Guest Speaker: Leia Jospé, who runs @favetiktoks420 and is a videographer on How To With John Wilson. Recording here.
Cringe has a long history on the Internet, as chronicled by “How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’?”. But what exactly is it? Let’s turn to this Contrapoints video on Cringe:
“[Cringe is] the intense visceral reaction produced by an awkward moment, an unpleasant kind of self-recognition where you suddenly see yourself through someone else’s eyes. It’s a forced moment of self-awareness, and it usually makes you cognizant of the disappointing fact that you aren’t measuring up to your own self concept.”
Cringe is, when you’re that asshole who speaks too loud at a wedding. It’s when after a server says “enjoy your meal,” you say “you too”. It’s when someone waves to a person standing behind you and you wave back. It’s the feeling when you hear a recording of your own voice. It’s about defying social norms without knowing it, and then suddenly realizing that you are.
Before having a moment online, cringe existed in popular culture already. The way I was introduced to it was through cringe comedy, which is fictionalized or manufactured situations that intend to make a viewer cringe. Why would someone willingly experience this? Cringe comedy can let us break down social values and conventions, it can present us with uncomfortable truths, it can affirm the moral order of the world (e.g. the bad guys ultimately suffer), or it can just be fun to laugh at people in awkward situations.
Some popular examples of this are The Office, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Peep Show, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, and many others.
From Contrapoints/Natalie Wynn’s video on cringe. She attempts to categorize the different types of cringe.
Natalie Wynn/Contrapoints notices that there are different types of cringe and suggests how to categorize them. She says you can either cringe for (be embarrassed for) or cringe at (have contempt for) a person.
You can cringe for (be embarrassed for) a person who trips down the stairs (vicarious cringe) or be embarrassed for something you did in the past (self cringe), such as trip down the stairs at your high school graduation. Either way, this is a form of ingroup embarrassment because you feel compassion for yourself or another person.
Are you cringing for this man?
You can also feel contempt for a person you are cringing at, whether it is yourself (self contempt) or someone else (other contempt). This is most often how cringe is used on the Internet, when we talk about cringe TikToks or cringe culture. Either way, this can lead to morbid cringe, the belief that there is someone out there worse than you are.
From the instagram account @catatonicyouths. Ozzy Osbourne and Jessica Simpson perform “Winter Wonderland” together.
I think morbid cringe can further be divided into punching down (or bullying) and punching up.** Punching up is a term that comes from comedy and means (from Urban Dictionary, lol)
Making jokes at the expense of someone who is of a higher level of power in terms of status or privilege.
Often online, cringe is used to bully others. Wynn points out cringe compilation videos, which usually are called something like “SJW cringe compilation” (social justice warrior) or “gender cringe compilation”. They contain clips of, for example, a teenage crying about how they are confused about their gender, with the context that this behavior is supposedly cringey. I find them pretty disturbing and I don’t recommend watching them. There are communities dedicated to the same type of behavior, such as Reddit’s /r/cringe. Again, I find it disturbing, so view at your own risk.
Following this logic, cringe is used in this way because it can be a tool for control. To quote “’Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric’: Trans Assimilation and Cringe***”*** by Charlie Markbreiter,
When the right calls individuals and/or whole populations “cringe-worthy,” they tell us who they think deserves access to the social body and its rapidly shrinking resources.
But also, it can be a coping mechanism for unprocessed trauma. As Wynn says,