Jenna Marbles and the Dark Side of Cancel Culture

Summary

Jenna Marbles' departure from YouTube amidst controversy over her past content has sparked a broader discussion on the complexities and consequences of cancel culture.

Abstract

The article discusses the departure of Jenna Marbles from YouTube following backlash over her past content, which contrasts with her later responsible use of her platform. Despite her efforts to evolve and align with modern social sensibilities, the pressure of cancel culture led to her decision to leave the platform. The incident has ignited a debate on the effectiveness of cancel culture, questioning whether it truly serves its intended purpose of accountability and social justice or if it disproportionately affects individuals who show genuine remorse and growth. The article suggests that the culture of cancellation may inadvertently harm those who are most willing to change and learn, while those with more resources and less accountability often manage to maintain their status.

Opinions

Jenna Marbles is recognized for her positive influence, including her early support for non-binary individuals and her willingness to address past problematic content.
The article criticizes the inconsistency of cancel culture, noting that while Jenna Marbles has been held accountable for her past actions, other controversial figures with similar or worse transgressions continue to thrive on the platform.
The author argues that the punitive nature of cancel culture may discourage personal growth and reform, as it fails to provide incentives for individuals to improve themselves.
There is a concern that cancel culture's tendency to ostracize individuals could hinder societal efforts towards rehabilitative justice and the reintegration of those who have committed mistakes.
The article suggests that cancel culture disproportionately affects those who are most vulnerable and have the least amount of leeway to recover, compared to more privileged individuals who can more easily buy back their social standing.
The author emphasizes the need for a nuanced conversation about cancel culture, one that moves beyond binary debates and considers its actual impact on individuals and public discourse.
The support received by Jenna Marbles from her audience and other content creators is seen as a potential catalyst for her to reconsider her departure from YouTube.

What happens when good intentions result in catastrophic outcomes.

Jenna Marbles speaking at VidCon 2012 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. Courtesy of Flickr by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It isn’t unusual for YouTube’s top brass to be embroiled in some sort of controversy, as that has come to define the platform’s standing in popular culture. Between filming live suicide, convincing someone that their longtime best friend is dead, and paying people to hold signs saying “Death to All Jews”, gaffes by popular YouTubers aren’t exactly running in short supply. The latest round of them issued against Jenna Marbles though, couldn’t have been a further departure from the rest.

At several occasions, Marbles displayed a great deal of responsibility with the way she wielded her enormous platform. She was one of the earliest popular creators to embrace the presence of non-binary people in her audience — even before the political weathercocks swung in her favor — and there’s never been a more pronounced arc of redemption than the one she went through. She ditched YouTube’s old conventions to accommodate the political sensibilities of a modern audience and as a result, has shown great accountability regarding the subpar themes of her old content–that’s what’s being currently leveraged against her, and it’s why she’s preliminarily decided to depart the platform for good.

Oftentimes when public figures are exposed to the horrid of their prior lives, they reframe it in the context of their erstwhile ignorance. Where Marbles deviates from the norm, is she doesn’t try to make up any excuses about it–she felt compelled to go through a deep moment of self-introspection after her past has come back to haunt her, and it’s an earnest display of what a responsible individual would do with their huge platform if they feared the adverse consequences of wielding it to great harm.

But Marbles for sure didn’t have to go as far as removing herself from YouTube–while it might seem sensible to kowtow to the demands of an angry mob, what an indiscriminate application of cancel culture often disregards, is that if its goal were to improve the material conditions of all by marginalizing society’s filth, the loss of Marbles from the platform is a net negative for all involved. The Paul brothers, PewDiePie, Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star all remain amply compensated as they commodified their presence to the nth degree, but Jenna Marbles somehow doesn’t get a second chance because she’s most susceptible to calls of holding her accountable… ? That logic seems ill-considered at best.

What the goal of social exile seems to be, is to hold those responsible for harm to account. But Marbles has already channeled much of her changed attitudes into the body of her content, so it seems awfully inappropriate that she’s being punished for being bad, when most serving her such accusations are unlikely to have stayed ahead of social justice issues that far back as is often the implication. That we get to judge past actions harshly — while we disregard our own troubled history since it was occluded from public view — is a lob-sided interpretation of personal reform, and dare I say even hypocritical.

If we ask people to make honest attempts at improving themselves, while giving them every incentive not to, cancel culture will have caused more harm than good. If we continue to punish those who made an honest effort at changing the course of their lives, shown great remorse at what reprehensible charades they partook in… are we even a society that can abolish prisons and undertake the project of rehabilitative justice as we’d like to often boast? A culture that ostracizes liberally, is one ill-equipped to handle the consequences of reintegrating those who’ve committed far more heinous acts than saying the wrong things on camera.

Like Natalie ‘ContraPoints’ Wynn put it astutely in her motion-picture-length essay on cancel culture, what seems to happen is those most vulnerable have the least amount of leeway to recover, while those living in impenetrable ivory towers of prestige — like Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle just to cite a few — get to buy back their reintegration, making the whole point of cancel culture in its current form practically moot.

The debate over cancel culture is in itself a rhetorical minefield where one side is adamant that it is absolutely necessary to the good function of society, and the other wields it as a counter-cultural bludgeon against the liberal left. Semantic quirks aside, what’s often debated are the merits of cancel culture, but rarely talked about is its affect, and how it seems to hurt those who abide by its directives more than those who don’t.

Fortunate for Marbles, the outpour of support might be enough for her to consider a more generous read of her criticisms. That withstanding, we need to have a conversation about cancel culture that is neither mired in ignorance, nor zealous opposition–the health of our public discourse depends on it.