The word cringe has dominated popular discourse and internet lingo since a very long time. However, what does the word actually mean? What exactly is cringe? Why do we cringe? And Why do I feel it impacts us in more ways than we’d like to believe?
To start off, when we cringe, what we essentially feel is embarrassment. This embarrassment can be towards ourselves or we may feel embarrassed for someone else. We cringe at ourselves when we are made self aware. We are ripped from our own perspective and forced to look at ourselves from a different lens. We may cringe at recordings of our voice, past pictures of ourselves or occasionally, when we do something so unusual, we feel the gaze of society staring us down Take for example, being unnecessarily loud. Essentially, when we cringe, its our mind punishing us for being “awkward”. There is , an attempt very often to cringe at people within a group and essentially , dissociate them. Its possible some cringe at their parents for behaving a certain way in front of people. Some may cringe at their friends. This is ingroup cringe. We feel embarrassed by the actions of those in our group, and hence we cringe at them.
But mostly, speaking on the context of internet cringe, Youtuber Natalie Wynn says that it can be divided into two aspects, contemptuous cringe and compassionate cringe. She relates Compassionate cringe with emotional identification or as vicarious embarrassment. Essentially, we are embarrassed for
someone else , we understand that they’re clearly uncomfortable and awkward and we sympathize with them. However, most cringe is in fact, contemptuous. What “pure” contemptuous cringe means is that we feel embarrassed and angry at someone who isn’t self aware and has hubris or misplaced pride or in short their cockiness. Be it people who overestimate their abilities or fake their appearance to fit in, their misplaced confidence forces us to cringe at them, not with them. We feel an emotional distancing from them. We get annoyed at their lack of self awareness. We believe they ought to feel cringe for their actions, and when they don’t, we feel obliged to do it ourselves.
Not all cringe on the internet is “cringe”. Because cringe is self awareness about awkward situations, (awkward here being, out of place) some on the internet choose to equate cringe with being a certain way, rather than acting a certain way. Here, we are invited not to cringe at their lack of self awareness , but at their appearance, their regular behavior. Be it autistic people, trans people , people of color, overweight people, people from the LGBT+, and anything that doesn’t fit in. Essentially, the internet conducts public floggings of misfits in the name of cringe. Its rebranded contempt and disgust. Now, when we see this occurring , we feel pity, but considering the hierarchy of the situation, the human
instinct is not to be the one being laughed at but to rather be safe and be the one laughing. Anytime we see someone act a certain way and get criticized for being “cringey”, our intuition is to avoid doing that action at any costs. In no way , can we allow ourselves to become the next victim after all, can we? I believe, its safe to say that this twisted version of “cringe” affects the way we perceive people who act
differently and consequentially, affects the way we behave.
Cringe isn’t just a psychological concept , in recent times it has become a political tool. When we have two opposing political groups, ideological or otherwise, they seek to drag down the oppsosite party. Initially the instinct is to villianize them, demonize them. But with this , we face the risk of the public overestimating their evil or seeing them as powerful( After all, the villain is always powerful ). The safer
option now, is to portray the opponent as ‘cringe’. To turn one of their group into a mascot for the masses. To somehow imply, that all people identifying with that group are represented by one member who is easy to make fun of. The trend is to pick an image or a statement and freeze it and then proceed to showcase it as a shining example of the entire group. For example, a statement made by a certain
judge on a reality TV show came to define all “feminists”, the actions of one person on an app came to define the actions of everyone who used it, a single seemingly ludicrous statement by a politician came to define anyone who chose to side with him. This image of a faulty, ‘cringey’ person is presented to the internet which wastes no time in eating up the narrative and finding a punching bag. This mascotization of individuals helps to change public opinion much more than moral lecturing, whether we like it or not.
The internet is a circus. And often, its more enjoyable for a lot of people to watch the trapeze fail than to succeed, simply for the purpose of amusement. Maybe the concept of public flogging isn’t as passé as we presume it to be. Though it may seem like a stretch, cringe has seeped into a number of aspects and
it certainly drives the way we think upto an extent. It has assumed multiple forms and its hard to escape. Maybe , just maybe we could all for once, be happy in our shared absurdity, our flaws and choose to be compassionate. But alas, the internet and the sheer amount of people on it, choose to disagree.
Comments