Jennifer Aniston is still trying to decode cancel culture

Poor Jennifer Aniston just doesn’t quite understand the youth and what they’re into—at least insofar as the whole “cancel culture” thing goes. “I’m so over cancel culture,” she laments in a new profile for The Wall Street Journal. “I probably just got canceled by saying that. I just don’t understand what it means.”

Can you be “so over” something if you don’t understand it? Of course you can, although you run the risk of coming across as “old man yells at cloud.” But Aniston brings up a good point, or at least a point that a lot of other people have already brought up: “Is there no redemption?” she wonders. “I don’t know. I don’t put everybody in the Harvey Weinstein basket.”

Well, not everybody needs to go in the Harvey Weinstein basket; surely there are other baskets to choose from. In fairness, Weinstein looms pretty large over the cancel culture conversation, particularly for her: Weinstein reportedly wrote that “Jen Aniston should be killed” in response to a reporter reaching out in 2017 about an (untrue) allegation that he’d non-consensually groped the Friends star (via Variety).

In reality, Aniston never had any truly frightening encounters with the producer. “He’s not a guy, you’re like, ‘God, I can’t wait to hang out with Harvey.’ Never. You were actually like, ‘Oh, God, OK, suck it up,’” she recalls for WSJ. “I remember actually, he came to visit me on a movie to pitch me a movie. And I do remember consciously having a person stay in my trailer.” (Weinstein says that “she never had any uncomfortable instances with me.”

Even beyond the Weinstein of it all, Aniston has a sense that the youth have become too sensitive. “[In the past] you could joke about a bigot and have a laugh—that was hysterical. And it was about educating people on how ridiculous people were. And now we’re not allowed to do that,” she said in a previous interview. “There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive. There were things that were never intentional and others…well, we should have thought it through—but I don’t think there was a sensitivity like there is now.”