Two days ago I sat down for dinner with a good friend. We met in part because both of us, with several weeks apart, were the target of the cancel culture and found ourselves out of a job.
His sin was that he was critical, in a piece in a paper, of a virologist who was giving advice to the German government. In response, the virologist, who is known for his hot temper, tweeted P.'s phone number and within several minutes he got hundreds of calls, including some that had anti-Semitic threats.
So, we sat there, both of us, in the Israeli restaurant in the Mitte, just so we could feel like we were in Tel Aviv and talked about our experiences.
P., who works for one of the largest papers in Germany, told me that this entire thing made him feel sad. He even said that a big piece at the Der Spiegel, which appeared several days later, helped him more than anything else make his case.
I looked at P. with a glare and tried to glean from his eyes whether there was something I could decipher. Maybe he was playing it all down because obviously things are going to make him feel bad. Maybe he just can't believe how hurt he feels, I thought. But his eyes said nothing. It was clear as the driven snow that he had thicker skin than me.
Because ever since that incident several weeks ago, I told him, I feel like I have been living in a snowball that someone has shaken really really hard.
It is not that I wake up with panic attacks every morning or go to bed at night with panic attacks.
But the trust I had in this world has been deeply shaken. For at least 20 years, I have considered myself to be a progressive feminist who wholeheartedly supports the interests and voices of the minorities who are considered disenfranchised.
I have never been a great fan of self-pity and obsessive victimhood, but I have been in favor of affirmative action quotas and changing the media landscape in order to create greater diversity and to shatter some of the economy's patriarchal structures.
For the past 12 years, I have railed in my writing, and even through my shouting, in the clearest possible way against these structures. Until my "sisters" decided to "cancel" me and redefined me as a privileged neoliberal feminist who acts in a discriminatory and prejudiced way against the disabled.
In recent weeks, ever since that terrible day, I have been reading Francis Fukuyama and Ezra Klein. I have been watching clips of Ben Shapiro and Jordan B. Peterson and the young YouTuber Natalie Levin.
I want to truly understand what happened to my beloved progressive bubble, which I had considered to be my political home for a very long time, and to discover what's happening with me and what being banished has done to me.
Where do I stand now politically, I asked P., and he just responded with a laugh: "Sit and wait; you will now transform into a conservative and in three years time you will start rejecting the idea of quotas."
So what's going to happen with this famous progressive feminist who has infamously become a neoliberal just because she wants women to be self-sufficient financially? What will become of this progressive feminist who has rejected hostile approaches toward children and is unwilling to hold negotiations using Marxist terms on her offsprings? Perhaps I had been a conservative for quite some time, I asked myself. Perhaps I had just convinced myself to believe in this progressiveness of mine.
As days go by, more and more of those snowflakes from this unimaginable snowstorm fall and my visibility is getting stronger bit by bit. Who am I going to be, when the skies clear? I have yet to figure this out.
