The Stripper Actually Likes You: The Intricacies of Humiliation Rituals in the Digital Age

By Lucia Hill

‘Life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face.’ - Franz Kafka  

Everything feels like the stripper actually likes me, and I’m running out of dollar bills. 

In a new niche of copy-paste text trends, this sentence has been posted and reposted across TikTok, often overlaying videos of crashing waves or galloping horses and set to the soulful melodies of the Cocteau Twins. Yet, these videos are merely old adages, repurposed for a new age. The virality of the text hinges on its communication of artifice: by comparing our everyday lives to sex work, creators call attention to the increasingly transactional nature of relationships in the digital age. What exactly is the appeal of videos like this, which reveal the dissonance and discomfort behind the performance of human connection for friends and followers? 

To explain this, we might think of another trending phrase: the branding of the ‘humiliation ritual,’ in which social media users become so enwrapped in the online performance of self that they are constantly convinced they are doing something wrong, and therefore embarrassing themselves. As we manufacture authenticity online, we carry the same attitudes into our offline lives, as we try to perfect our images. But when something as simple as having a boyfriend, trying a new hobby, or going about your daily routine is immediately branded as embarrassing, we have to think about our generation’s failure to form honest human connections, beyond the ephemeral world of likes and reposts. 

Pixel_Hysteria, ‘Transmisión Panóptica,’ Pinterest

These days, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. It’s a simple concept: a prison designed to allow guards the possibility of watching any prisoner at all times. In the modern age, the suggestion that someone might be watching you at any time resonates on an uncomfortably deep level. Being in public now comes with the caveat that you aren’t just being passively observed– at any point, someone could be taking photos of you or recording you. There’s a non-zero chance that a video of you doing something as innocuous as walking down the street or talking with a friend could be posted on social media and go viral. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a frothing horde in the comments accusing you of some social transgression, with a dozen self-appointed lip readers and body language experts dissecting your every micro expression for the masses' viewing pleasure. The worst part is the fact that we’ve all seemingly opted into this digital panopticon: surveillance is incentivized by the attention economy we all feed with likes, comments, and interaction, whether positive or negative.  

This monitoring of the self has resulted in what I dub ‘chronic authenticity poisoning.’ Seeing someone cross the lines we’ve so carefully drawn suddenly feels like an attack, and the internet is all too enthusiastic to deliver its daily lashings to whoever commits that week’s new social faux pas. How are they not embarrassed? How don’t they understand the social contract they signed as soon as they stepped foot on the internet? This mentality is made particularly clear in Vogue’s viral article, ‘Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing?’ The article seems less invested in the realities of a relationship offline than in the construction of brand image and self-identification. The discussion over whether having a boyfriend should inspire shame feels less like a rejection of hetero-patriarchy and more like the coalescing of familiar internet neuroses. At times, it feels like the entirety of the internet’s under-30 demographic is so caught up in collective navel gazing that we forget to look for the source of the ‘ick’ feeling. Why should we feel grossed out whenever anyone deigns to be themselves, in any meaningful way, on a public forum? 

How do we begin to unravel this inevitable embarrassment, the shame of failure, the hyper-awareness of being watched? How do we disconnect when our culture is all about being plugged in? The second wave of the Luddite movement hasn’t taken off yet– only the worst people you know seem interested in smashing their iPhones and returning to the simpler days of the pager, the discman, or the humble iPod shuffle. There’s no subversion, no meaningful escape from prying eyes– only the choice to buy in. We affect indifference and perform nonchalance. We dismiss and deflect. We curate coolness for imagined audiences. The only way to avoid embarrassment is to pretend we didn’t care in the first place. But becoming our own jailers doesn’t solve the digital panopticon; it just mitigates our sense of discomfort. Maybe the answer is to embrace the liminality of the strip club, or the therapist’s office, or the million other places we practice vulnerability. Maybe we yearn for the metaphorical strip club because we’re so desperate to connect that we’re willing to feed into the transactional bent of social media for some sense of intimacy. Maybe the stripper does actually like you, but you’ll never know if you can't even get yourself through the door.  

Cover Image: Philip Garner, ‘Closed Circuit Vanity, Table and Make-Up Mirror,’ Domus 621 (October 1981)