Today I feel an irresistible urge to post music videos. Above, an awesome interpretation of a rock classic that is sure to get you PUMPED for the weekend.
Below, enjoy the silky voice of Phil Collins.
And here’s Jim Morrison apparently doing his impersonation of the most insufferable man in the universe.
Ok, ok. Here’s that creepshaming manifesto I promised. Or portions of it, anyway. (Like a lot of things written by MRAs, the whole thing is a lot longer than it needs to be.)
The term ‘Creep’ is used every single day to describe people who have done something creepy. A ‘Creep’ is, according to a dictionary, a detestable person, but not according to society today. Today ‘Creep’ is an everyday word that is plastered all over men’s foreheads whenever they do something women don’t like, there is a thousand ways for me to be creepy as a male that I don’t even recognize until it’s too late, or until someone else decides I’m a ‘Creep’. Here is society’s definition of a ‘Creep’:
A man who shows more attention, platonic, romantic or sexual, to a person then they so desire at that time.
[blah blah blah]
I have a little anecdote here for you all. I had a friend with benefits, a girl I was sleeping with every week or two with no romantic strings attached and it was awesome. I found myself loving this woman, not romantically but as a friend I couldn’t have asked for better. Fast forward a few weeks [blah blah blah] The fact that I wasn’t aware of the boyfriend, that the message I sent wasn’t sexual at all and that I was a close personal friend of [oh just fucking shut up]
‘Creep’ is a term that gets abused all over this society; it gets pasted on a man’s forehead by women and scars them with a disfiguring social mark against their name to everyone who is around to hear them say it. Men, you are not a ‘Creep’ for showing a woman attention, you are not a ‘Creep’ for loving kids, or for showing interest in child things. You are a functioning human being. Any women who labels you a ‘Creep’ has problems, they don’t know how to deal with other peoples desires, they don’t respect men’s desires, they don’t realize that men have needs and have wants that don’t line up with their own. Any women who labels a man a ‘Creep’ without a dammed good reason cares only about her own desires, she believes only she can have flexible wants and differing needs and she can’t understand that you are just as human as they are, and that’s a little bit creepy in my honest opinion.
-J.C
Woah. J.C.? The J.C.?
Sorry, Jesus, I didn’t know it was you.
Honestly, I don’t remember you being this whiny the first time around. But whatev. Good to see you.
Naturally, the fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit think JC’s Creep-i-festo is pretty creeptastic. One of them even left this rather alarming comment:
Yikes. I would go so far as to say that this comment is a bit creepy,
The “opened a conversation” bit is revealing, too. Hello, wannabe PUA!
(The folks in AgainstMensRights are making fun of the Creep-i-festo and making Jesus jokes too.)
Shitty insurance.
Shitty Tea Partiers trying to hurt a whole lot of people because they’re afraid of the ACA.
Shitty shitty-insurance peddlers scaring the Tea Partiers.
Shit is fucked up and bullshit.
OTOH, I managed to successfully apply on the website last night. Didn’t even have to stay up past midnight or anything. 9:30 EST did it.
@Argenti
Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound flippant and should have considered that people’s options can be extremely limited due to insurance, finances or location. I still think asking your therapist for a treatment plan, which includes agreed upon goals, is a good idea and should at least be tried, IMHO.
Oh, no, I didn’t think you were being flippant, I figured it just slipped your mind. You’re right about the treatment plan part for sure.
Falconer, I watch Fox News and so I know that your little story about signing up for CA insurance is unpossible.
I have not been called a creep (at least not to my face), but I did manage to creep out someone with whom I thought I had a chance with and make her seriously mad at me after she invited me home to meet her parents.
What did I do exactly to creep her out? I’d rather not go into details but I believe I was a bit too forward and friendly…. That, and the fact that I wore a “Clerks” T-Shirt, one where Jay is in his undies and getting stoned with Silent Bob (Did I mention I was meeting her parents?). Seriously, what the hell was I thinking?
Was she right to get creeped out? Most definitely. And any attempts I made to make amends, apologize and find out what exactly I did wrong (she never told me) only seemed to make things worse… way worse.
