Baby's first PR crisis

On my dear friend being canceled

I knew that my co-founder might get canceled someday, it was a risk that we’d discussed. If you’d just met her, you’d think: Scout? Who would cancel Scout? She is just so sweet. I’ve previously written that she’s the most charismatic person I’ve ever met, and I stand by this, and a big contributing factor is that she has charitable warmth for everyone she encounters. She’s one of the most reliably kind people in my life. But she also has a filthy mouth and a contrarian, edgelord-y sense of humor. She’s one of the many people who leaned right politically in response to the censoriousness and insanity coming out of much of the left, as well as the striking fact that many Democrat-run cities are becoming unlivable. You know, she listens to Red Scare and she doesn’t watch what she says. It’s risky to be that way right now.

Here’s what went down. She liked a right-wing meme on Instagram on the night of the election, something about the death of the fake news media. Some hall monitor type saw this, dug up a bunch of stupid jokes Scout made on Twitter within the past few years, and got a cancel campaign going, with the simple angle being “Scout is evil, we hate Scout now, she was our favorite person yesterday but now let’s rip her apart.” Within hours, our retailers were being hounded by hundreds of emails demanding to remove our products from the shelves, and some less popular fragrance people on TikTok—who had previously assumed Scout was woke because, I guess, she knows how to use an adverb—were making videos about how they were shocked to learn that Scout is a bad person, full of performative outrage, seizing their opportunity to climb the ladder. 

It is really clarifying to see a cancel mob come for someone you love. It becomes so startlingly obvious that none of it is about justice, or reconciliation, or improving the world. It’s pure scapegoating. It’s a game where the target has crossed the line of “not a person anymore”, so now your righteous task is to ruin their life in whatever way possible. 

Along with lots of insightful commentary like “it’s Joever,” Scout has received death and rape threats in the name of progressivism. Vicious rumors about her private life are being bandied around by gleeful keyboard warriors, thrilled at having the chance to make a popular woman suffer. Some years ago, Scout’s mom, who suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s, scammed some money out of a homeless veteran. The full extent and nature of her mother’s crime isn’t clear to me, but whatever went down led to felony charges, so it’s public, the kind of dirt a mob is motivated to dig up. This might tell you something about the circumstances Scout grew up in and fled from, and also how painful it is that Scout’s now having to parent someone who never really parented her. And it might tell you something about the cancel mob that they are now hounding Scout with accusations that we started the company with the money her mother stole. (We raised money from investors like normal businesspeople, you freaks.)

Nobody seems particularly shy about the fact that this is plain bullying and nothing else. Scout didn’t graduate high school and now “high-school dropout” is one of the most common insults being hurled at her by the mob. Aren’t you guys supposed to be the saviors of the downtrodden, the compassionate ones who really care about the working class? In point of fact, Scout didn’t graduate because she tested out at 16, got a job at a bookstore before she was a legal adult, and then moved to Japan to model—she is whip-smart, fiercely independent, and more creative than any of these drones.

Here is her response to the mob, which I think is perfect. 

@scoutdixonwestAnd a very merry touch grass to you all

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And here is Beauty Independent reporting about it.

If you haven’t checked in on cancel culture on TikTok recently, one weird feature of it is that it’s an actual culture now. Like, they have memes. In the avalanche of comments on Scout’s videos, you will find references to other cancelations, and formulaic phrases that people now repeat at these struggle sessions. It’s a choreography, and everyone knows what their job is. I watched a few of the videos about Scout that other influencers were posting, but after a couple, I felt completely bored, even though I was also furious. I just couldn’t pay attention to the monotone of a massively distributed propaganda office repeating its tired theme.

This weird hive mind quality was slightly surprising. I was also a little surprised that we are still doing this—it all feels a little retro. Is this 2018? I thought the culture had collectively realized that canceling doesn’t do anything positive, it just makes society a little dumber and angrier every time it happens. But the only thing that really surprised me is the staggering amounts of personal cowardice and dishonesty I’ve seen out there. People just turn on you. Last week our perfumes were all over TikTok, being praised to high heaven for their combination of mass appeal and originality, and now the same crowd has rushed to write reviews on Fragrantica saying that they “smell like fascism” and are cheap and unoriginal. Meanwhile, Scout has a friend in the perfume world who has confided in her that he’s afraid of being cancelled for his privately Republican views. Guess who was one of the first to publicly denounce Scout when the mob got going? And this person is a grown adult. Imagine living that way at forty.

