Is Avoiding Embarrassment the Only Goal?

Dating is now structured around avoiding humiliation above all else. Meanwhile, the price of love is often embarrassment.

The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by Benjamin West, 1791

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

Shame does not feel good. It’s understandable we’d want to avoid it. We have entire social systems and norms in place to do so. Even so, shame has served as a productive tool, a hermeneutic element of being human. We learn a lot from shame. But in recent years, shame has instead been replaced with something far more trivial. Shame has been traded for embarrassment.

The entire arc of contemporary sex, dating and relationships is centered on one central objective: avoid embarrassment at all costs.

The latest discourse on whether having a boyfriend is “embarrassing” distills this well. The function of a relationship, in this context, is not companionship but only an extension of how you are viewed by the outside world. And if that outside world deems it embarrassing, well, then, it’s clearly not worth your time. The outside world in question, it’s worth noting, is not your immediate friends or family — it is the Internet, the other, the abstract that is forming the terms of this embarrassment in the first place. If your actual loved ones found reason to see your relationship as embarrassing, that would be worth considering. But that isn’t the conversation here. Instead, it’s flatly that having a boyfriend no longer aligns a woman with the current culturally acceptable narrative.

There is some merit to the original “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” article that proposed the question. As author Chanté Joseph wrote, much of this so-called embarrassment is actually just a refrain from posting about one’s personal life online. Some play it coy, by posting faceless photos of a man’s body across from them at a restaurant or other images that suggest a partner is present, but his identity will remain a mystery. Some, seemingly in fear that someone will try to sabotage their relationship, post photos where the man’s face is entirely blurred. Others, like myself, rarely post about their man at all.

All three of these behaviors stem, I think, from a similar place of desiring boundaries between our digital and personal lives. It’s often appropriate to not want everyone in your business. To reframe the original question of the article, having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing, but maybe posting about him is.

The majority of where this conversation originates is not quite so straightforward, though. This is not some reckoning in how much of ourselves we give to the Internet. Instead, it is further neuroticism over who we are online and romantically, with the gender war as the arbiter.

“On the Delusional Diaries podcast, fronted by two New York-based influencers, Halley and Jaz, they discuss whether having a boyfriend is ‘lame’ now,” explained Joseph. “‘Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?’ read a top comment. ‘Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right,’ read another with thousands of likes. In essence, ‘having a boyfriend typically takes hits on a woman’s aura,’ as one commenter claimed.”

@ivafunIt’s embarrassing? TUH DONT GOTTA TELL ME TWICE #vogue #embarrasingboyfriend #boyfriendproblems it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend Vogue

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Here we have reached the ideal nexus of the gender war and the digital dating panopticon: it is not just that women do not like men, but that they do not want to be seen online liking men by other women. To be clear, this is something the manosphere has been doing for ages. Among both MGTOW forums and followers of Nick Fuentes, shaming men who “betray” the cause by having relationships with women is a common occurrence. These types of guys are moreover part of the reason why having a boyfriend has become embarrassing — they’re both loud and bad enough to make all men undesirable by association.

But this itself is what has always concerned me about the anti-men, anti-dating attitude among young women: it’s just the inverse of what we hear from the groypers. The threat these attitudes present to women versus what they present to men are obviously not the same (women are far more likely to experience violence from misogyny than men are from misandry), but some of the results yielded are the same. Either way, the discourse is trying to make an incel out of you.

I think a lot of this goes deeper than the basic online gender war conversation, though. All of this stems back to a crisis of vulnerability. Whether it’s the Tea app or “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook groups or a growing ideology of puritanical misogyny among young men or the rising numbers of people opting out of sex and dating entirely, the message is that intimacy is a threat to your ego. The only way to protect it is to absorb an attitude of defensiveness, wherein fear is your guiding principle.

It isn’t that men have broadly become embarrassing by association. Instead, we’re just more afraid of being embarrassed. We’re afraid of being someone who desires love and sex and connection and companionship. We’re afraid of acknowledging ourselves as having emotional needs that require another person for fulfillment. We’re afraid of other people seeing this need within us.

Slavoj Žižek spoke about this several years back in discussing our fear of “falling” in love. “I think today we are I think that today we are simply more and more afraid of these ‘event’ encounters you encounters, something which is totally contingent but the result of it, if you accept it, is an event that your entire life changes,” he says, describing the sort of meet-cute encounters that we might romantically describe as love at first sight. “This is why I think that this avoiding falling in love is the same phenomenon as a standard joke that I use in almost all my books, how we want today the thing without the bet aspect of it, without the price we have to pay for it. We want sugar without calories. We want beer without alcohol. It’s the same thing in sexuality: we want brief, safe sex sexual encounters without the fall, without this fatal attachment… life is just a play of appearances, don’t take it too seriously, maintain a proper distance, don’t get too attached to early objects — it fits perfectly, this superficial consumerist attitude.”

That’s the tradeoff here: everything good and true and real comes with risk. Embarrassment is that risk. Vulnerability is that trade. What I don’t think Žižek saw when he first discussed this, though, is how over time these risks have made us not what the thing at all. The sugar-free candy and alcohol-free beer reflect not a desire for sugar and beer without the consequences but a lack of desire at all. People aren’t having brief, risk-free safe sex: they just aren’t having sex. The only real desire that remains is that of avoidance. The “want” is to avoid embarrassment.

The saddest part of all this, of course, is that love inherently requires embarrassment. It requires a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, a fall we may not quickly rise back up from. It requires allowing someone else to look within our whole selves. It requires a willingness to fracture our sense of self and reckon with the cracks. As anyone who has been in love knows, that exchange is worth it. More than worth it. It’s a new fulfillment of its own. But something has shifted to where we’re not just afraid of the embarrassment of love, but the embarrassment of how other people might see us if we even begin to approach that risk. Is it that we’re being viewed and assessed and dissected now online? Is it that we’re thinking of ourselves too much? Are we looking at other people’s lives online with more scrutiny, and worrying everyone else is doing the same?

A lot of this gender war nonsense is just a side effect of this overwhelming cycle. We weren’t supposed to be seeing this much of each other, of random people and their views and inner monologues. It’s a cycle that, just like the gender war, wants us to choose these abstract narratives over our own personal lives. Isn’t that embarrassing?