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What is the cause of cringe?
Developmental psychologist Phillipe Rochat says cringe is an automatic empathy response of either contempt or compassion. An empathy response involves the necessity of experience — one cannot cringe without knowing what an embarrassing situation feels like.
Why do humans cringe at things?
“Our facial features involuntarily contract, our eyes half close and our head moves away or to the side.” Dr Ellen explains that when we cringe at someone else’s behaviour (or even our own past behaviour) it’s usually because it’s something we find “pathetic, or stupid, or deplorable”.
When did cringe become popular?
It is the 2000s, when Larry David of Seinfeld fame went on to create Curb Your Enthusiasm — a saga of awkward misadventures that capitalize on the brand that was cringe.
What is the cringe feeling?
If you cringe at something, you feel embarrassed or disgusted, and perhaps show this feeling in your expression or by making a slight movement.
Why is cringe so popular?
We find things more or less cringeworthy depending on our “social closeness” with that item, e.g. if we know a boss who speaks in that way. One major theory of cringe is that it’s a form of venting social anxiety; it allows us to enjoy the violation of a social norm in a safe setting.
How do I stop cringing?
The secret to surviving cringe attacks isn’t to shut the memory away, and it isn’t to try to tell yourself it wasn’t really that bad. Instead of focusing inward, turn your attention outward, onto the people around you. You’re not that special.
Why do I get 2nd hand embarrassment?
During an embarrassing situation, the observer empathizes with the victim of embarrassment, assuming the feeling of embarrassment. People who have more empathy are more likely to be susceptible to vicarious embarrassment. The capacity to recognize emotions is probably innate, as it may be achieved unconsciously.
What does cringe look like?
When you cringe, your body language shows you don’t like what you see and hear. You close your eyes and grimace. You may even jerk your body away from the offensive sight or sound, like the old picture of you in an “awkward stage” that makes you cringe whenever you see it.
How do you know if you’re cringing?
- Name calling. Ad hominem attacks like name calling are the verbal equivalent of a low blow. …
- Snobbery. …
- Giving excuses. …
- Lack of generosity. …
- Judgmental Behavior.
Who invented cringe?
Given the political turbulence roiling the nation, the cringefest of recent years calls to mind the concept of “cultural cringe,” coined by the Australian literary critic A.A. Phillips in the 1950s, which is often interpreted to mean an inferiority complex on the part of an entire nation.
Is cringe a good thing?
It can help reframe the idea of awkwardness as something that everyone has experienced, so maybe I can choose not to drown in it and I can learn from it. It makes the feeling a little less isolating and is a nice way of connecting with other folks through our mutual human absurdity.
Is it Cringey or Cringy?
In fact, the spelling “cringey” is the one most likely to be recorded in dictionaries. However, both spellings are correct. “Cringy” is listed as an alternative spelling in most reference books, similar to “connection” and “connexion.”
What is cringe slang?
Cringey refers to someone or something that causes you to feel awkward, uncomfortable, or embarrassed—that makes you cringe.
Is it cringe to say cringe?
As defined by an Urban Dictionary user, cringe culture is: “making fun of people and/or insulting them by calling them ‘cringey’ or ‘cringe’ for doing something which doesn’t harm or somehow insult anyone nor anything.” This internet subculture’s origins can be traced back to subreddits like r/cringe or r/cringepics, …
What should I do if my boyfriend makes me cringe?
Cringy behaviour is most definitely normal! Particularly amongst younger men and women. Just tell him it makes you cringe, he’ll probably feel embarrassed for a bit and then try to accommodate. We’re all different and all have things we like/dislike.
What is an example of cringe?
To cringe is to draw back or to move your face or body in order to shrink from danger or fear. An example of cringe is when you duck backwards because you are afraid you are going to get hit. (dialect) A crick. (intransitive) To shrink, tense or recoil, as in fear, disgust or embarrassment.
What does cringe look like?
When you cringe, your body language shows you don’t like what you see and hear. You close your eyes and grimace. You may even jerk your body away from the offensive sight or sound, like the old picture of you in an “awkward stage” that makes you cringe whenever you see it.
How do you know if you’re cringing?
- Name calling. Ad hominem attacks like name calling are the verbal equivalent of a low blow. …
- Snobbery. …
- Giving excuses. …
- Lack of generosity. …
- Judgmental Behavior.
