In Defense of Cringe
(CN: I discuss homophobia including some slurs in this comics essay so proceed accordingly) Also, if you went to high school with me and are trying to recognize yourself in my GSA drawings, I hope you don’t! I intentionally didn’t draw any real people to protect the privacy of my friends and people I went to school with.
My high school GSA was what people these days would call “cringe.”
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
My fourteen-year-old self was kind of cringey. I was the kind of kid who would have commented “I was born in the wrong generation” under classic rock videos, I spent a lot of time on Tumblr, and had a small touch of “not like other girls” syndrome. The truth was, I was not like other girls—I’m not a girl at all. But before I knew the words bisexual or nonbinary, let alone that they applied to me, I just felt very different. And alone. Seizing on weird hobbies to a level deemed cringe-worthy was my way of explaining that feeling of difference, and an escape from the awful reality I was living in.
I fell into my GSA because all my friends (with similar, Tumblr-esque interests) were in it, otherwise I never would have gone. And it was only then that I properly learned what being queer meant, and only after a trip with the GSA that I came to the realization that those words applied to me. I also found a community. Yes we had our dramatic moments, but we were the ones that kept each other safe through mental health crises, awful family situations and more. When our school was content to wash their hands of us because we were too gay or too loud or too quiet or too whatever and yes you feel suicidal but you’re also failing Latin and that’s the bigger problem, we were each other’s sanctuaries.
For a lot of us gay teenagers at the time, our nerdy, “cringe” interests were a way of finding each other. Obviously there are homophobic Doctor Who stans and gay basketball players, but nerdy apparel and subtle references to Tumblr was a pretty accurate way to find fellow inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys. Even though I went to high school in New York City, good chunks of this city aren’t as progressive as they pretend to be and being a gay teenager in my school wasn’t easy. We needed to find our people to make it through.
Now, my friends and I look back at our “cringe” pasts and we can laugh at ourselves…
…but I sometimes worry about today’s teenagers, especially the gay ones, that have less spaces to express themselves anonymously than we do, that don’t really have the freedom to be cringe.
I wanted to find a dictionary definition of “cringe” to start this essay, like all good modern essayists (and graduation speechwriters), but I couldn’t find a good one. Dictionary.com defines “cringey” as “someone or something that causes you to feel awkward, uncomfortable, or embarrassed.” The top entry on Urban Dictionary is far more succinct and simply defines cringe as “Jake Paul.” Big swathes of Twitter seem to see any display of earnestness, genuine feeling or passion as cringe, but to each their own.
I know I just said “to each their own” but something that makes me irrationally angry is when I see people joking about abolishing high school GSAs because they are cringe, or that they’re proof that homophobia is justified. Maybe I’m just too close to my childhood in a pretty homophobic environment to even be able to joke about wishing violence on gay teenagers just because they choose to express themselves in a way I don’t like, but whatever.
I’ve been sitting with my reaction to those jokes and they finally resulted in this comic. I genuinely think my cringey phase was crucial to my development as a human being. One of the only good things about being a teenager is the way you’re able to throw yourself completely into an interest with a level of intensity not accepted later in life, but one that’s totally mirrored by your peers at the time. Being cringe is how many teens form social bonds, find niches they belong in, and learn to express themselves outside of the realms of authority.
I get why people think high school GSAs are cringe. By my senior year, even I could only hang out with some of our freshmen in limited doses. But I never would have told them to change, because who am I to police how young queer kids express themselves? Why would I deny them the joy I found in “cringey” spaces, the self-discovery, and the community?
I think we also need to discuss how the term “cringe” gets deployed within the queer community. I’ve mostly seen “cringe” used against teenagers and flamboyant gay men. The people that like to call everything “cringe” seem to have a sense of superiority. “I’ve evolved past these stereotypes of what a gay person should act like and now I am a real adult and expect everyone to act exactly like me," is lurking between the lines of their mocking tweets. Good for them if they’ve found happiness in their current form of expression, but why are they so invested in policing the expression of other gay people, especially ones that bravely flout heterosexual norms? How is mocking people for not acting more like straight people revolutionary?
Some things are objectively cringe, like forming obsessive parasocial relationships with politicians. But there are so many better ways to deal with people expressing themselves in ways that you don’t like without calling them “cringe”.
Here’s an easy fix: if you think a guy making TikToks wrapped in a rainbow flag is cringe—don’t watch them.
If you think gay teenagers roleplaying anime characters is cringe, why are you following what teenagers do this closely anyway?? Weirdo.
If you think something is cringe and annoying, it is so easy to just look away and entertain yourself with something else, the Internet is a vast place. Anything is better than wishing homophobic violence on literal children, no matter how annoying you think they are.
Cringe is great, actually. Cringe is a necessary part of growth. And I worry that today’s kids don’t have enough access to it.
I mentioned earlier in the essay that I was pretty cringe in high school, but you only know to what extent I was cringey because I chose to tell you (or if you’re one of the few people reading this that have known me long enough to know my old Tumblr url). Today’s kids don’t have nearly as much space to breathe. They don’t have an anonymous space where they can just be themselves like we had Tumblr. Even though bullying and pile-ons still happened on Tumblr, nowadays it’s much easier for some bored thirty-year-old to screenshot a teenager’s tweet or video and make fun of them. The current social network of choice for Gen Z, TikTok, is far less anonymous than the Internet spaces we grew up in. It’s going to be harder for current teenagers to distance themselves from whatever phase they’re in a few years down the road, now that their name and face is associated with their whole online presence.
Let the kids be cringe. And maybe some of you members of the cringe police should try it as well. It’s far more liberating than ironic detachment, or whatever is cool these days.