Face the Ick

An old friend hit me with a deep insult in a group setting. It wasn’t a polished zinger. She just saw too big an opening, and her cruelty suppression was overwhelmed by the gaping comedy chasm. My reaction was less hurt and more the pure shock of the Anchorman meme: “Boy, that escalated quickly.” The insult was a curt, specific form of, “Is your partner embarrassed to be with you since her job is to help people in your visibly suboptimal state?” She, along with many others, was present to hear this, and it wasn’t a question without merit.

The next day I got an unsolicited text apology. That’s how it works in Western culture, right? An apology undoes a harm. It was enough for me. In my college days, I couldn’t resist delivering barbs whose cleverness outstripped their cruelty, so I get it. But this was a group setting. Does a personal or even public apology undo harm done in that arena? We like to pretend it does, but how could it? I was shown to be someone deserving of and then accepting the insult in front of everyone, a loss of dignity in itself before the content of the actual insult is considered!

On trips to the Arabian Peninsula, I spent months running afoul of an additional kind of dignity beyond reputation or prestige. It didn’t map cleanly to anything back home. Most everything else translated. Some people are afforded more respect for their community standing. Others are held in low regard for habitual lying. This culture had something else.

Occasionally I would slip up in some way I didn’t understand and rob someone of “face,” a distinct sociological aspect of reputation that has no counterpart in the West. No one was able to describe it to me in a satisfactory way. Each infraction seemed distinct, and I failed to create a model that would predict what not to say in the future. The CIA wrote a declassified brief describing how it applies to Arabs, and it is remarkably well articulated.

I won’t try to draw the elaborate boundaries between all the Western words that orbit status: honor, pride, dignity. It annoys me how authoritatively people try to do this for jealousy and envy—pretending some tidy semantic map exists where one ends and the other begins. Instead, I’ll point out how face is different. It is not symmetric. It can be lost in an instant through embarrassment, public contradiction, or a breach of ritual. It spreads contagiously, radiating outward to kin.

Most crucially, the processes and timescales where it can be lost are not the inverse of how it can be regained. That is the key distinction in the East. It is a big deal to cause someone to lose face, because you can’t give it back to them, nor can they forcefully take it back. The highest social virtue isn’t to rise to glory, but to move through the world without making anyone else fall.

Why invent an additional status dimension that mostly moves in one direction, down, and can only be lost? Why did so many cultures converge on something like it? We seem to do fine without it in America. It must serve some purpose if it survived so long in so many diverse cultures.

In cruising the world of TikTok where young people are eager to give up generational secrets for a few likes, I discovered an unusual claim. Certain behaviors by men trigger an instantaneous, often irreversible collapse of attraction. It’s called “the ick.” They’re often delivered as disembodied clauses. “When you meet his friend group and he’s not the leader.” “When his legs dangle from a barstool.” “When he clumsily chases after a coin that rolls away.”

What is the ick, in precise terms? What unifies these odd statements? They are nearly instantaneous tells that a man lacks status, agency, competence, taste, or hygiene. To men, these look petty or mystifying. That’s all it took to lose attraction? I can’t get it back? Is it a leftover instinct from a more barbarous era of polygamy in which few high status men deployed attacks to secure many women, and were mostly successful in doing so? Maybe we should devise a way to track this dangerously asymmetric attribute in the modern era. It needs to be a grave error to cause your fellow man to give his wife the ick, intentionally or unintentionally.

Men and women resolve conflicts on different channels. Male conflicts are often reset after a bounded contest, verbal or physical. Symmetry is restored quickly. We fought, a pecking order was upended or upheld, and equilibrium returns. This seems awfully similar to the symmetric markers we use in the West like prestige, honor, dignity. If Western business can run without face—look at our GDP—why does face remain elsewhere?

Perhaps it is not for men or for historically male commerce at all. What if it is a collective guardrail to prevent men from publicly shrinking each other in ways that would infect the home? Face allows men of unequal status to avoid displaying or leveraging that status in ways that give their wives “the ick.” In that sense, it protects the pair-bond by defanging public humiliation.

This doesn’t exhaust face. It still structures hierarchy, lubricates negotiations, and averts vendettas. But this interpretation explains why face is asymmetrical while most male conflict is not. You can apologize to me and I can accept, but you cannot easily apologize to the room, my father, or my wife’s model of me.

Tomorrow, if the room’s memory matters more than intent, when did our world get so big?