Cringe Culture Isn’t What It Used to Be – The Atlantic
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A Cultural History of ‘Cringe,’ and How the Internet Made Everything Awkward | The Swaddle
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Why Do We Cringe, And How Does It Influence Culture? | The Swaddle
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Cringe TV and film: Why do we experience cringe? – ABC Everyday
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How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’? | RealClearPolicy
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Why has America become so cringe-worthy? – Quora
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Why do some people love cringe comedy while others can’t stand it? – Big Think
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Cringe TV and film: Why do we experience cringe? – ABC Everyday
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How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’?
Take a tweet from the week after the Capitol riot in January 2021: “A Liberal insurrection would have looked very different. We would have escorted the original Broadway cast of Hamilton into the galleries. They would softly sing … as members of the GOP spewed their lies.” This was apparently intended as satire of a certain type of extremely online and cringe-inducing liberal smugness, but it came off as the thing itself and then produced more of the same. “I’ve literally been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack at work for days now,” wrote one woman. “This is EXACTLY what would’ve happened. ALL the theater kids everywhere,” wrote another.
Then the joke became real. Last week, as part of a series of public events marking one year since the January 6 riot, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi introduced a prerecorded performance by the cast of Hamilton, singing “Dear Theodosia.” Pelosi read aloud from the song’s lyrics: “We’ll make it right for you. If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you; we’ll give the world to you.” There was no need to debate whether this was cringe (which is now an adjective, as well as a noun and verb), because cringe is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it type of thing. And these days, you can see it everywhere.
As a term, cringe took off in forums in the early aughts, when the practice of humiliating oneself online was still somewhat novel. If it’s now mainstream—as a meme and an entertainment genre and an incredibly cutting insult—that’s not because human beings have become more cringe as a group. It’s because we’ve been given more opportunities to display our cringeworthy characteristics, and also to point out the cringeworthy behavior of others. Whereas people used to feel secondhand embarrassment on behalf of their friends and family, or wince at their own awkward behavior, they are now exposed to the potentially embarrassing behavior of entire social networks.
After spending years in that environment, our sense of cringe has been heightened to truffle-pig levels of sensitivity. We can sniff out the tiniest flaws in someone else’s public performance, dig them up, share them around. We’re connoisseurs of cringe. Maybe we’re even gluttons for it.
Early cringe culture drew much of its content from YouTube, and the majority of the cringe came from the fact that the people posting there didn’t seem to totally understand that anybody in the world could see them. There were beloved cringe clips, like the one of the Star Wars Kid, alone in a nondescript space, wildly swinging around a golf-ball retriever as if it were a lightsaber. And there were repulsive clips, like “My Video for Briona for Our 7 Month,” in which some guy winks and licks his lips in between making romantic declarations like, “I love you more than there are all the snowflakes in Russia.” Either way, the cringe was caused by empathy. You would be horrified if a video of you like that were made public. You could watch in privacy and feel grateful that yours was not a public life at all.
Read: ‘Thank you, Brandon’ is just embarrassing
Other styles of cringe existed, too: self-deprecating cringe; playful cringe; hostile cringe grounded in the shocked, giddy realization that people even more embarrassing than oneself could exist in the world, and that they could be found so easily online. On 4chan’s designated Random forum, some of the first discussions of cringe ridiculed the many soft enemies of the edgelords: Tumblr users (“SJWs”), fangirls, furries. 4chan posters also used the term to describe the tastes of “normies,” people who weren’t online enough to understand their ironic sense of humor.
when god created the world that was the first time someone had ever posted cringe on main — wife of the mind (@andrealongchu) November 29, 2021
But the real cringe culture was on Reddit. Reddit’s first cringe-specific forum appeared in 2012, after Michael Dombkowski saw a local TV news segment on self-styled “teen werewolves.” He found the feeling it elicited interesting, and went in search of more videos that were “impossible to sit through”—ones that made him hit “Pause” over and over and steel himself to continue watching. He started the r/cringe forum as a central repository for those clips and set up an RSS feed that would alert him whenever someone on Reddit—in any forum—commented about something being “embarrassing” or “hard to watch.” Then he’d encourage the poster to share the video in his forum instead.
