Cringe

[Phoebe]

Contrapoints' latest:
https://youtu.be/vRBsaJPkt2Q

I don't know how many of y'all follow these videos but most of them are just so great. I'm less interested in the ones that focus a lot on her internet dramas, but I love the ones where she gets conceptual and this is a classic. We get a fully diagrammed theory of Cringe, and it's a doozy! It's also quite easy to extrapolate from the examples she uses to the many ways this probably shows up in everyone's life in one form or another. (I do find it funny that my husband does not appear to take any enjoyment or fascination in this genre of thing, because he does not give a fig what other people think, probably for the same reason she postulates in the video. Happily, he seldom has contempt for anyone, nor does he cringe over their embarrassments.)

But contempt, as Natalie reminds us, has a relationship to self-hatred. No accident that contempt looms large in relationships that go bad, as we are angry at ourselves for having been duped by the partner who is now making us angry, and our own self-hatred fuels our contempt for them in a nice little feedback loop. Perhaps a less understood feature of that phenomenon is the reverse, when contempt for someone you cringe at gradually transforms into affection. She nails it when it comes to contempt driving obsession, like the YouTuber who obsessively catalogs this trans woman he cringes at. The Morbid Cringe, where we recognize something of ourselves that we don't like in the other person. But she doesn't discuss what happens when we recognize something of ourselves in the other cringed-at person and then find a way to rehabilitate them into an object of affection. Maybe we find it necessary to develop that affection in order to stop directing hatred at ourselves through the medium of this other person, if the similarities between us become too strong to ignore? Or perhaps we find other things of value about the Cringe person, and it's easier to channel contempt into a more positive emotion or even an obsessive habit rather than erasing it completely. Contempt is so powerful and ill understood! But this video does a lovely job of giving us some insight that can be used to help life.

When I think back on the people I've had the strongest cringe response to, it was invariably to a boy who exhibited the features in myself that made me most likely to be bullied or picked on by others. Namely: borderline autistic behavior, super-nerdy, super out-there imagination and unconventional use of language, intellectual obsessiveness, all that good stuff that, when you're a girl with those traits, you have been taught incredibly powerfully to hide. When I was in kindergarten I had a friend who was just like this and I remember him so vividly! I even remember his name, in a sea of other forgotten names from that time. I absolutely loved him and was indignant and outraged and ashamed of the way that other people would pick on him for the very same things I thought I shared with him. I remember the way I cringed at the cowlick on the back of his head because it made him look even more like the Aspie nerd that he was, though I had no understanding of what that meant at the time. I just knew it was important to be cute and quiet and polite and pretend so much better not to be anything like that! Otherwise it was very clear how bad the responses of the outside world would be. There was no space to process these feelings.

That stuff doesn't magically go away without a concerted effort - like Natalie says, people keep picking and picking those scabs of old wounds for years afterward, never realizing that's what they're up to. If you are a driven and thorough scab-picker by nature, no wonder that it can have such an emotional hold on you. I guess the moral of the story is, from my take on her take on cringe: be very careful whom you select as a target of your contempt, because the thing you're upset about is not with them but with you. Once you figure that out, things are likely to go quite sideways from where you thought they would be.