Everything Is Embarrassing: A Response To Chanté Joseph’s Viral Vogue Article
- Hannah Breen
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
When Chanté Joseph asked Vogue readers whether it’s now embarrassing to have a boyfriend, it immediately struck me that her question uncovered an integral issue that permeates society far beyond the world of dating and relationships. Modern culture has an intolerance to sincerity and an obsession with “nonchalance”, which is why, for so many of us, showing that we care about anything at all feels like a humiliation ritual. Joseph’s piece captured that shift in a very interesting way. She framed the embarrassment around romance as a symptom of women finally questioning their “blind allegiance to heterosexuality,” where being partnered once defined their worth in society. In other words, embarrassment isn’t the disease to Joseph, but rather, the cure: a healthy discomfort with a system that had long made womanhood contingent on male validation. But what happens when that discomfort metastasises and that detachment becomes a personality trait until, eventually, embarrassment turns into the only emotion we can trust?
Joseph’s article ended hopefully, envisioning a space where women could re-evaluate their relationships to heteronormativity without shame, where being single was no longer a cautionary tale, but rather a statement of personal autonomy. And she’s right – there is certainly something politically powerful about refusing the old fairytale myth we were all sold throughout our childhoods. But, upon reflecting on Joseph’s article, aided by the endless think pieces on Instagram Reels and Substack pages, it feels like we have collectively overshot the mark entirely. The pendulum that swung away from complete dependence has landed somewhere far off the safe middle ground, at a point somewhere closer to emotional repression and avoidance.
Embarrassment, in terms of psychology, is considered to be a “self-conscious emotion”: it arises not from what we do, but from how we imagine others will interpret what we do. In the age of the internet, where the audience has become both invisible and infinite, that social reflex has become chronic, and we no longer need to be physically observed to feel perpetually observed. This imagined gaze becomes ambient noise, passing through a filter of anticipation and becoming a silent calculation of how our actions and behaviour will look to others. Thus is the logic of “cringe culture,” a complex and intricate form of modern social regulation. Research into “vicarious embarrassment” shows that we don’t just feel shame for ourselves, we even feel it second-hand for others who break our own interpretation of this imagined social code. Cringe, then, is moral, defining what is acceptable to feel and what isn’t. And as of right now, sincerity sits firmly on the wrong side of that line.
Caring too much? Embarrassing. Commitment? Embarrassing. Conversations with my friends about the struggles of navigating today’s dating landscape are filled with constant pre-emptive defences: “It’s not that deep,” “We’re just seeing where it goes,” “I don’t even like them that much anyway.” The subtext is always: please don’t take me too seriously, I’m in on the joke too. According to the dating app Hinge, popular amongst Gen-Z, over a third of 12,000 Hinge users found themselves in a “situationship” in the last year, despite 75% of users in a separate study saying that they wanted a true relationship. The whole point of the situationship is to avoid clarity, where if you can’t be clearly defined, you can’t be clearly rejected. Joseph’s critique of heteronormativity was about how traditional romance confined women to legibility, where having a boyfriend was a cultural milestone rather than a personal choice. Our generation’s response has been to make illegibility the ideal. Being emotionally avoidant and permanently unbothered has become the new ideal, as detachment has become an aspirational goal.
However, that feigned nonchalance bleeds into every other aspect of our lives. Dinners with friends have started to look like curated photoshoots. Time spent with family is forced into nostalgic carousels of “soft Sundays” and “reconnecting with nature.” Even sharing our creative efforts, whether that be a song, poem or sculpture, now must be hidden behind many layers of irony and self-awareness. The end result? We operate within a culture that looks emotionally expressive on the surface but feels strangely hollow, one that prizes the performance of depth over the risk of genuine feeling.
Somewhere along the way, self-awareness became a form of critical self-surveillance.
We perform this curated notion of independence for an imagined audience, policing our own authenticity and vulnerability in real time. Gen Z, once imagined as the emotionally intelligent generation, has grown mean. Our humour is cutting, with any sense of empathy filtered through irony. We make fun of ourselves before anyone else can, and we do it to each other, too. Behind screens, we’ve gotten far too comfortable ripping people to shreds, perhaps because it’s somewhat easier than facing what their existence stirs in ourselves, their authenticity an affront to our true selves we’ve suppressed for external validation.
The cruelty feels justified when it’s dressed up as wit, but oftentimes it’s just projection, our own insecurities disguised as social commentary. Entire accounts such as @qringey on Instagram are dedicated to reposting people acting in a “cringe” way, often without direct consent from the original posters. But in the end, the joke is not on the innocent individuals they attempt to humiliate, but on us, the willing bystanders, who frantically scroll through our FYPs to determine what the new “in” personality is.
Sociologist Erving Goffman proposed a theory of this constant performance in our social lives that he called dramaturgy, whereby individuals are “actors” presenting themselves through a carefully curated “front” to an “audience” to improve one’s public self-image. But where Goffman’s audience was physical and finite, ours is algorithmic: invisible and infinite, a cruel opponent forever impossible to please. There is no backstage anymore. Every emotion feels like content in waiting, every relationship a potential “soft launch”. We’ve become fluent in performance, but terrified of presence.
What is especially ironic is that embarrassment originally evolved as a prosocial emotion. Studies show that people who blush easily are often considered to be more trustworthy, with embarrassment signalling a sense of care. In that sense, it’s meant to connect us, to help us to trust one another slightly more. But now, we’ve inverted it. We hide our embarrassment instead of expressing it, using detachment to prove we don’t need connection at all. This is the hidden cost of liberation: the fear that intimacy will make us regress.
In the case of straight women, rejecting the boyfriend-as-badge model may seem necessary as an act of defiance against performative romance for patriarchal approval. But now, the same impulse that freed us from the fairytale has also made vulnerability feel suspect, almost reactionary. The same logic applies to identity more broadly. The internet’s relentless churning mill of microtrends has turned authenticity into an unstable category. The moment you commit to something, an aesthetic, a tone, even a hobby, it risks becoming cringe or dated.
Personality is now iterative, designed to expire, and what was once meant to be liberating has made us permanently anxious. In freeing ourselves from fixed scripts, we’ve lost the comfort of being readable to others, and perhaps most horrifyingly, even to ourselves. Still, cultural moods are cyclical, and you can already sense sincerity stirring again. Gen-Z artists like Olivia Rodrigo lean into the idea that “Love is Embarrassing”, offering confessional alt-pop songs as evidence that vulnerability can still resonate.
Maybe embarrassment isn’t something to purge, but something to embrace, as a reminder that you care enough to risk humiliation, as we remind ourselves that “to be cringe is to be free”. Joseph was right: we’re re-evaluating what partnership means, and that matters. But maybe the next step is to also re-evaluate detachment itself, asking why caring openly has become such a social faux pas. Because, whilst Joseph almost certainly disagrees, having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing. Loving your friends isn’t embarrassing. Wanting to be known isn’t embarrassing.
So, in the end, what is actually “embarrassing”? I say, it’s how scared we’ve become of being real.
Edited by Zarah Hashim, Sex and Relationships Editor
