Cancel culture: I was uninvited from speaking at a feminist rally

Last Saturday, I got cancelled. I was on my way to give an invited speech at a feminist rally in Sydney’s Hyde Park on sexual assault prevention. But before I had a chance to speak, I was disinvited.

Evidently, my “values” did not “align” with those of the organisation, I learnt via text. As a feminist activist, researcher and educator of four decades’ standing, I was a little surprised to learn this. I’ve been left guessing why I was deplatformed.

I sat on the Board of Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia for many years, and I am aware that there are diverse views on how we prevent sexual assault, how we educate people about it and how we lobby for change.

So what was I going to say at the rally? Well, here’s a soundbite from my non-values aligned speech.

When I was a TV reporter in the early ’90s, I came into work one morning to learn a young woman had been raped and murdered on her way home from a nightclub the night before. Her body was found dumped by the side of the road. Dumped. Like a bag of garbage.

In a bid to get additional information about her movements on the night she was murdered, the police had a placed a mannequin dressed in the clothes she was wearing at a train station. It was intended to jog people’s memory in case they’d seen the killer.

A producer told me he wanted me to do a story about the woman. His highly original angle? What was she wearing? I told him to “get a life”. He promptly put a different reporter on the same story.

Diversity has always been a strength in the feminist community. We can agree to disagree while working towards the same collective goal.

Of course, there have always been hardliners in the women’s movement. Some on the radical feminist left advocate for separatism. Me? I like having male allies on our team. But I don’t want rad feminists cancelled. I want to debate them and listen with genuine respect and curiosity to their views.

This brings me back to the current obsession with “cancelling” people rather than hearing them out. Anyone who reads a newspaper knows that the academic Randa Abdel Fattah was disinvited to this year’s Adelaide Writers Week. That resulted in the whole festival imploding, leaving many South Australian wineries short of a few thirsty customers.

My view? I disagree with quite a lot of what Abdel Fattah says. I particularly object to her reported claim that there “should be no cultural safe space for Zionists”. I’m a Zionist. I believe in the right of Israel to exist. I also believe in the right of Palestinian people to be free of oppression. I pray for a peaceful two-state solution in a region Arabs and Jews have co-existed in for millennia.

The current wars in the Middle East will not be solved by simplistic, binary thinking. That’s pretty much what got us here in the first place. But I’d be pleased to debate Abdel Fattah on that topic. She deserves to be questioned with respect.

I have a strong hunch that I got cancelled at the last minute because I wrote a column for this masthead two years ago in which I argued for better dialogue over the Israel/Hamas war at my university. I advocated for less shouting of slogans such as “You’re on the wrong side of history” and more discussion.

I expressed my concern about seeing open antisemitism. And by that, I don’t mean opposition to the actions of the state of Israel in Gaza or the West Bank. I mean actual instances of Jewish staff and students feeling intimidated, psychologically and physically unsafe.

The response I’ve had to that column shocked even me. And I’m pretty shockproof these days. I lost friendships. I got more than the usual volume of hate mail. And, in response, I just finished writing a book about why we need to talk more and shout less. It’s titled Cancel This: How Social Media Is Polarising Us.

The left of politics has become obsessed with identity politics. The Israel-Hamas war is but one example. Progressive politics is stronger when we stay pragmatic, celebrate our differences and avoid elevating extraneous issues over a common cause.

Catharine Lumby is a professor of media at the University of Sydney.