Read: TikTok is cringey and that’s fine
As r/cringe grew to include more than 1 million members, Dombkowski had to teach Reddit users what cringe was. “In the early days, we would get a lot of people posting stuff that just didn’t really match what I was looking for, or people who would post videos of people breaking bones or, like, gross-out stuff,” he told me. Later, he had to make a list of hard rules and ban people who were sharing clips of children or going into the YouTube comments of a cringey video and telling the subject to kill themselves. (Banned users made a spin-off forum called r/CringeAnarchy, which later became a far-right cesspool and then was kicked off Reddit for encouraging violence.) “I hated that. It really bothered me,” he said. “I always saw these videos as an empathetic exercise. It was always like, Oh, I could totally see myself doing this, or it just felt like one of those nightmares where you’re at school with no pants or something. It just fills you with dread for that person.” When I asked for an example, he sent me a link to a video from 2009, in which the employees of a Microsoft Store dance to the Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling” for much, much longer than you would expect.
In her book, Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, the reporter Melissa Dahl admitted to being a regular presence in r/cringe. “I visit the site almost every day, in part because I find it so amusing to eavesdrop on fights within this odd little online community,” she wrote. The bickering she described often focused on what cringe even means. Users quibbled over whether a video of Taylor Swift fans singing a song they’d written for her was really “cringe” or just “a little hokey,” and whether one person’s “a little hokey” might be another person’s “cringe.” Is cringe objective fact? Or is it a personal, physical response that can’t be explained? Do you need to have watched through your fingers, or while literally cramping at the gut, for something to be cringe?
you can’t post cringe
posting IS cringe — I hope this is satire… (@sablaah) March 3, 2020
That visceral response to cringe would be softened by the genre’s gradual mainstreaming. As cringe culture was blowing up online, the entertainment industry embraced cringe comedy and realized the cringe promise of reality television. This made the trappings of cringe even more familiar, while the act of calling out cringe—as opposed to simply feeling it—became something of a reflex. In 2018, the same year that Dahl’s book on cringe was published, several popular image macros were created specifically for this purpose, including one of the cartoon character Shrek snapping a photo, captioned YEP. THIS ONE’S GOING IN MY CRINGE COLLECTION. (Sorry, I know explaining this is also cringe.) Soon, there were Instagram compilation accounts dedicated to collecting the worst cringe, with a focus on cringe created by not-quite-random people who were performing, and failing, for thousands of their peers on TikTok. (Vox’s Rebecca Jennings has referred to cringe as “the backbone of TikTok.”)
Just last week W Magazine dubbed Leia Jospé, a videographer who worked on the popular (and cringe-influenced) HBO series How to With John Wilson, the “Curator of Cringe” on account of her efforts to catalog clips of classically hot influencers making fools of themselves. “I’m not being mean,” she said. The TikTok kids lack self-awareness or a sense of irony, and Jospé’s cringe comes from her feeling “secondhand embarrassment” about that fact. But these aren’t clips that make you wince in recognition and shared pain. The empathy that was once part of cringe culture—the “it could happen to me, or it has”—is harder to get to because the positions of viewer and subject are so uneven. The cringe comes at a remove.
Platforms like TikTok or Twitter or YouTube, where anyone can stumble across anyone else, are hotbeds for cringe because cringe comes from context collapse: Here is a person standing up in public to say something that will be received in a way completely unlike what she had hoped or planned. Sometimes the error is so big that onlookers become outraged—as was the case with Nancy Pelosi’s earnest presentation of what has become, to many, a symbol of liberal mawkishness. (“Immediately started to cry from the cringe,” read one response to the video. “This is cataclysmic. It broke me.”) This is a dark turn for cringe, but it makes sense. After a decade of watching and analyzing millions of moments of public performances online, all while feeling compelled to constantly recalibrate one’s own, it’s offensive when someone grievously misunderstands the way that they’re coming off.
While we used to cringe because we understood, we now cringe because we can’t believe it: How are there still so many people out there who don’t know how to act?
Read How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’? Online
Take a tweet from the week after the Capitol riot in January 2021: “A Liberal insurrection would have looked very different. We would have escorted the original Broadway cast of Hamilton into the galleries. They would softly sing … as members of the GOP spewed their lies.” This was apparently intended as satire of a certain type of extremely online and cringe-inducing liberal smugness, but it came off as the thing itself and then produced more of the same. “I’ve literally been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack at work for days now,” wrote one woman. “This is EXACTLY what would’ve happened. ALL the theater kids everywhere,” wrote another.
