https://aeon.co/ideas/what-is-to-be-done...creepy-men
EXCERPT (Heidi Matthews): These days, ‘creepy’ is a popular pejorative. From ‘Creepy Uncle Joe’ Biden’s hair-smelling antics to Justin Trudeau standing ‘too close’ to a tennis star [...] many people are invoking creepiness as a factor, even a decisive one, in considerations about what is socially acceptable and even who is fit for political office. Creeps, it seems, are everywhere. It’s a strange development. Why are we calling so many people, usually men, creepy?
Despite the prevalence of the creepiness discourse, real research into the nature of creepiness is pretty new. It suggests that creepiness is related to disgust, which is an adaptive emotional response that helps to maintain a physical barrier between our bodies and potentially injurious external substances. Disgust assists us in policing the line between inside and outside our bodies, but also to create and maintain interpersonal and social borders. Physical reactions – such as the shudder response, nausea, and exclamations of ‘ew’, ‘icky’ and ‘gross’ – can be important ways of producing and transmitting commitments to social norms. Signalling disgust helps society maintain the integrity of taboos around sexuality, including paedophilia and incest.
Biologically, being grossed out by, for example, the idea of ingesting faeces makes sense: it keeps us from getting ill. Feeling ‘creeped out’ by a person or a social situation, however, is less straightforward. Creepiness is different from disgust in that it refers to a feeling of unease in the face of social liminality, particularly where sex and death are involved. We become uncomfortable when events don’t easily fit our expectations or transgress social rules. In a 2016 study, the psychologists Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke at Knox College in Illinois concluded that ‘creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat’. Emotionally, creepiness helps us externalise our internal sense of confusion and uncertainty when presented with situations that are not easily categorised. Feeling ‘creeped out’ justifies our decision to shut down, rather than undertake the task of analysing ambiguously threatening situations. It is a form of cognitive paralysis indicating that we are unsure how to proceed.
Because women are more likely than men to experience physical and sexual threat in their daily lives, they are also more likely to judge others (usually men) to be creepy. Judgments of creepiness, however, are not necessarily reliable. [...] As researchers warn, what most people intuit to be creepy aligns closely with the attributes of individuals and populations already on or beyond the boundaries of social acceptance. The mentally ill and disabled, the physically deformed, those with ticks or other abnormal movements or facial features, the impoverished and the homeless are all more likely to be judged creepy. [...] we should probably remember what we have known for some time: that the homeless and mentally ill are far more vulnerable to acts of violence than they are threatening to the rest of us. In short, ‘we’ are far more likely to hurt the ‘creepy’ than they us.
[...] How we should think about creepiness when it comes to a co-worker, a politician or a celebrity? To date, little has been written about the social and psychological mechanisms that make #MeToo allegations compelling. But it has become common and acceptable to publicly evaluate and judge sexual conduct and experiences according to the capacious affective language of disgust. [...] On its face, #MeToo discourse relies heavily on the supposedly clear line between consent and violation, where the trouble presented by ‘grey areas’ is understood to be fixable if only we better understood – and were more publicly aware of – the nature of consent. But for all the talk about the importance of consent, there is another slippery process at work under the surface. ... A sexual encounter can be intensely creepy – and entirely legal. But if we allow creepiness to stand in for principled normative assessment of the kinds of sex we want to hold up as socially valuable, it will be at the expense of historically sexually marginalised groups: the queers, the perverts, the BDSM community, and others who find joy and meaning in the sexually experimental... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Heidi Matthews): These days, ‘creepy’ is a popular pejorative. From ‘Creepy Uncle Joe’ Biden’s hair-smelling antics to Justin Trudeau standing ‘too close’ to a tennis star [...] many people are invoking creepiness as a factor, even a decisive one, in considerations about what is socially acceptable and even who is fit for political office. Creeps, it seems, are everywhere. It’s a strange development. Why are we calling so many people, usually men, creepy?
Despite the prevalence of the creepiness discourse, real research into the nature of creepiness is pretty new. It suggests that creepiness is related to disgust, which is an adaptive emotional response that helps to maintain a physical barrier between our bodies and potentially injurious external substances. Disgust assists us in policing the line between inside and outside our bodies, but also to create and maintain interpersonal and social borders. Physical reactions – such as the shudder response, nausea, and exclamations of ‘ew’, ‘icky’ and ‘gross’ – can be important ways of producing and transmitting commitments to social norms. Signalling disgust helps society maintain the integrity of taboos around sexuality, including paedophilia and incest.
Biologically, being grossed out by, for example, the idea of ingesting faeces makes sense: it keeps us from getting ill. Feeling ‘creeped out’ by a person or a social situation, however, is less straightforward. Creepiness is different from disgust in that it refers to a feeling of unease in the face of social liminality, particularly where sex and death are involved. We become uncomfortable when events don’t easily fit our expectations or transgress social rules. In a 2016 study, the psychologists Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke at Knox College in Illinois concluded that ‘creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat’. Emotionally, creepiness helps us externalise our internal sense of confusion and uncertainty when presented with situations that are not easily categorised. Feeling ‘creeped out’ justifies our decision to shut down, rather than undertake the task of analysing ambiguously threatening situations. It is a form of cognitive paralysis indicating that we are unsure how to proceed.
Because women are more likely than men to experience physical and sexual threat in their daily lives, they are also more likely to judge others (usually men) to be creepy. Judgments of creepiness, however, are not necessarily reliable. [...] As researchers warn, what most people intuit to be creepy aligns closely with the attributes of individuals and populations already on or beyond the boundaries of social acceptance. The mentally ill and disabled, the physically deformed, those with ticks or other abnormal movements or facial features, the impoverished and the homeless are all more likely to be judged creepy. [...] we should probably remember what we have known for some time: that the homeless and mentally ill are far more vulnerable to acts of violence than they are threatening to the rest of us. In short, ‘we’ are far more likely to hurt the ‘creepy’ than they us.
[...] How we should think about creepiness when it comes to a co-worker, a politician or a celebrity? To date, little has been written about the social and psychological mechanisms that make #MeToo allegations compelling. But it has become common and acceptable to publicly evaluate and judge sexual conduct and experiences according to the capacious affective language of disgust. [...] On its face, #MeToo discourse relies heavily on the supposedly clear line between consent and violation, where the trouble presented by ‘grey areas’ is understood to be fixable if only we better understood – and were more publicly aware of – the nature of consent. But for all the talk about the importance of consent, there is another slippery process at work under the surface. ... A sexual encounter can be intensely creepy – and entirely legal. But if we allow creepiness to stand in for principled normative assessment of the kinds of sex we want to hold up as socially valuable, it will be at the expense of historically sexually marginalised groups: the queers, the perverts, the BDSM community, and others who find joy and meaning in the sexually experimental... (MORE - details)