“Oh No, My Favorite Show Has a Bad Actor on It, What Do I Do?”

My big pet peeve: Publicly announcing “Oh no, the news has come out that celebrity X is a bad person. Now I am obliged to hate and never again watch the art that they were involved in.”

As far as I can tell, there is no other reason to announce this other than performative allyship.

I have no problem with people independently deciding that a certain star repulses them too much to watch something or that learning about abuses off-set leaves them with too much of a bad taste.

However, announcing it out loud is simply contributing to the basest elements of cancel cultures, and pressuring other people to act on what are ultimately harmful elements to society. There are so many wrong elements in the idea that art is negated because a bad person is involved in it:
1. It encourages us to feel good about ourselves by judging celebrities rather than empower ourselves to do good in our own lives.
2. It encourages oversimplification of people and encourages us to see people simply as good or bad or margianalized and unmargianalized as easily defineable things
3. It’s harmful to every other person who ever worked on that movie or TV show
4. It’s not particularly even across the board. There are plenty of bad people who are given a free pass. The court of public opinion is more fickle than any other system of judgment we have