The dumbest accusation leveled against Scout is that she’s somehow polluted the leftist safe space of the perfume world. Many have said that they feel “deceived” because it turns out Scout isn’t a liberal—so weird that she has taste but doesn’t vote like you! Relatedly, many commenters have scoffed at the idea that conservatives could enjoy niche perfume, opining that Scout won’t have any customers now. This is a simple disconnect from reality. The perfume world is not a woke space, that’s just a little slice of TikTok. A moment’s research about the world’s top beauty companies would reveal that many of them are run by conservatives. One of the most heralded perfume houses in the world, which plenty of these woke PerfumeTok people make content about, is run by the royal family of Oman. Last time I checked, they weren’t on team ACAB. Amusingly, I’ve seen attempts to drag one of our perfumers into the cancel campaign—neglecting to notice that the very same perfumer worked on Donald Trump’s perfume line.

A couple of observers have asked me whether I approve of Scout being conservative, or what I have to say about her Tweets. I find the demand for approval creepy, but regardless, I do have something to say about both topics. 

First, the jokes. The very worst thing that anyone dug up on Scout—and they have really been trying to find bad shit—is a Tweet reply she made to a photo of a character from Gremlins with weird-looking slit eyes and a caption that said “I like holding my cat’s ears back so she looks like this”, to which Scout replied “same except I call it Chinese mode.” This was dashed off to the tiny followership she has on a semi-anonymous account with I assume with about three seconds of thought, it wasn’t intended as a broadcast to planet earth. And my primary objection to this joke is that it is extremely stupid. Come on, Scout, are you nine years old? If you think this joke is genuinely hurtful, I respect that. I can see it: I faced some antisemitic mocking of this register as a kid, and Jew tropes still bug me a little. But if you think that everyone who makes crude but mild racial jokes of this kind should be bullied by a mob and treated as equivalent to the KKK, you get to feel good about yourself at the low low cost of losing every election forever. And anyone who is appalled by this silly tweet, anyone who is absolutely shaken by it, clearly hasn’t hung out with working class people for more than five minutes, or watched the average comedy special.

Which brings us to the political angle. I am a politically ambivalent person who wants there to be a strong left and a strong right wing. And to these people on TikTok, I want to say: it is not a winning strategy to become the team that is known for trying to destroy anyone who hurts your feelings. It might feel therapeutic in the moment to bully the cool girl who says something uncouth, or doesn’t vote your way this time. But: you just lost the cool girl. Great work. Do you think she’s going to stop being cool and influential just because she’s not on your team anymore? In my perception, Scout is a swing voter by nature, but this definitely pushes her in one political direction.

Repeat these purity tactics at scale, and it’s political game over for you, indefinitely. Does that sound a little fanciful? Well, this same demonize-the-bad-person reflex is apparently what caused Kamala to decline going on Joe Rogan—she didn’t do an interview with perhaps the most popular broadcaster in the USA because she thought her progressive staffers would be offended by the association. I’m sure some TikTokkers would have been upset! And this kind of dysfunctional neuroticism, writ large, is how you lose ground with minority voters in a race against fucking Donald Trump. It is not the path to a cosmopolitan utopia. 

As a friend, I am sad and angry about what Scout’s going through. We just wanted to make perfume, but I guess everything is political now. As a businessperson, I am not intimidated. Cancel mobs are not composed of customers. Since this happened, sales have been strong. (Our discovery sets are now back in stock, in case you missed them before they sold out!) We’ve had many offers of support, and are accumulating allies who will help us grow. A couple of retailers dropped us, a couple more reached out. Moreover, while Scout was tough before, she’s tougher now. “I think they just made me unkillable,” she said to me. 

I am thankful to everyone who stuck with us. To those who didn’t, I really hope that someone remains your friend if the mob comes knocking.