Audrey Hobert arrived at NPR's Tiny Desk and did something dangerous for a young female pop star in the social media age: she looked entirely comfortable being a little embarrassing. And she sounded good while doing it.

But, online, a performance is rarely allowed to remain just a performance for long. The reaction quickly became a kind of brutal referendum on Hobert herself.

Commentators largely skipped past the easier question of whether she could sing and moved on to the lyrics and dance moves—both, admittedly, a little cringe—then to her looks and her industry connections: her father is a successful television writer and producer, and childhood friend Gracie Abrams gave Hobert an unusually direct route into professional songwriting.

From there, in some corners of social media, came needless speculation about whether she is transgender.

Then followed the backlash to the backlash. Hobert's defenders called the response cruel, misogynistic, or evidence that people had simply failed to understand the act.

Hobert's appeal rests on an awkward combination. She wraps real musical competence in lyrics, movements and mannerisms that seem almost engineered to make part of the audience recoil in some way.

So the cringe is not an accidental flaw around the edges of the performance, but almost the very point. And that makes much of the pile-on feel oddly beside it.

The Problem Isn't That She Can't Sing

Here’s the thing about dismissing Hobert's Tiny Desk as terrible: she can sing.

The stripped-down setting makes that hard to avoid as her voice holds up, the melodies are clean and catchy, and she has the kind of pop instincts that helped her cowrite Abrams’ That’s So True before launching her own solo career.

The cringe, however, is elsewhere.

It is in lyrics so conversational and hyper-specific that they sound like someone slipped a melody under a voice note ("And I like it the best when I'm losing, baby," she sings in Shooting Star, which is perhaps the most Gen Z possible response to losing—make it part of your personality).

It’s also in the exaggerated expressions, the gangly movements, the little theatrical flourishes and the peculiar earnestness with which she delivers lines another pop singer might bury beneath sex appeal or studied indifference.

Hobert dances with the physical abandon of someone who has either forgotten she is being watched or knows perfectly well and has decided to make it uncomfortable.

That is all a very different thing from being bad. Hobert's performance is more disorienting because the musical fundamentals are there. What some viewers cannot stand is the esthetics around them.

Hobert is fully aware of what she is doing. Her debut album is called Who’s the Clown? after all.

When Cringe Becomes a Femininity Test

Nobody has to like Hobert's lyrics, her dancing or even Hobert herself. But, somewhere in the reaction, "this makes me cringe" started sliding into "she looks weird" and, from there, for some commenters, into something nastier: speculation about whether she is transgender.

The two judgments are actually connected. Hobert's whole act is built around refusing polish, so she pulls ugly faces, makes her body comic and moves awkwardly on purpose, purposely moving away from the sex appeal that other pop stars have made the central parts of their acts.

So the same qualities that make Hobert cringe to some people also make her fail a very old test of female pop stardom: be unusual, but still pretty; be funny, but still desirable; be awkward, but in a way that remains flattering.

Once she refuses that bargain, the criticism starts drifting from artistic taste and into an unsolicited inspection. Height, angular features, a long face or insufficiently polished femininity become "evidence" against her.

The thought process says less about transgender people (to be clear: Hobert has not said she is trans) and more about our standards of femininity and how they've become something that audiences think they are entitled to speculate about.

Hobert is a clear target because she does not conform to the entertainment industry’s unrealistic standards.

The Cringe Is the Point

Hobert has addressed her lack of "classic femininity" directly in interviews.

Discussing the cover of Who’s the Clown?, she explained why she rejected the obvious glamorous-pop-star pose: "I didn't think there'd be anything interesting about me, posing semi-sexually and looking really good."

The whole Hobert proposition is she's OK to live outside the pop star box…and some people find that unbearable.

They are allowed to dislike her disposition and her music, but when "she is annoying" turns into "she is ugly," or perceived failures of attractiveness become clues about whether she is female at all, the criticism reveals itself as pure misogyny.

Hobert's idea is that she can rise above all that and just perform, in her own way, as herself.

You can hate the dancing and the lyrics, you can cringe all you like…but Hobert is still booked for three nights at the Brooklyn Paramount this fall.