Cringe :3
Hewwo friendos :3 Greetings from your favorite Griffindoor sun, Hufflepuff rising. Soooo, I did a thing. I wrote a substack about cringe. Yeaahhh, methinks it t’was a pretty good idea myself. Why did I decide to write about this? Because my sick and twisted brain is so sick and twisted that it happy dances at the thought of making you squirm. This one goes out to all the super heckin’ amazing cringe appreciators out there and all their smollest doggos too =D
I am prone to cringing. It is not an overestimation to say I live my everyday life in a state of vague discomfort. I have trouble watching the Office because they’re all having such an unfortunate time on that show. However, this doesn’t mean I shy away from all cringe comedy. There’s a niche that tickles my brain just right: ironically cringe Tik Tok content.
If you’re one of the three people I regularly send Tik Toks to, then you know I have dedicated hours of my life to fedora-clad, anime-lip-syncing, adult theatre kids. My feed is populated by creators who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of cringe and all its nuances. Some of my favorites include Hallie Walker, finibruh, and bofem. Without the mask of irony, these cringe artists would certainly be ravaged by the wrath of the anti-cringe mob. Never forget what they did to our millennial king Jake Novak. If they’re “doing a character”, these creators are basically granted permission to perpetrate all the same crimes of Novak’s infamous SNL audition, so long as we all know they’re in on the joke.
Jake Novak was yet another victim of contemptuous cringe, as opposed to the purer and more innocent cringe response, compassionate cringe1. Compassionate cringe is: “ohhh, Lin Manuel, I’m so embarrassed that no one told you it wasn’t socially acceptable to make that face in your selfie. I feel for you.” Contemptuous cringe is: “Did you see that Lin Manuel made that face in that selfie? He should be sentenced to death”. I’m sorry some people might feel that way about you, Lin. I have sent pictures of you to people for the purpose of mocking you and for that I apologize. I would love to write Hamilton 2: Eliza’s Revenge with you.
When you cringe at someone else, otherwise known as second-hand cringe, what you’re having is an empathetic response of self-cringe. You’re putting yourself in their clown shoes. What you do with that empathizing depends on who you are. Apparent cringe scholar and psychologist Felipe Rochat proposes that whether one cringes compassionately or contemptuously fundamentally depends on how insecure the cringer is. A compassionate cringer might empathize with someone who embarrasses themselves as publicly as Lin or Jake did. Whereas a contemptuous cringer might see themselves in these people but go out of their way to prove that they’re nothing like them. To laugh at them as a kind of denial of their own shamefully cringe core.
I think the reason I enjoy cringe character comedy is because it invites me to contemptuously cringe with no harm done. I’m thinking: “wow, this person is great at playing an insufferable person” and not “this person is insufferable oh my god I see myself in them I must cyberbully them into oblivion”. The people who seek out the biggest social pariahs to torment are living by a kind of inversion of the famous Christian saying: “hate the cringer, love the cringe.” Methinks the cringer doth protest too much. When did this become so important to people? When did everything become cringe?
I went to google and did that thing where you look up how often a word is used over time. It should come as a surprise to no one that usage of this word had an incredibly sharp uptake in 2016. An era of shunning blue-haired liberal afabs as “cringe,” particularly surrounding the Women’s March on Washington, amongst other trends. I think my teenage nieces are also in part responsible for this increased usage. Nieces, if you’re reading this, I do think you tend to use that word where it shouldn’t apply. But more importantly, like all bad things in this world, I blame the internet.
Everyone is a brand. Every post is a curation of that brand. Spiritually, we are all one big ad for a Target Summer sale. People are so attentive to their own personal brands that god forbid their house of cards come crashing down via unironic usage of the word “adulting.” We’re living in a cringe surveillance state. Never before has the average person been so perceived. And when I say “the average person” or “we,” to be clear, I mean me. These are my own personal feelings. Maybe some people really are completely cringe-free or cringe and free and do not worry about this sort of thing at all, but I do. And this feels painfully cringe to admit.
It’s time to reveal the real reason why I’m so sensitive to cringe. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I have a dark, cringe past. My first boyfriend was a brony. I didn’t even know what a brony was when I met him. Another love interest taught me what it meant to have a fursona, because of course, he had one. These are perhaps two of the worst offenses to the cringe vultures. And then there were my own demons. Long before the brony or the furry, I used to be so obsessed with the Potter Puppet Pals that I made my own versions of the puppets, memorized all their videos, perfected my impressions of their impressions, and went around performing various episodes at people against their will. Over time, I self-censored that part of me into oblivion. Because, to put it bluntly, people don’t like that. I spent many years trying to teach myself out of my ostracism. When you spend that long trying your best to learn all the things you shouldn’t do (as many do in their pubescent years), you become keenly aware of and sensitive to all the things that the general public broadly cringes at. As a result, I catch myself cringing all the time now. And yet I choose to go to open mics, where I have probably accumulated generations upon generations worth of second-hand cringe.
Am I saying abolish cringe? Well, no, cringe is just a feeling. And shame, for better or for worse, does have its purpose. But it’s not worth contemptuously cringing at someone who’s just having harmless fun. The mantra “bullying works” irks me. Yes, I do think bullying and shaming has its usefulness. But these are tools that should only be used to discourage actually harmful behavior. Bully the racists. Shame the transphobes. There is behavior that should and can be shunned. But I think we’d all be better off if we stopped mocking all the harmless millennials making quirked-up little videos. And this is a lesson that I need to learn too. Unironically, let people enjoy things.
I reached out to some people in my life who I thought might have a thorough understanding of cringe and here’s what they had to say on the topic:
“Increased usage of the word to me just shows that, because of the internet, more people are exposed to subcultures they’d never otherwise see. Most people who are doing things that are “cringe” probably don’t think what they’re doing is cringey at all. It’s all about your point of view. Though I also think some people just fundamentally lack self-awareness”
“… God forbid you go viral being cringe. That will always follow you down. You can never really be a new person under the surveillance state. You’re always watched and it’s like the Panopticon effect, you know, everyone is afraid too. People are afraid to take risks because we develop that double consciousness of watching ourselves as if we’re a stranger all the time because that’s what the surveillance state has done to us.”
“To me, cringe means anything where you (or people you relate to) are so badly failing the assignment of being a person in a community with other people that it elicits a strong physical sensation of discomfort.”
“I don’t think secondhand generational cringe (the tendency of the young to view the culture of the old as cringe) is a new phenomenon. Many things that Gen Z finds cool or fun today will be found cringe by Gen Alpha later.
What I find troubling is the insistence that everyone needs to *agree* on what’s cringe. People can’t let people enjoy things; nor can people accept that others find their interest cringe without feeling personally attacked. We all should relax.”
Quality thoughts all around. I concur.
Upcoming Events:
This Sunday at 8:30, Sketch CageMatch returns to UCB. Chimp Cocktail vs. Burnt Toast. Come vote on your favorite sketch team!
Next Wednesday I’m on Constellation Prize at Starr Bar. A panel of judges will guess my astrological sign. I’m skeptical if they can but we’ll see…
Today is Halloween. Enjoy it.
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Credit to Felipe Rochat, this guy really gets cringe.