I’ve heard anecdotes of disgruntled graduate students attacking their schools because they weren’t given their degrees. (The example that comes to mind is of a woman who set explosives in a lab.) I definitely consider that creepy. I would start worrying about safety if an obviously unqualified student kept ranting about how she deserved her degree.
Charles Guiteau, who assassinated James Garfield, was chronically unemployed but convinced that the government owed him a high office (he wanted to be an ambassador.) I would consider his obsession with “deserving” a position far out of his reach was a warning sign for criminal behavior.
So it’s not just about sex. “Creepiness” is something I associate with being convinced you deserve something that it’s totally unreasonable (socially) for you to be granted. Most unemployed workers are disappointed, sure, but that’s not the same thing.
Reading this thread has inspired an interesting definition. Creepiness is an approximate estimate of how far someone would have to be pushed in order to do something evil. A history of criminal behavior is extremely creepy, because it’s strong evidence of bad character. Physical deformity is creepy because it correlates well with mental illness, but it stops being creepy once it’s understood well enough to rule out that possibility. Violating social norms can be creepy, or not, depending on what’s known about why it was violated and the nature of the norm. And horror movie villains, of course, peg the creepiness scale, merely by being in that role, regardless of what other features they have.
By this definition, refusing to accept a disappointment that won’t go away is very creepy, because the only real options for dealing with disappointment are to accept it, to work harder towards fixing the source of the disappointment, or to escalate. Escalating would be bad, and working harder has a limit that, in the case of the disgruntled student, has probably already been reached or nearly reached.
Not really—there’s a sort of creepiness which is about distaste at least as much as fear.
And I don’t think creepiness is a reliable signal of dangerousness—there are people who are very dangerous who aren’t creepy, and it’s my impression that there are a great many creepy people who don’t do anything awful.
I will tentatively suggest that that some kinds of creepiness are some sort of off-key or out-of-sync body language (not necessarily on the Asberger’s spectrum).
A story from one of John Malloy’s Dress for Success books: He realized that one of his subordinates had done some very good work for him, and took the chance of offering the subordinate (who had disastrous body language) some consultations.
The subordinate looked distressed, and Malloy was worried that he’d said the wrong thing, but then the subordinate explained that some of his sons had the same body language and were running into similar social problems.
Not really—there’s a sort of creepiness which is about distaste at least as much as fear.
These seem like importantly different categories that merely happen to share some mental machinery.
And I don’t think creepiness is a reliable signal of dangerousness—there are people who are very dangerous who aren’t creepy, and it’s my impression that there are a great many creepy people who don’t do anything awful.
True, but I suspect that’s just because many things that used to be useful signals, aren’t anymore. Strange body language, for example, may be a signal of distant origin (to the extent that body language differs from place to place).
I’m beginning to get the impression that you and perhaps some other commenters have no idea what the creepy guy experience is.
I’m not blaming you, but if there’s that lack of commonality of experience, then that could explain some communication breakdowns.
Creepiness isn’t just about low status, though I grant that if, say, a street person is making a pass, he might well come off as creepy.
However, the interesting case is that there are men who aren’t obviously low status who just make a high proportion of women’s skin crawl.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
Some men are much worse than average at detecting negative reactions (like fear) in the person they are talking to.
So, when a woman has a negative reaction to something in a conversation, it starts to get creepy when the man does not notice that reaction and persists in the behavior that caused the reaction. I gets creepier fast when the woman reacts more strongly than the first time and the man continues to persist.
I’m guessing too, but the creepiness reaction has a large component of disgust/revulsion—it isn’t just about fear.
I’ve been trying to think of portrayals of creepiness, and whether it can be done in a movie (or might it be pheromones?)-- it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but iirc, Beetlejuice is an example.
Successful movie portrayal of creepiness: Anakin Skywalker, in Attack of the Clones. Critics commented on the surprising lack of chemistry between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman; I think the “romantic” scenes achieved exactly what they were supposed to.
I’m trying to think of examples of female-on-male creepiness that I’ve experienced and heard of, and the only examples I can think of fall into the categories of mere mild-discomfort-induction and outright stalking. Male creepiness appears to have a significant middle ground that seems to be almost completely absent in the other direction.
Perhaps this is related to the disproportionate prevalence of male-on-female rape and sexual harassment — because those are strongly negatively-valued events, it’s worth having a sensitive filter that’ll give false positives sometimes. But that depends on whether features associated with “creepiness” are less perceived as creepy in women by men or if they are actually less prevalent in women.
Edit: I have a friend who’s internet-famous-in-some-circles and he has had a lot of experiences with young female (and a few male) fans who’ve crossed the line into conventional creepiness but not into stalking (plus a few who have...), but people act differently toward celebrities. Probably doesn’t generalize very well at all to interactions between, say, two people meeting in a bar.