Then the joke became real. Last week, as part of marking one year since the January 6 riot, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi introduced a prerecorded performance by the cast of , singing “Dear Theodosia.” Pelosi from the song’s lyrics: “We’ll make it right for you. If type of thing. And these days, you can .
A Cultural History of ‘Cringe,’ and How the Internet Made Everything Awkward
There is a phase in everyone’s lives, a time not so long ago but feels ridged away in memory, which inspires only violent disgust in hindsight. The body instinctively contorts and convulses in shame of violating arbitrary social mores. These felt like violations indeed: a decade-old Facebook post that made liberal use of capitalization and punctuations to litter our language (HapPY BiRthDaY, BeStiE!!!); a text-turned-essay sent to an ex that would instantly be regretted five minutes later; the acid wash jeans that used to be a staple in the wardrobe but now is better left washed away from memory; a video of an actor praying to Audrey Hepburn’s portrait before walking the red carpet at Cannes.
One word, five letters, an inexplicable feeling: cringe. A curled upper lip, a wrinkle on the nose, a weighted sneer, a shake of the head from side to side. To the assault on grammar, excessive displays of human emotions, fashion that was meant to die, any and every behavior that forgets social norms.
Yet, there’s a churn underway in the tale of cringe culture. Taylor Swift in a graduation commencement speech, among other bits of advice on growing up, urged people to “embrace” and learn to “live alongside it [cringe].” Retrospective cringing will always happen, so be wild, be free, and accept the revolting and the hilarious in equal measure.
The story of cringe is the story of a Russian doll, but one that looks a lot like you and me. We cloak that cringe with shame, then with comedy, then with an infraction so severe that shan’t be committed, and now the biggest piece is one of acceptance. Lurking underneath it all is still that cringe, that sense of public shame, but how we grow around it.
Plot cringe on a cultural graph and it would take the shape of a lustrious zig-zag: it started out as a way to show mild embarrassment and shame, inspired a genre of comedy, became a serious social transgression, and now, a way to reclaim the “non-chic” and the “uncool.”
The history of cringe is rooted in social submission. What reached its peak through the internet culture first originated in the Old English; cringan was the word to describe “to fall, to yield in battle, to give way, to become bent, to curl up.” Cringan became cringe sometime in the 16th century when it introduced the feelings of fear and embarrassment to “bending” or “crouching.” Finally, by the 19th century, the meaning had cemented itself; cringe meant to “recoil in embarrassment, shame, or fear.”
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Why We Find Cringe Couples Fascinating
Evolutionary history shows cringe is birthed by the fear of social rejection — a feeling similar in intensity to physical pain. People literally crinkle in embarrassment also because the ability to “feel vicarious embarrassment is influenced by our ability to empathize with others,” psychology professor Rowland Miller told Vox. People cringe for reasons beyond contempt; it can be compassion too for having experienced a feeling similar to that unfolding in real-time. Cringe was then about second-hand shame and empathy — human emotions that defined anything and everything we do. Cringe, at its heart, is as much an instinct as it is a conditioned physical response, to public shame.
Then came the rise of “cringe comedy” that truly added the humor to the fluster. It is the 2000s, when Larry David of Seinfeld fame went on to create Curb Your Enthusiasm — a saga of awkward misadventures that capitalize on the brand that was cringe. The Office furthered this trend, when to cringe was to both laugh and feel a revulsion from the second-hand embarrassment for people who were unwittingly the butt of the joke. Michael Scott’s mischances with women and his colleagues add the c, r, i, n, g, e in the word cringe.
Watching train wrecks in fictionalized worlds spilled into a desire to mock those in real life. This coincided with a new public space that made humiliation a currency to reach social capital. “With a new form of public space—the virtual—comes the navigation of new social norms and, consequently, new ways to be humiliated. In 2012, Michael Dombkowski started Reddit’s first cringe-specific forum, curating a repository of content that was “hard to watch,” “embarrassing,” or “impossible to sit through.” Sample? A video of a Microsoft Store dance to the Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling” for much, much longer than needed. “I always saw these videos as an empathetic exercise. It was always like, Oh, I could totally see myself doing this, or it just felt like one of those nightmares where you’re at school with no pants or something. It just fills you with dread for that person,” he said.
