards of student politics, while his former colleagues ran and hid, or worse, joined in the witch-hunt out of a cowardly need for self-preservation.
Poor Louise Dickinson should have been a feminist icon: at just 22, she had single-handedly taken her magazine, Lemon, from a photocopied indie fanzine to a semi-glossy, semi-serious publication (I still own a couple of issues and the fantastic cassettes that came free with them). “It had become the hip, street-level quarterly magazine to read, with a run of 2000 copies,” remembers Edwin Garland. “Half were shipped overseas to be distributed by the music super-chain, Tower Records.”
Then Dickinson wrote a flippant, typically punchy review of folk-pop duo, Club Hoy, with the characteristically punk, off-hand, one-liner, “These girls deserve a good raping.” Hardly Dorothy Parker, but quite clearly not a serious invitation to sexual violence. Nonetheless, the proto-cancel culture mob pounced. The legacy media wolf-pack soon joined in. Within a short few weeks, Dickinson’s years of hard slog were wiped out. Her magazine was banned by nearly all retailers and her career and reputation were destroyed. Shortly after, Dickinson took her own life.
This was all, remember, a decade before ‘The Facebook’ hatched in a Harvard dorm room.
The internet didn’t create this kind of unhinged bullying: feminine psychology did. What happened to Dickinson was a microcosm of what happens whenever the mean girls gang up. While the female-dominated legacy media and educational establishment shriek and wail about the ‘manosphere’, the femosphere is writing itself large all over social media.
Two years ago I read the book Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons, and it felt incredibly familiar. She explores the covert forms of bullying often employed by girls, but not only girls, in school – shunning, the silent treatment, gossip, ganging up on a single person.
Simmons interviewed dozens of kids. She found that bullying is pervasive in the school system but tends to pass unnoticed by adults. Surprisingly, the bullies tend to be one’s best friends. Most bullying is inflicted by friend groups who turn on the victim suddenly.
This is the psychological machinery that has metastasised from the schoolyard into HR departments, university common rooms and editorial suites. Boys tend to settle disputes with a clumsy, immediate brawl behind the bicycle sheds: bloodied noses, bruised shins and a handshake afterwards. Female aggression, as Rachel Simmons documents, is non-physical but utterly lethal. It operates not through direct physical confrontation, but through relational annihilation.
The weapon of choice is the rumour mill, the sudden freeze-out and the co-ordinated ostracism designed to destroy a target’s social standing. The victim is made an untouchable overnight, usually by the very clique she considered her closest companions.
Worse still is the suffocating blanket of sanctimony that accompanies the cruelty.
Even more shockingly, Simmons found that the bullies often claimed not to have known that they were doing anything wrong. They seemed genuinely attached to their victims and thought they were being helpful. They view the hazing, shunning and slander as a form of tough love.
Sound familiar? It is the exact pious patter spouted by modern woke inquisitors when they hound an errant author off Twitter or pressure an employer to sack a dissident clerk. They never admit to raw, vindictive malice. Perish the thought! They are simply ‘holding people accountable’, creating a ‘safe environment’ or performing a vital moral intervention. This is what journalist Jon Ronson also found, in his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Most of the mob members he interviewed not only didn’t care about what they’d done – they were proud of it. These soulless inquisitors saw themselves as the righteous heroes.
Underneath the high-minded prattle about community safety lies the sheer, primal thrill of the hunt. There is an intoxicating adrenaline rush that comes with joining an inner-circle lynching bee, knowing that by throwing stones at the designated scapegoat, your own status within the tribe remains secure. The Queen Bee nods, the courtiers fall into line and the herd stampedes over whoever committed the crime of being slightly too independent, too loud or insufficiently deferential to the ruling consensus.
Modern cancel culture is nothing more than this middle-school pathology writ large across the civic square. We have constructed an entire media and corporate ecosystem based upon the toxic etiquette of the playground cabal, where conformity is enforced through reputational execution and any protest is dismissed as proof of guilt.
The internet did not invent this spiteful tribalism: it merely provided the mean girls with a megaphone, an algorithmic pitchfork and a global audience of eager accomplices.
Forget Andrew Tate and his tiny-dick followers: the real monsters of social media are the feminist harpies like Clementine Ford and her flabby-armed army of hunting witches.
