What Happened to Doja Cat?

With no punches left to roll with, let’s analyze her career-ending blows.

( @dojacat / Instagram)

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Doja Cat has quickly made herself the divine leader of pussy power anthems. With absolute bangers reclaiming female sexuality to catchy TikTok dances and clever metaphors, Doja has infiltrated social consciousness with earworms incapable of leaving our heads.

After her 2019 release of Say So, which was popularized by TikTok user @yodelinghaley’s incremental dances, Doja Cat received unprecedented success in mainstream pop. Although she was well-known for her 2018 Mooo! declaring, “Bitch, I’m a cow,” Doja struck success in her feline mastery over the English language.

Female rappers are dominating pop culture, from Meg Thee Stallion’s Savage, Ashniikko’s Stupid, ppcocaine’s 3 Musketeers, women are finally objectifying their own bodies to a song worth throwing ass for. Unfortunately, the pussy is both talented and complicated in more ways than one.

While Doja Cat’s pussy may be fluent in three languages, her Twitter feed seems addicted to every forbidden word in the dictionary. Back in 2018, Doja was canceled for calling openly bisexual artist, Tyler the Creator, the F-slur in a tweet in 2015. She later justified this tweet by saying her use of the slur was non-hateful in nature...so the opposite of a slur. After issuing a sincere apology post-expected backlash, Doja stumbled back out of the spotlight.

Fast forward to 2020 and her recent collaboration with City Girls for their song Pussy Talk has been met with praise, instigating yet another TikTok trend involving hot girls doing hot girl shit (no, literally). But something seems off…

Could it be the fact that Doja was called out for writing a song based on an extremely racially-insensitive slur in 2015? Or the fact that allegations emerged about her hanging out in racist chatrooms this May? That doesn’t seem very heartfelt.

The song was written in 2015 but was never released; that didn’t stop people from finding out. What Doja now describes as “maybe the worst song in the world,” she used a slur associated with victims of police brutality as a rhyme scheme. 

On May 25, 2020, Doja took to Instagram Live to unpack all of the controversy surrounding her alleged racist behavior. Explaining the meaning behind the uncovered song, Doja clarifies the song was never intended to demonize victims of police brutality and instead “take back” the word. (Pussy needs to learn the definition of connotation and historical significance, then.) 

As for the allegation that she purposefully interacted in racist online chat rooms, it may not be grounds for cancellation, though. Using a website called TinyChat, Doja entered a chatroom called Tea Time where users discussed entertainment news. Some still persist that the allegations that Doja participated in racist hate speech during this time are unfounded.

In 2019, however, Doja admitted to Paper Magazine that she’d “make offensive jokes and do things sort of out of the box” in response to offensive behavior that occurred in the chatrooms. She never outwardly admitted to racist behavior but “horrible, horrible language” doesn’t sound very acceptable to me.

Looking down upon “woke hip-hop people” doesn’t make you special, it makes you deliberately ignorant. Being one of the boys shouldn’t come at the cost of trivializing racism.

Despite Doja Cat taking ownership over the song and accountability for its disgusting nature, her behavior in these chat rooms remains unknown, yet profoundly sus.

With her career only soaring, it raises a question about the longevity of cancellation. More often than not, being canceled is just a socially determined hiatus for certain artists. How long will it take for them to wait it out until either their critics forget or they’ve moved on?

Personally, I did notice, Ms. Doja, and you’re running out of punches left to roll with.

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Kaylinn Escobar is a Staff Writer at Rowdy Magazine. She's fond of underrated claymation, sitting in extravagant chairs, and yearning to the sound of the 2005 Pride and Prejudice soundtrack. She adores classics, healthcare, and re-told historical fiction. Reach out to her at kaylinnescobar@ufl.edu for more info.