Our instinct to cringe reinforces the new norms of online social behavior on a bodily level,” wrote Caleb Madison for The Atlantic. Social media truly became a prism for cringe to thrive into a rainbow of meanings; it was an adjective (such a cringe dress), a verb (I’m cringing at her song), a noun (stop writing cringe), and even an interjection. Pete Davidson tattooed Kim Kardashian’s children’s names on his face? Cringe! The mental image of Shrek snapping a photo, captioned “yep. this one’s going in my cringe collection, instantly paints itself.
At this point, there is an important question to be asked: Is cringe an objective fact? What may be cringe to you may just be plain-old things said and done in jest to others. Then is cringe an inexplicable feeling? Yes and no; no, because it is linked to a feeling of fear, of rejecting social exclusion by rejecting anything the culture automatically deemed as “bad.” This is a coping mechanism — may be one to respond to self-hatred, insecurity, and memories of our own failure.
“While we used to cringe because we understood, we now cringe because we can’t believe it,” Kaitlyn Tiffany argued in The Atlantic.
Cringe has then been weaponized against people to laugh at them instead of with them. Taylor’s call to embrace cringe leads us back to the wholesome, compassionate origins of cringe rather than the one leaden in contempt.
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Why Do We Cringe?
If we cringe at social outliers today, it is because feelings of shame and embarrassment have existed far before. And the feeling will outlive internet moments and second-hand embarrassment. Maybe we’ll cringe at “cringe” someday, and we should. If cringe is about shame, it is also an ode to enthusiasm and experiment, of finding levity in chaos and realizing the fleeting nature of it all.
“I think [cringe content] is a controlled way of facing this really deep fear,” said Melissa Dahl, a senior editor at The Cut and author of Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness. “It’s funny to talk about being embarrassed during the year 2020 when there’s such scary things going on. But, like, there’s nothing scarier than being cast out on your own and laughed out of the group!”
This is an ownership of the emotion of disgust — because there are countless ways to be humiliated and countless instances to regret. The inevitability of retrospective pain makes a strong case for claiming cringe as a familiar feeling. I look to Taylor who said: “No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime. Even the term cringe might someday be deemed cringe. I promise you, you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will look back on later and find revolting and hilarious. You can’t avoid it, so don’t try to.”
Imagine watching and analyzing instances in real-time, all while recalibrating one’s own misadventures, and critiquing them for the same. This self-censorship strips away any semblance of empathy. “…the ‘it could happen to me, or it has; — is harder to get to because the positions of viewer and subject are so uneven. The cringe comes at a remove,” Tiffany added. The social norms when translated online inspire unbridled humiliation — sometimes tepid, sometimes severe. As if the attempt is to push someone back inside a cage, away from the “cringeworthy” aspects of their being.
Cringe first gained social relevance by way of mockery, and then again by way of defiance. Cringe stands at odds with chic, of a social order built on conformity and status quo.
The more mainstream the genre of cringe becomes, the easier it is to be subdued by its effects. It is no wonder that Cringe TikTok is a burgeoning canon of its own. Things get viral because everyone hates it, but here’s the catch: the creators know it and end up capitalizing on this knowledge of chaos. “I think for the most part when people think of the word ‘cringey,’ they think of some nerdy kid dressing up and LARPing or something. That’s not cringey to me. That’s someone having a great time. If someone’s making fun of that, then they’re just jealous,” said Kurtis Conner, a popular YouTuber who makes videos about Cringe TikTok. Making fun of people who try, who fall outside the confines of presentable and otherwise, is an act of enforcing servility and demanding homogeneity from a social group — all unrealistic but familiar asks.
We’re reclaiming laughter and the ability to ridicule social mores — and ourselves, most of all. When compassion is found in cringe, it becomes easier to laugh. In the entirety of 2012, Taylor Swift dressed like a 1950s housewife. “But you know what? I was having fun,” she says. “Trends and phases are fun. Looking back and laughing is fun. And while we’re talking about things that make us squirm, but really shouldn’t, I’d like to say I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things.”
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