X-Factor Cringe (2022)
REBECCA MELMAN
Tik Tok, the controversial social media platform that allows users to make videos, is not much different than any other social media. However, there is something special about TikTok. Perhaps it is the especially addictive AI algorithm on the “For You” page. Unlike other apps that create a feed based on choices made by the user, TikTok “presents individuals with content and uses their reactions to it (in the form of likes, comments, and reshares) to determine other content they might like, facilitating a continuous cycle that starts from the first use and becomes increasingly accurate with repeated engagement.” Beyond the technical aspects of TikTok structure, Tik Tok videos have a certain X-Factor that makes it hard to look away.
TikTok is valued at around $75 billion. Its’ young stars like Addison Rae (who attended the Met Gala) and Charlie D’Amelio (whose immense fame led to a reality TV show), are making millions of dollars before age 18. Becoming a social media influencer is a career path that, according to a 2019 poll, 54 percent of Americans aged 13-38 would pursue. In 1990, the age of puberty onset in girls was 14 years old. Today it is 12 years old. When puberty begins, “the brain becomes hypersensitive to social and hierarchical information.” Additionally, “rates of smoking, drugs, alcohol and sex declined among high school students over the last decade,” while use of smartphones, tablets, computer or game consoles has risen excessively. Although teenagers have been “online” for over a decade now, and use has increased since, the COVID-19 restrictions accelerated the integration of the internet in their daily lives. How are teens dealing with these changes? How are they expressing themselves via TikTok? Why are they being so sexual in these videos? This is not an essay examining the positive and negative consequences of TikTok, but rather an exploration of the X-Factor in some of the most popular “trends” seen on TikTok videos made by teens.
Barret Swanson experienced this X-Factor first hand. In an article for Harper’s Magazine, he wrote about the “collab houses,” or homes rented by teen influencers (or sometimes, outside investors) to create content with each other throughout LA;
“It’s noon in Los Angeles toward the end of the Plague Year, and I’m lounging on the patio of a swanky three-floor mansion, watching a scrum of teenage boys perform trending TikTok dances. Arranged in a tidy delta formation near the jacuzzi and pool, the five boys smile into the glare of a ring light, at the center of which is affixed a smartphone recording their moves. These boys possess a teenybopper cuteness and, because they’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, they have noisomely strong metabolisms and thus go shirtless pretty much all of the time, displaying either the ectomorphic thinness of trees or greyhounds or, in one boy’s case especially, the sharply delineated musculature of a really big insect. They bite their lower lips, and their expressions are—I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe them—precoital.”
As is the case with any medium, sex sells. Viral dance trends veer towards gyration rather than jumping or twirling. Gen Z tweens look more like 25 year olds than 15 year olds. Unfortunately young girls have always been sexualized, but perhaps the more novel phenomenon is the seemingly endless bounty of Tik Toks made by teenage boys seeking virality on the app. What began as dancing and lip syncing videos turned into an array of bizarre “trends,” all of which portray socialization at various levels.
Leia Jospé, a 30 year old photographer and videographer, curates the Instagram account @favetiktoks420. She collects videos of Gen Z-ers dancing suggestively, lip-syncing out of sync, and playing out imaginary scenarios with plots that range in topics, from sexuality to family relationships to imagined horror stories. In an interview with W, she was titled “curator of cringe.” I’d posit that she just sees the X-Factor, like a music label agent at an underground performance. In an article for Vox, Rebecca Jennings wrote about the cringe of TikTok. The app hosts a “part of the internet largely grouped as “cringe,” used as both adjective and noun: content deemed humiliating on account of the poster’s looks, behavior, or talent, and the lack of apparent self-awareness about those things. The top tier of digital cringe is created by people who not only lack self-awareness but lack it enough to share themselves in the hope that other people will be impressed, then fail to realize when the general response is laughter.”
Cringe comedy is not new; Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Office are examples of TV shows that were based on this feeling of secondhand embarrassment, or perhaps even schadenfreude (German term meaning to take pleasure in the pain of others misfortune). Cringe comedy on TikTok elicits the same psychological response, but the main difference is that on TV, we know we are watching actors, in produced environments, reading from a script. On TikTok, however, we are watching people, both young and old, expressing themselves earnestly.
While some people follow @favetiktoks420 to post mean comments, berating the teens for being so shameless and “cringey,” Jospé admires the teens. She says, “I’m kind of jealous of TikTokers’ ability to not care about the things that I care about. They’re not self-conscious in the same way that I am. Not that they’re not concerned about how they’re perceived because I think they are; they wear tons of makeup, everything is filtered and earnest and purposeful. But I would be humiliated to act like that, even alone in my room to the camera. TikTok kids are kind of past self-awareness. They don’t need it, they don’t care about it, they never had it. I respect that. “Cringe” comes from feeling secondhand embarrassment about a lack of irony.” An intriguing aspect to TikTok boys is the way in which they encapsulate a transformed sense of masculinity. A trend known as #femboy emerged on TikTok sometime in 2020, in which teenage boys wear skirts, dresses, nail polish and makeup. Femboy is not a new term, as it circulated on Reddit for at least the last decade. TikTok took this term from the anonymous conversation boards on Reddit to the mainstream video app, where millions of people interacted with this content. Chase Hudson aka @huddy, who has 32.2M followers, proudly wears makeup and nail polish, and peacocks on TikTok, posing, dancing and singing. These young men are not dismantling the patriarchy, as they still flaunt their muscles, workout routines and find ways to show off their machismo. The same TikTokers that wear nail polish are making sexual scenario videos in which they infer their sexual dominance as men.
We learn how to socialize through practice. As we grow up, we make social mistakes, learn from them, and continue this process until we die. Teens have had fewer opportunities to learn this way because of the pandemic. So they turn to the internet to play out imagined scenarios, seen primarily in the “POV” trend. In this trend, the TikTokers fabricate situations in which the viewer plays a role. Some videos are more “realistic,” for example, “POV: I’m your boyfriend taking care of you after a bad day,” while others veer into fantasy. Examples of these fantasies range from a group of teens discovering they are demigods to unsettling hostage scenarios.
Millennials take their privacy more seriously than the teens of TikTok. When I was a teenager, I was extremely online. From around 2006 to 2014, I found solace in sites such as Tumblr and LiveJournal. I had an entirely separate life online. I remained anonymous under pseudonyms and avatars, and to this day I have a limited public social media presence. Teens today are unable to separate their online selves from their AFK selves, and as Jospé also mentions in the interview, “I can relate to these kids spending an insane amount of hours [on the internet], but now what they do there is attached to their entire being and they’ll never get rid of that. The internet became real life, there is no split or an escape. It’s not even an extension because, if anything, more is happening online than off.” With the promise of virality, and by proxy eventual celebrity, teens on TikTok treat the app as an opportunity to put themselves out there; to make a name for themselves. Hopefully, their X-Factor can help them achieve these dreams.