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What is to be done about the problem of creepy men?

#1
C C Offline
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)
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#2
confused2 Offline
Just a post in support of the 'queers' I've known - past present and hopefully future - not in the least bit creepy - straighter than straight on the creepy front.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
Am I to believe that a woman would never move inside the ‘creep zone’? When we look at a photograph where man & woman are in close proximity how do we know that the male is responsible? Regardless, there’s only two sexes, er three, maybe four and quite possibly a few I missed so if I want to meet one of them am I to do this from a prescribed distance? Thank goodness we carry a cell phone so we at least can communicate without getting too close. Dating sites are good for that (their photo looked genuine). Although something like sexting is probably the new touching, for better or worse.

I remember the expression “I wouldn’t touch him/her with a ten foot pole”. Has that pole gotten longer or shorter, I can’t tell. I think it used to mean that if someone crept within the 10’ radius that they found you attractive or at least approachable. Now you’re a creep, I guess. Personally I find it amusing to ponder just how boy meets girl these days. However I don’t sit around thinking change isn’t a good thing plus I’m open minded enough to know it’s inevitable. Although if a major religion decrees creeping is straight from God then it might become ridiculously hysterical.
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#4
Syne Offline
Women aren't "creepy". They're "crazy", "stalkers", etc.. The solution to both is education toward genuine self-esteem and proper socialization, as opposed to the "everyone's a winner" coddling.
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#5
Leigha Offline
I think there are some women who deserve the label of ''creepy.'' Whenever I read about a 30 year old female teacher seducing her 13 year old male students, I cringe and to me, that falls in the category of creepy. And crazy, I guess. But, perhaps our society still perceives women as non-threatening and thus the creepy label mainly applies to men, but there are many criminal cases where the women involved could very well be considered ''creepy.''
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#6
Secular Sanity Offline
(Nov 17, 2019 01:29 AM)C C Wrote: 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.

Hmm...I never really thought of it that way.

I have to admit that I do the creepy Joe Biden thing but I would never do it to strangers.

They say that the smell of an infant’s head triggers our reward center. I’m not sure if it’s true or not but that’s the first thing that I do when someone hands off their baby to me. I still do it to my boys. They hate it. Blush
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#7
C C Offline
(Nov 18, 2019 03:19 PM)Leigha Wrote: I think there are some women who deserve the label of ''creepy.'' Whenever I read about a 30 year old female teacher seducing her 13 year old male students, I cringe and to me, that falls in the category of creepy. And crazy, I guess. But, perhaps our society still perceives women as non-threatening and thus the creepy label mainly applies to men, but there are many criminal cases where the women involved could very well be considered ''creepy.''


In the vintage past, there may have been more balance in that regard. Although some of the female tropes of entertainment back then don't necessarily reflect similar in the actual life of those times. The asymmetry of today's "creepy" attribution arguably comes from the dogged trouncing of male privileges, tradition, and policies in conjunction with the philosophic shift of at least superficial promotion of female agency and value sensitizing in that context.

Also, in the deeper retro decades, censorship kept the most repugnant, unsavory, kinky, and depraved habits and appearances (or what qualified as such in that era, anyway) from being paraded as often in public awareness. As a result, most [non-criminal] offending men may have been limited to and popularly construed as "fresh" rather than creepy (as far as interaction with women went that could be overtly reported, gossiped about, and portrayed with little controversy).
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#8
Zinjanthropos Offline
Women seem to be able to avoid the creeps but control freaks, I'm not so sure. Seems over time, when some domestic problem presents itself in the marriages/relationships between people I know personally, it's almost always involves a male control freak. What gives? or WHo's worse?
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#9
Ben the Donkey Offline
Don't Stand so Close to Me.

The ongoing war between pheromones and social mores.
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