‘Let’s cancel Bret Easton Ellis’: is millennial ‘cancel culture’ really a thing?
The author annoyed young people this week by criticising the practice of withdrawing admiration for offending celebrities
The novelist Bret Easton Ellis annoyed young people in an interview this week. “I mean, what is millennial culture?” he asked. “There’s no writing. They don’t care about literature. None of them reads books.” The only culture they have, he said, is “cancel culture”. But what is that?
“Someone said it about me today, ‘Let’s cancel Bret Easton Ellis’,” he explained. “The word gets used all the time, ‘We’re going to cancel this person, she shouldn’t have tweeted that, she’s cancelled’.” Indeed: where once you might “cancel” a train booking or a TV show, it became possible in 2013 or so to “cancel” a human being, meaning to withdraw your admiration.