That is odd, actually. Everyone I’ve met that I would describe as “creepy” is male.
Is it even theoretically possible to be creepy to a man? In my—very limited—experience, if a man is afraid of anything, you don’t condemn the object of his fear for frightening him; you deem him a coward and a pussy, lose all respect for him and basically stop regarding him as a man. You’d better be ready for him to challenge you to a duel, or some other culturally appropriate, less formal kind of fight, though.
As far as I know, the ancestral, sexist rule is that showing fear as a man is like showing sexual desire as a woman: you never ever do it, on pain of losing everyone’s respect.
I think it’s a lot harder for a woman to come off as creepy than a man. (Standard “within the culture I’m familiar with” disclaimers apply.) I’ve been made uncomfortable by girls when in high school, but not really “creeped out”. You almost have to go to the level of movie villain before they start getting creepy.
The female version that I have encountered is a sort of… obsessive and misplaced motherliness, maybe? Usually starts with nosiness and unsolicited advice — creepy only in that the person will have no understanding of what subjects are off limits, and will completely ignore any attempts you make to communicate “I am not discussing this” — and moving on, if allowed, to total control over all actions, opinions, and basically your entire life. The rages, if you (say) do not like a tv program they’ve told you to, are ugly, manipulative, terrifying things.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
I can only think of one occasion. A female classmate who had had less than 5 minutes of conversation with me announced her cancer treatment and recent bad relationship, then made overtures about meeting outside of class. Basically, forcing intimacy waaaay too fast. This was followed by a lot of “oh look, we’re coincidentally on the same bus” sort of events, despite my consciously unfriendly demeanor and monosyllabic conversation.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
Some women have an especially intense “you pathetic loser better stay the hell away from me” seemingly permanent look on their faces, to the point that it’s actually readable to me. It can be rather uncomfortable when you have responsibilities that involve interacting with them anyway.
Strange body language, for example, may be a signal of distant origin (to the extent that body language differs from place to place).
Damned if I know. There’s at least some commonality of body language across the human race, and I don’t know what the xenophobia/exoticism balance would have been for human prehistory.
My bet is in favor of exoticism—my impression is that people who are relatively isolated are desperate for novelty.
Personal space and touchy-feeliness varies a lot by culture. I’ve heard of American women being freaked out by foreign men standing too close because the men just didn’t realize it was too close in the US.
being convinced you deserve something that it’s totally unreasonable (socially) for you to be granted
There’s some sort of ambiguity in the word “deserve”. I would say that every harmless person deserves to be loved, or deserves an enjoyable job, but that doesn’t mean anyone owes anyone anything. The world is the way it is.
This is certainly a fair reply. I take it, then, that you wouldn’t consider the mere expression—much less the mere feeling—of disappointment to be creepy?
As a practical matter, I suspect we agree a fair amount on the sorts of actual behaviors that should be considered alarming—whether in the case of sex or anything else. Rather than disagreeing on what is or isn’t bad behavior, my aim was just to point out the problem of amorous disappointment (in the specific case of males, as I have the impression—which should be corrected if false—that there tend to be differences in the basic causes of rejection between the sexes).
On reflection, though I do tend to think this aspect isn’t discussed enough (edit: what I mean here is that the taboo level is too high), it probably wasn’t especially useful for me to add my voice to this particular controversy. Perhaps I should indeed leave this kind of thing for the Robin Hansons of the world.
Sure, no, I don’t have a problem with disappointment.
It does seem that men have more of a problem with amorous disappointment than women do. That definitely is “something wrong” and I’m not on board with women who basically think that men are in the wrong whenever they express desire.
It does seem that men have more of a problem with amorous disappointment than women do.
I disagree. I’ve been in situations where girls were determined to seduce me, and I kept rejecting their increasingly overt and desperate advances. They’d typically end up getting visibly annoyed, and there were also some ugly scenes of frustrated anger on their part. Similar things also happened sometimes when I would (mostly unintentionally) give a false hope to girls who were below my standards, though admittedly with much less overt drama compared to the former sort of situations.
Of course, such situations are less common than the inverse, and even more importantly, since women are typically physically weaker, men won’t feel intimidated and threatened by their flipping out. These were just amusing youthful adventures for me, but I can easily imagine inverse scenarios being awfully scary for women. However, the idea that women somehow handle it more calmly and rationally when they’re faced with the terrible feeling of being put down by a disappointing rejection is completely false.
That said, there are some significant differences in practice. Men are expected to take a more proactive role in approaching and initiating things, so by sheer necessity, they more often end up plunging into defeats based on unjustified expectations. Moreover, men and women tend to react very differently towards various kinds of signals of aloofness and disinterestedness in the early phases of meeting and dating. However, discussing these issues fully would mean getting too deep into technicalities—the important point is that it’s unjustified to present men as somehow worse overall in this regard.
