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And he says, I wonder what it's like to watch football as a girl.
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To which I replied, like, are the rules different?
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I'm Gabby, and you're listening to While I've Got You.
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Let's start the show.
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A couple weeks ago, I was listening to Ju Afualu's podcast, the comment section, and she's in a hilarious conversation with comedian Ida Osman, and they sort of take a detour to talk about how we don't really show each other grace anymore, that everyone's responsible for their own education, knowledge, experience, and that experience is somehow supposed to make us geniuses.
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They drew the parallels between sort of cancel culture and the fact that everything can be captured, documented on our phones, not only by other people, but by the things that we post in our own personal digital footprints.
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And it's kind of leading us to a place where we're about to cancel grandma because she said something problematic at Thanksgiving.
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When the inverse is an opportunity to show grace, extend a hand, offer a different perspective, and maybe educate and bring somebody out of whatever problematic or ignorant thinking that they had prior to your exchange with them.
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This episode and specifically that conversation, as well as my reflecting on moving to LA, knowing one person at 24 and sort of having to start over and build out a community here, in addition to a friend who has just moved to New York and is sort of in the same process.
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I really started to consider and think about the fact that maybe cancel culture is a contributing factor to why it's so hard to find and maintain adult friendships.
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Especially when anything you do or say can live online in perpetuity and you can be canceled for it at any moment.
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Sort of like that um expression where you can't judge yesterday's actions based on tomorrow's knowledge or today's knowledge, the future knowledge that you may have.
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We're all kind of living in fear of the things that maybe we did in our youth, in our ignorance, can somehow be held against us in our future.
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And if that can happen to us individually, we have to be very mindful and vigilant about the people that we allow into our lives.
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And unfortunately, that judgment starts from the very beginning.
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Day one, the second you open your mouth to meet someone new, the judgment is so severe and so harsh and so quick because there are very real consequences to being associated with someone who is problematic.
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You yourself can bear the repercussions of their canceling.
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I think there's a general sense of understanding that cancel culture is in a lot of ways harmful to the collective, to the culture itself, because it doesn't allow for this grace, it doesn't allow for growth, it doesn't allow for a person's evolution.
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It is steadfast in its definitiveness.
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And I think regardless of our best intentions of this only impacting our culture, that trickles down and impacts us on an individual level as well.
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And while that's not necessarily a bad thing, of course, we should be beholden to the same standards that we place on others, there's of course some negative side effects to that.
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Even as someone who needs grace being extended to them, there's a level of concern and fear and trepidation.
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For example, the both sides of the argument is as someone who is well informed or not currently problematic, operating at the peak capacity of my knowledge and my experience in a certain area, I may keep my circle around me very tight-knit.
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Anyone who is not at that same peak of knowledge and understanding that same acceptable level of group think, I keep away from me.
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Because in the future, even if it's not so distant, something that that person says, they can get in trouble or be canceled for.
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And then that falls back on me.
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Sort of like you are a representation of the people that you keep around you.
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And on the flip side, if saying something out loud or leading with curiosity and saying something that is seemingly problematic, you get so much shit for it.
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For reaching out and asking questions because they're not the right questions or they're worded and not the best way.
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If doing so gets you pushed out or ostracized, it's often safer to not be curious, to live in ignorance and bliss.
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In general, I think it's better, and something that I also very much need to work on, is to be a little more compassionate and show a little more grace, be a little bit more engaging and inviting people into more difficult conversations.
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We might learn something in those conversations ourselves.
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I definitely want to give the caveat that I don't necessarily feel this way about predators, but that's just me, and that's just this podcast.
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I'm talking explicitly about good, uninformed people that have a tendency to adapt based off of the information that they obtain.
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This episode is for all of those people that are doing the work or have done the work and are still looking for their community, but are finding it difficult to
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engage and get beyond the surface level of poorly worded or borderline problematic rhetoric.
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It's kind of a really good example of people who don't live in LA or are not from LA typically say Angelinos are fake.
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That seems to be the general consensus of newcomers.
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I say this as a newcomer, and I will also give the caveat that that has never been my experience of Angelinos.
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And that is sort of the blanket statement.
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I'm going to catch myself in a contradiction right now and say that I kind of look at it as a red flag if you come to LA as a transplant and then say that you can't find any genuine connections because everyone's fake.
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And I'm realizing as I'm saying that, like I said, I'm a work in progress.
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God's not done with me yet.
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That me judging someone's judgment of other people is the same silo that I'm talking about, showing more grace and extending kindness and compassion and a better narrative and more information to people instead of being like, yuck.
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Maybe it's not that all Angelinos are fake.
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Maybe you don't attract genuine people.
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Anyways, crazy tangent.
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It's happening in real time.
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That's that's what this podcast is.
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But it really makes me wonder, since that has not been my experience, if the pushers of this Angelinos are fake narrative are just people that couldn't or wouldn't engage in conversations that went beyond whatever they had deemed as fake.
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And I think that that takes time to differentiate and delineate.
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For example, my friend who just moved to New York said that she's having a hard time connecting with people because not that everybody in New York isn't genuine, it was something like the people that she's meeting while she's out don't care about the same things that she cares about.
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And while that sounds like a really good justification for to friend or not to friend, I'm also curious about the depth and the level of conversation that's happening in passing in a loud and crowded bar.
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You know what I'm saying?
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I'm wondering if you notice that correlation in your life.
