In an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Matt Damon and Ben Affleck discussed cancel culture in Hollywood as part of their ongoing press tour for Netflix’s “The Rip.” According to them, some canceled performers would rather go to jail and serve time than cope with the constant chaos entailed with “cancel culture.”
Rogan defined getting “canceled” as “this idea that one thing you said or one thing you did, and now we’re going to exaggerate that to the fullest extent and cast you out of civilization for life.” Regarding cancel culture’s eternal character, Damon responded, “In perpetuity. Because I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever, and then come out and say, ‘I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’ The thing about that getting kind of excoriated, publicly like that, it just never ends. And it’s the first thing that… you know, it just will follow you to the grave.”
Damon is well-versed in handling online anger. In an interview with The Sunday Times in 2021, he notably battled cancel culture by claiming that he ceased uttering the F-slur “months ago” because his daughter had written him a “treatise” on “how that word is dangerous.”
“During a recent interview, I recalled a discussion I had with my daughter where I attempted to contextualize for her the progress that has been made – though by no means completed – since I was growing up in Boston and, as a child, heard the word ‘f*g’ used on the street before I knew what it even referred to,” Damon penned an articulation. “I explained that that word was used constantly and casually and was even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003; she, in turn, expressed incredulity that there could ever have been a time where that word was used unthinkingly. To my admiration and pride, she was extremely articulate about the extent to which that word would have been painful to someone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of how culturally normalized it was. I not only agreed with her but thrilled at her passion, values, and desire for social justice.”
He added, “I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind,” Damon continued. “I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys’. And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”