It’s a good point, but I stand by what I said.
I’ve heard anecdotes of disgruntled graduate students attacking their schools because they weren’t given their degrees. (The example that comes to mind is of a woman who set explosives in a lab.) I definitely consider that creepy. I would start worrying about safety if an obviously unqualified student kept ranting about how she deserved her degree.
Charles Guiteau, who assassinated James Garfield, was chronically unemployed but convinced that the government owed him a high office (he wanted to be an ambassador.) I would consider his obsession with “deserving” a position far out of his reach was a warning sign for criminal behavior.
So it’s not just about sex. “Creepiness” is something I associate with being convinced you deserve something that it’s totally unreasonable (socially) for you to be granted. Most unemployed workers are disappointed, sure, but that’s not the same thing.
Reading this thread has inspired an interesting definition. Creepiness is an approximate estimate of how far someone would have to be pushed in order to do something evil. A history of criminal behavior is extremely creepy, because it’s strong evidence of bad character. Physical deformity is creepy because it correlates well with mental illness, but it stops being creepy once it’s understood well enough to rule out that possibility. Violating social norms can be creepy, or not, depending on what’s known about why it was violated and the nature of the norm. And horror movie villains, of course, peg the creepiness scale, merely by being in that role, regardless of what other features they have.
By this definition, refusing to accept a disappointment that won’t go away is very creepy, because the only real options for dealing with disappointment are to accept it, to work harder towards fixing the source of the disappointment, or to escalate. Escalating would be bad, and working harder has a limit that, in the case of the disgruntled student, has probably already been reached or nearly reached.
Not really—there’s a sort of creepiness which is about distaste at least as much as fear.
And I don’t think creepiness is a reliable signal of dangerousness—there are people who are very dangerous who aren’t creepy, and it’s my impression that there are a great many creepy people who don’t do anything awful.
I will tentatively suggest that that some kinds of creepiness are some sort of off-key or out-of-sync body language (not necessarily on the Asberger’s spectrum).
A story from one of John Malloy’s Dress for Success books: He realized that one of his subordinates had done some very good work for him, and took the chance of offering the subordinate (who had disastrous body language) some consultations.
The subordinate looked distressed, and Malloy was worried that he’d said the wrong thing, but then the subordinate explained that some of his sons had the same body language and were running into similar social problems.
These seem like importantly different categories that merely happen to share some mental machinery.
True, but I suspect that’s just because many things that used to be useful signals, aren’t anymore. Strange body language, for example, may be a signal of distant origin (to the extent that body language differs from place to place).
I’m beginning to get the impression that you and perhaps some other commenters have no idea what the creepy guy experience is.
I’m not blaming you, but if there’s that lack of commonality of experience, then that could explain some communication breakdowns.
Creepiness isn’t just about low status, though I grant that if, say, a street person is making a pass, he might well come off as creepy.
However, the interesting case is that there are men who aren’t obviously low status who just make a high proportion of women’s skin crawl.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
Thoughts on what creepiness is:
(Hat-tip: I found Ursula Vernon from your LJ flist, Nancy.)
Thanks. That’s a good essay, and I don’t think I’d seen it before.
As she says, she doesn’t know what the creepiness trigger is—and whatever is going on, it isn’t normal intimacy starting at the wrong time.
Here is a wild guess about creepiness.
Some men are much worse than average at detecting negative reactions (like fear) in the person they are talking to.
So, when a woman has a negative reaction to something in a conversation, it starts to get creepy when the man does not notice that reaction and persists in the behavior that caused the reaction. I gets creepier fast when the woman reacts more strongly than the first time and the man continues to persist.
Just guessing.
I’m guessing too, but the creepiness reaction has a large component of disgust/revulsion—it isn’t just about fear.
I’ve been trying to think of portrayals of creepiness, and whether it can be done in a movie (or might it be pheromones?)-- it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but iirc, Beetlejuice is an example.
Successful movie portrayal of creepiness: Anakin Skywalker, in Attack of the Clones. Critics commented on the surprising lack of chemistry between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman; I think the “romantic” scenes achieved exactly what they were supposed to.
I’m trying to think of examples of female-on-male creepiness that I’ve experienced and heard of, and the only examples I can think of fall into the categories of mere mild-discomfort-induction and outright stalking. Male creepiness appears to have a significant middle ground that seems to be almost completely absent in the other direction.
Perhaps this is related to the disproportionate prevalence of male-on-female rape and sexual harassment — because those are strongly negatively-valued events, it’s worth having a sensitive filter that’ll give false positives sometimes. But that depends on whether features associated with “creepiness” are less perceived as creepy in women by men or if they are actually less prevalent in women.
