Male Cringe, Male Cope

I never tried to get after an article about the “NYC Colombian nanny” debate. I glanced at it at the time, and because I have written a bunch of other bullshit about gender wars and gender roles, I was exhausted and decided not to touch it. Then, like any online flashpoint, it completely faded from my memory until I found this mention of it on the Cartoons Hate Her Substack. (Good Substack, BTW. I am mostly broke and recently just paid for it.)

The point in that Substack is important. We generally associate the idea of “cringe” or “cope” online with females, and admittedly, yes, women do post a lot of cringe-y and cope-y stuff, often sitting in their cars crying about men or work. That does happen, and it is often cringe, but you also have to remember there’s maybe 1,000 women at most that do that, 44 of whom go viral, so it’s also not enough to say “Women are collapsing.” Although yes, there’s also a weird ecosystem where men (guys like “Ace Nate” and “Sigma Male”) make reaction videos about those videos, so they go more viral. Anyway.

The thing is, men post a lot of “cope” and “cringe” too — it just comes in different formats.

Let’s go to this Colombian nanny debate. If you remember it, the idea is that it’s stupid to get a hot nanny (“au pair”) in NYC, because she will eventually bang your husband. This can happen, yes, and there’s currently a true crime case in Northern Virginia where this happened, but it’s honestly relatively rare.

The man side of this nanny discourse was usually:

• “The wife would deserve it, she’s out girl-bossing all day.”
• “Of course this is happening.”

(1) is cringe, especially since this particular viral nugget is from NYC, where two incomes are often necessary.

(2) is cringe and cope, because it presupposes that a super hot au pair wants to bang a 48 year-old dad bod guy for, what? Citizenship? His money? She can take a bunch of his money via employment, and then go bang Chad and Tyrone after work hours.

So yes, men do the cringe and cope thing as well. It just takes different forms, is all.

Two additional quick points here:

1. In 2023, I worked for this company and I liked it for a while. Let’s say six months. Then I had this new boss come in, and from the first intro call, he was telling us about his glory days at Disney, eBay, and various other places, and he just reeked of douchebag. That turned out to be true. Now, I’ll also admit I wasn’t the best employee at this gig. I was good, but could have been more focused, absolutely. The most interesting thing about this guy, though, was that his wife worked and they lived in Palo Alto. His wife was a middle school teacher. If you ever even remotely mentioned the concept of his wife working, he would lose his mind and spend 14 minutes justifying why “she likes it” but, of course, “she doesn’t have to.” Basically, I read the situation as all his tech friends had SAHMs and he felt inferior in some way. This is huge to guys, but we don’t often acknowledge it. In fact, let me show you a very stupid video.

Ignore the thumbnail and go into the video. There’s a clipped TikTok where some creator talks about men and says that men don’t protect women, but they simp for other men. Look, most men I know do protect women — or at least try to. But men also do simp for other men, especially the rich and powerful. That’s also undeniably true. And a lot of guys will simp out for another guy over protecting their wife or partner in a given situation; that’s also true.

My old boss was like this. Even though his wife really liked doing this middle school teaching arc, he was resentful of it because of what it said about him. Now, I don’t know if he posts that stuff online, but that’s also a version of cringe/cope from the male side.

PS — I do the same shit with infertility. It saddens me that I haven’t helped my wife “get there,” so I cringe/cope that topic. I am by no means immune.

2. Red Pill, I.e. anti-women, content is some of the ultimate cringe and cope on the Internet, including this recent arc where a woman apparently deserved to get murdered because “she might take his kids.”

In all honesty, we are all searching for love and belonging and wanting to be seen. And in the process of that going well and not going well for us, we are all guilty of a little cringe and cope.