Today’s newsletter is about cringe!!! Kind of.
The internet as we know it - driven by user-generated content - started in the mid-2000s. These days, the impulse to share our innermost thoughts, experiences, and beliefs with a vast imagined audience has become second nature. And amidst this, a curious phenomenon: the tendency - no, the need - to embarrass ourselves online.
I am, of course, talking about The Cut’s most recent personal essay, ‘Age Gap Relationships: The Case for Marrying an Older Man’.
Grazie Sophia Christie, the piece’s author, married a man 10 years her senior when she was in her early twenties. She conflates it with marrying rich; subtly implies that because she is hot, she doesn’t need feminism; and describes her younger self as having “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity” and “a flush ponytail”, whatever that means. The backlash was swift: she’s been called delusional, a bad writer, and a traitor to women. She’s had her worldview nitpicked. It took the Miami Times exactly one day to write a news article sharing her information, and information on her parents (I won’t be sharing a link; I think that’s kind of gross and weird).
I’m sure that some way, somehow, Christie expected that the audience may learn from, or relate to, her work; to see themselves, reflected. She miscalculated how out-of-step her own worldview was with the expectations and norms of the online communities reading her work.
I guess, if the point of this newsletter is to fill you in ‘What’s been on the internet this week’, then I could stop there. But I won’t. This newsletter is about cringe!!! I told you!!!
🤒 Contemptuous cringe 🤒
There’s a lot to say about the gendered exploitation of female writers, who mine their personal trauma for clout, but it has been written about by women much smarter than me. Micha Frazer-Carroll wrote a really excellent article about that for gal-dem back in 2019 if you’re interested in reading about that.
But it is worth noting that Christie isn’t alone in her essay backlash hell. This year alone we’ve been chuckling at the ‘financial expert’ who fell foul of a (seemingly extremely preventable) scam which saw her hand $50,000 over to ‘an undercover CIA agent’ in a shoebox. We’ve also hee-hawed at the antihero who convinced herself to divorce her husband (derogatory).
YouTuber Natalie Wynn, also known as Contrapoints, wrote a really great video essay on ‘cringe’ content which I think about at least once a week. In it, she argues that while ‘cringe’ always involves a clash between self-perception and how others are perceiving you, there are two kinds of online cringe: compassionate, and contemptuous. I’m paraphrasing, but ultimately:
Compassionate cringe: When you feel embarrassed for someone because they are embarrassed themselves.
Contemptuous cringe: The victim is not embarrassed. They therefore deserve the humiliation they’re bringing on themselves.
Now, within that framework, Christie is the vessel for the audience’s contempt. She deserves it, and as such, I cannot feel bad about making fun of her. Thanks!
Modern social media is what Wynn calls a ‘cringe culture’:
“When we see a mob of people, whether in person or online, laughing at someone and ridiculing them, we register an emotional memory of it as a warning. “Don't act like that, or people will laugh at you”. This is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to control human behaviour.”
ContraPoints, 10 May 2022, Cringe (YouTube link)
What is Twitter telling Grazie Sophia Christie, then, and the other women who step out of line by sharing their thoughts? Because it is, to be clear, almost always women who suffer this level of backlash. And most often it’s the women with a sense of self-importance: whether they consider themselves a really good writer, good enough to be published; that they’re a level-headed financial advisor; or that they’re just, y’know, so beautiful other women hate them.
If shaming is a form of social control, then we’re merely reifying our own norms and expectations. Christie - by espousing some pretty archaic gender stereotypes - slipped outside of that established norm. Going viral on Twitter for all the wrong reasons should set her on the straight and narrow.
Problem is, on a platform like Twitter with something like 368 million active users, there are a million and one different norms swirling around. The chances that you’ll bump up against a group with a different view to your own is heightened. Unlike a journalist reporting on something outside of their own personal experience, every personal essay is a gamble which could implicate you, your life, your parents, your job. The stakes are immeasurably high.
So.. I don’t know what the point of this newsletter is. I think it’s, “Consider publishing your next personal essay anonymously,” or maybe, “The Cut needs to start offering a sort of witness protection programme for its essayists.” Anyway, let me know what you think.