Edit: I have a friend who’s internet-famous-in-some-circles and he has had a lot of experiences with young female (and a few male) fans who’ve crossed the line into conventional creepiness but not into stalking (plus a few who have...), but people act differently toward celebrities. Probably doesn’t generalize very well at all to interactions between, say, two people meeting in a bar.
Not really.
That is odd, actually. Everyone I’ve met that I would describe as “creepy” is male. Plus I’ve never heard a woman described as such except in jest.
Is it even theoretically possible to be creepy to a man? In my—very limited—experience, if a man is afraid of anything, you don’t condemn the object of his fear for frightening him; you deem him a coward and a pussy, lose all respect for him and basically stop regarding him as a man. You’d better be ready for him to challenge you to a duel, or some other culturally appropriate, less formal kind of fight, though.
As far as I know, the ancestral, sexist rule is that showing fear as a man is like showing sexual desire as a woman: you never ever do it, on pain of losing everyone’s respect.
I think it’s a lot harder for a woman to come off as creepy than a man. (Standard “within the culture I’m familiar with” disclaimers apply.) I’ve been made uncomfortable by girls when in high school, but not really “creeped out”. You almost have to go to the level of movie villain before they start getting creepy.
From a comment to the Ursula Vernon essay below:
I can only think of one occasion. A female classmate who had had less than 5 minutes of conversation with me announced her cancer treatment and recent bad relationship, then made overtures about meeting outside of class. Basically, forcing intimacy waaaay too fast. This was followed by a lot of “oh look, we’re coincidentally on the same bus” sort of events, despite my consciously unfriendly demeanor and monosyllabic conversation.
In my experience, it is much much rarer. As a guy, I have been more creeped-out by other guys than by women.
Some women have an especially intense “you pathetic loser better stay the hell away from me” seemingly permanent look on their faces, to the point that it’s actually readable to me. It can be rather uncomfortable when you have responsibilities that involve interacting with them anyway.
Damned if I know. There’s at least some commonality of body language across the human race, and I don’t know what the xenophobia/exoticism balance would have been for human prehistory.
My bet is in favor of exoticism—my impression is that people who are relatively isolated are desperate for novelty.
Personal space and touchy-feeliness varies a lot by culture. I’ve heard of American women being freaked out by foreign men standing too close because the men just didn’t realize it was too close in the US.
There’s some sort of ambiguity in the word “deserve”. I would say that every harmless person deserves to be loved, or deserves an enjoyable job, but that doesn’t mean anyone owes anyone anything. The world is the way it is.
This is certainly a fair reply. I take it, then, that you wouldn’t consider the mere expression—much less the mere feeling—of disappointment to be creepy?
As a practical matter, I suspect we agree a fair amount on the sorts of actual behaviors that should be considered alarming—whether in the case of sex or anything else. Rather than disagreeing on what is or isn’t bad behavior, my aim was just to point out the problem of amorous disappointment (in the specific case of males, as I have the impression—which should be corrected if false—that there tend to be differences in the basic causes of rejection between the sexes).
On reflection, though I do tend to think this aspect isn’t discussed enough (edit: what I mean here is that the taboo level is too high), it probably wasn’t especially useful for me to add my voice to this particular controversy. Perhaps I should indeed leave this kind of thing for the Robin Hansons of the world.
Sure, no, I don’t have a problem with disappointment.
It does seem that men have more of a problem with amorous disappointment than women do. That definitely is “something wrong” and I’m not on board with women who basically think that men are in the wrong whenever they express desire.
SarahC:
I disagree. I’ve been in situations where girls were determined to seduce me, and I kept rejecting their increasingly overt and desperate advances. They’d typically end up getting visibly annoyed, and there were also some ugly scenes of frustrated anger on their part. Similar things also happened sometimes when I would (mostly unintentionally) give a false hope to girls who were below my standards, though admittedly with much less overt drama compared to the former sort of situations.
Of course, such situations are less common than the inverse, and even more importantly, since women are typically physically weaker, men won’t feel intimidated and threatened by their flipping out. These were just amusing youthful adventures for me, but I can easily imagine inverse scenarios being awfully scary for women. However, the idea that women somehow handle it more calmly and rationally when they’re faced with the terrible feeling of being put down by a disappointing rejection is completely false.
That said, there are some significant differences in practice. Men are expected to take a more proactive role in approaching and initiating things, so by sheer necessity, they more often end up plunging into defeats based on unjustified expectations. Moreover, men and women tend to react very differently towards various kinds of signals of aloofness and disinterestedness in the early phases of meeting and dating. However, discussing these issues fully would mean getting too deep into technicalities—the important point is that it’s unjustified to present men as somehow worse overall in this regard.
TvTropes does have plenty of examples of women who don’t handle it well, so at least it’s something that exists in the popular imagination.