It seems very popular nowadays to call a lot of things “cringe,” and I find a lot of it toxic. Whenever we cringe, this is actually the “disgust” reaction. Disgust is there to help prevent us from touching or associating with things that could make us sick or otherwise endanger us. This isn’t only for cringing when we touch something slimy or smell something awful. It can also be what we perceive as danger to us as a person and our place both in society and our personal world.
So when you cringe at a person, you are essentially thinking, “this isn’t correct, this isn’t how this should be, this doesn’t belong.” It is you essentially rejecting it, whatever “it” is.
This could be someone confessing to someone very loudly and publicly. You cringe because you’ve deemed it unacceptable for a various reasons - it could be that you put yourself in the confessors shoes and thought, “I could never bring myself to do that” or the confessed person’s pov and thought, “I’d die if someone did that to me.” But...why? For a lot of people, it’s because we were taught that being that open and vulnerable is a bad and dangerous thing to do. It could result in public humiliation from rejection, and thus hurt. Or for the latter, it could be because we were taught to hate having attention brought to ourselves, that one should be meek and mild and stay quietly in the background.
Basically, it invokes feelings of “this is not proper!” - “proper” being what you’ve internalized as socially or personally acceptable, and we reject it because it contests our personal world viewpoint of, “this isn’t how things work.”
For some things, the societal norm we’re protecting has a lot of validity to it. For example, our disgust at pedophiles and child abusers. As a society, it stands to reason that we protect our young offspring to ensure our society’s future. There’s of course other valid cringey things, like sexism, homophobia, etc., and objectively noxious behavior that we cringe at, like poor sportsmanship. But for other things, it’s simply to perpetuate certain social constructs.
Girls in particular are often hated because “she doesn’t look or act her age,” but this implies that there is an acceptable look and manner for one’s age...which is bullshit. (The exception being sexual objectification of children.)
It’s not talked about as much as it really needs to be, but we’ve been aware of ageism for quite a while. We’re told that only certain things are “for kids,” but this is like being told only certain foods can be eaten at breakfast. It’s just made up crap. There isn’t a life manual that tells you exactly how one should look, act, and think by a certain age. This isn’t the universe of The Giver where things are systematically given and taken away at certain age intervals and simultaneously in batches of groups so that everyone grows and experiences life at an equal pace.
So for the most part, cringing at others is being judgmental and raining on their parade for being their unabashed, authentic selves and living their best lives, or simply doing and trying their best, even if it’s wrong or it gives off secondhand embarrassment (aka, cringe.) All this comes from a place of conformity, with a lot of narrow-minded bigotry, self-hatred, envy, and past trauma under it all.
Next time you cringe, consider taking a moment to reflect and see if you can pinpoint exactly why you reacted that way, and what exactly is it that you’re rejecting. I think what we cringe at says a lot about us and can better help us uncover and understand some of our most deeply entrenched biases and perceptions.
So whenever someone calls you “cringe/y,” please know it’s a “them” problem, not a “you” problem.