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Maybe it shows up as you being willing to cut someone out of your life or not even willing to engage or having a clear or a clear seeming view of a person based off of something that they said and not necessarily the content of their character.
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Like they can have a million great qualities, and then they say homeless instead of unhoused, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
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It won't be me.
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You're not gonna catch me slipping.
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That's that's not what we say.
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That term's not in use anymore.
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Like something like that.
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That's an example.
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Well-meaning person that is uninformed, or using not great uh language, or still adopting or upholding language that we as society have shifted away from.
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I think the biggest example of this, and because, like I said, God's still working on me, I don't necessarily have any regrets about how this played out, but I think this is a really good example.
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When I first moved to LA, I had one friend that I went to middle school, I believe we started, we met in middle school, and definitely we we went to high school together.
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Um, we went to different colleges, so kind of lost touch after high school.
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And then I saw that she posted on Instagram that she was moving to LA like three months before I was moving to LA.
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So it timed out pretty perfectly.
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I moved out here at 24, essentially knowing no one but one person.
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Anyways, a little background on me and my BFF.
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She kind of was in the same situation where she knew me, but she also kind of knew some other people, had gone to a Super Bowl party, and then a couple of weeks later had a sort of gathering at her house.
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Long story short, because this was years ago, we start talking about twerking as one does at a party.
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Twerking comes up.
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That's a normal thing.
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Don't look too much into it.
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And while we were talking about twerking, a content creator came up who was either a choreographer or just knew how to throw that ass in a circle and was posting videos about it on the WWW.
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And so, since we weren't all familiar with her, and if she's a great dancer, the conversation has shifted to well, let us see how good of a dancer we're watching this girl twerk on the telly.
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And a man, because there is always one, says, you guys can't be watching this.
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Woman twerking.
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Again, that's what we're watching.
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You guys can't be watching this like the same way as I am.
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Like, just as a man, me watching this woman shake her ass on TV, it's just different because I'm a man.
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Which in 2021 is 2022, in 2022, when I was in LA, as a newcomer,
it was problematic.
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It hasn't gotten less problematic in 2026.
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Um, I was perplexed because I think he was trying, there was some LGBTQIA 2S plus erasure happening in that moment.
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And so I sat silently because I don't know this person.
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I don't know this man, so and I don't have to know this man.
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So whatever.
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But someone in the room says, a woman specifically in the room says, if you're watching this video as someone staring at a woman with a great ass and thinking, I tap that, then we're definitely watching this video in the same way.
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Which to me was a great response and made a lot of sense.
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And we moved on.
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And by we mean moved on, I mean that was strike one for me.
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My my alarm bells are going up.
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I don't know if this person should be in my circle because he's definitely gonna keep saying some problematic shit.
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And when he gets called out and canceled for the consequences of his actions, I don't want no posts coming up with me and him in a photo together, and now everybody's saying, release the files.
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Hello, come on, come on, somebody, release the files.
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I don't want that problem.
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So my alarm's already gone off.
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That was strike one for me.
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When he gets up and leaves the room, strike two very quickly became me learning that while at said Super Bowl party a couple of weeks earlier, everyone's watching the Super Bowl, the sports ball.
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And he says, I wonder what it's like to watch football as a girl.
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To which I replied, like, are the rules different?
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It's been many a year since that happened.
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I never saw the guy again, which was great for me.
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And I think in that moment, there was some level of it's this one area that's making the alarm bells go off.
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But he was polite in every other instance.
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He was funny, he was kind, he brought something to the party, if I remember correctly.
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And it seemed like, though it had come up more than once in this very short time of knowing him, this very narrow-minded, problematic viewpoint, it could have been a great opportunity to say, he's great in all these other areas.
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Maybe we just help him fix this one.
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As I have already hinted at, I do mean that that is a possible stance to take for good-natured, uninformed people who have a tendency to evolve and adapt their worldview, their language, their viewpoint based off of information that's presented to them.
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And I am very clearly and explicitly not talking about predators or pedophiles or predators who become president and no pedophiles.
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Just so we're clear.
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In that situation, what could have been chalked up to oh, that's just his personality.
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We can help him fix that.
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Turn into me being like, yo, who is this dude?
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Get him out of here.
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This is such a terrible representation.
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To be one of the first people I meet in LA to be like this is not feeling like it's gonna be a great adjustment for me here.
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So the question is: could the difficulties in building community be a byproduct of our individual relationship to cancel culture and the fact that you can be canceled at any moment, at any time, for any transgression?
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I have a recurring fever dream of me getting canceled for being on Facebook and telling my same-sex friends I love you, and having to feel the need to end it with hashtag no skittles.
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Because God forbid she or anyone else drew conclusions about my sexual preferences from that message.
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And I'm sure that fear, that fever dream, that one day, you know, God willing, this podcast is successful, that one day someone's gonna scroll back into the archives of Mark Zuckerberg's platform and say she's homophobic because it was such a big deal that people would think that she was something as seemingly negative as queer.
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And I think that that has percolated, ooh, better word, that that has permeated the way that we give people chances and the way that we have connection.
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Now I'm not saying, just in case I haven't been clear, give the billionaire pedophile a chance.
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And I'm definitely very explicitly saying, and don't make his BFF president.
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All I'm trying to say is that maybe we try not to let a person's lack of eloquence when speaking be the reason why we don't create community or relationship with them.
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Don't even let someone's lack of a bigger picture, a clearer image be the reason why we don't interact with them.
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Anyways, that's all for now.
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I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I'll see you next time.
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Bye.