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When Somebody You Know Is “Canceled”
We’re all kind of tired of cancel culture. Sometimes we’re oscillating from “It’s bad” to declaring that we are canceling somebody.
J.K. Rowling, for example, has been pretty thoroughly divorced by the Harry Potter fandom after years of issues.
Michael Jackson has been posthumously canceled more than once. Scarlet Johansson keeps ending up on thin ice.
And numerous books have been pulled, usually because of content issues, but there was also the woman who said some racist stuff about a Washington Metro employee and got into a legal battle with her publisher.
But what if it’s somebody you know?
When you Know Them
Over the weekend, I got a shocking message from a professional colleague asking if I knew anything about the behavior of an “online predator.”
The individual concerned was a cis man who wrote erotica under a female pen name. This is fairly standard in the industry; erotica written by women tends to sell better and a lot of male writers use female or gender neutral pen names.
He had taken it too far. He was sexting and catfishing lesbians, forming friendships with people who had no idea he was in fact a man.