The Humiliation Sensation That's Gripping the (Online) Nation
When humiliation is the default setting, is it still a "ritual" – or just the price of getting exposure?
What’s Going On?
“Is [Doechii wearing a Louis Vuitton brand on her face at Met Gala] a sign of a humiliation ritual?”
“Is this a humiliation ritual?” ask the top comments on a post of Ice Spice at Off White.
“Jason Momoa performs humiliation ritual in the form of A Minecraft Movie.” (That’s an actual article.)
The concept of public humiliation rituals in celebrity culture is having a moment. The thinking goes that rising celebs are made to do embarrassing things – especially at high-visibility events like red carpets – as a kind of initiation rite (and yes, The Illuminati come up a lot in this discourse).
It sounds absurd – until you see how many people are posting about it and (juding from the engagement) how many seem to believe it.
What’s driving it?
Celebrity culture has always invited conspiracy. It’s a rarefied, tightly controlled world, with enough real horror stories (Epstein, Diddy) to make darker speculation feel plausible.
Social platforms like TikTok turn that curiosity into content. Blind items, yacht girl lore (at this point, every moderately successful actress, KarJenner, and High School Musical alum seems to do a bit of the yacht), “Illuminati contracts,” and now humiliation rituals all feed a shared desire: to make sense of the opaque.
And though I very much think it’s reductionist to say “everything is an alt-right pipline,” creators like Sindi and Crutches and Spice make a strong case for how blind items and celebrity gossip, which center on the control and commodification of women’s bodies, can veer into narratives of traditionalist radicalization.
What does it mean?
says it best in their GQ piece about humiliation rituals back from March: “The problem these conspiracists are addressing is real: capitalism requires us to debase ourselves on a daily basis, and, in the age of social media, to do so publicly. [W]e are all being encouraged to do increasingly ridiculous things to feel seen, to connect with each other, or even to make a living.”
It’s all very Entertain or Die, of course.
And, in parallel, there’s a related discourse: get over the cringe – embrace self-expression even when it’s awkward. But is this liberating, or just the normalization of public performance?
Because whether it’s a star in a bizarre outfit, a microinfluencer oversharing their trauma, or a teen dancing badly on main, the line between “owning it” and being made into content feels increasingly thin.
Final Takeaway
When cringe and humiliation becomes currency, we have to ask: is visibility worth the cost? And what happens when debasement is the new baseline?