And the worst part was that I didn’t realize what I did wrong until much much later when I got into the whole “feminism VS MRA” thing and started educating myself about those sort of things. It was only recently that I realized how exactly my behavior was creepy, how I rubbed her parents the wrong way, and how my attempts to apologize afterwards made me look like an obsessed stalker. If I bumped into her one of these days I would tell her that I finally understand… and that I am sorry.
Still, I would have really appreciated it if she had told me back then how exactly I had offended her and what exactly I did wrong. It would have given me sense of closure and showed me what sort of behavior I was to avoid in the future. Instead, I was left wondering how I messed up, and it ate me up inside for years.
Is there any moral to this story? Maybe it’s that in the very same way that fat shaming doesn’t work to make you thin, creep-shaming doesn’t work to make you less of a creep, especially if it’s of the covert/whispering type. In fact, it can actually make you act worse…
…or maybe I just suck and need to start learning Game.
Make of this what you will.
That should say “ACA insurance” but it doesn’t because I’m careless.
In a strange coincidence given this thread today, a man about my father’s age just ignored my obvious signs of wanting to be left alone on the train in order to hit on me, and quiz me in detail about my life. That hasn’t happened in quite some time.
@Joseph. I’m really sorry to hear that people call you creepy for no good reason. That’s really cruel.
Ahoy, Falconer, you haven’t been putting records out while you’ve been offline, have you?
AVfM is currently conducting a poll about where to hold a men’s rights conventions. So far, 43 people have voted! Anyway, in the comments, things quickly devolve into fantasies about drowning Chanty Binx. 0_o
@lensman,
What you describe sounds to me more like “gauche” than “creepy.” “Creepy” denotes more of a weird, persistent violation of boundaries, and people I designate “creepy” are in can’t-put-my-finger-on-it scary. Example of “creepy” from my own experience is once I was talking to someone I had met online. We had “progressed” to exchanging phone numbers. In the course of the phone conversation, he revealed that he was actually outside my apartment door(although I had not given him my address) and was ready to take it a step further, like right then and there. Of course that immediately and irrevocably ended any possible interest in him that I might have had, and I told him so. Nevertheless, I spent the next few months looking over my shoulder every time I entered or exited my apartment.
@lensman,
What you describe sounds to me more like “gauche” than “creepy.” “Creepy” denotes more of a weird, persistent violation of boundaries, and people I designate “creepy” are in can’t-put-my-finger-on-it scary. Example of “creepy” from my own experience is once I was talking to someone I had met online. We had “progressed” to exchanging phone numbers. In the course of the phone conversation, he revealed that he was actually outside my apartment door(although I had not given him my address) and was ready to take it a step further, like right then and there. Of course that immediately and irrevocably ended any possible interest in him that I might have had, and I told him so. Nevertheless, I spent the next few months looking over my shoulder every time I entered or exited my apartment.
God I just had a flashback of another “creepy” incident. I was sitting on a public bus, wearing an old fur-collared coat, when a man walked up to me and started “petting” my collar in a way that was very persistent, inappropriate, and…. creepy.
lensman – seconding La Strega’s comment.
One problem with wanting it explained if you (general ‘you’ here) how you’ve made someone feel you’re creepy, is that that means they have to spend more time talking to you. A big part for me of finding someone creepy is wanting to get away from them, feeling uneasy or actually unsafe around them. Yes, it’s unfair if the person isn’t knowingly doing something creepy, or has no wish to alarm or distress at all, but it’s like your description of trying to apologise and just making things worse.
The other thing is, of course, that women are generally socialised to ignore our feelings about someone who’s alarming or unsettling us, to be nice, to be accommodating. At best it means we’re stuck in the company of someone harmless, but who we do not want to be around. But sometimes it means we’re in physical danger from someone who really is deliberately testing boundaries. Sometimes it means we’re not just in danger, but that the worst does happen. And of course when it does, what are we told? We should have known better. We should have told him to piss off ages ago. We should, we should, we should …
(I’m not having a go at you at all, btw; I’m talking about the broader situation and how loaded it is.)
There’s a bloke I’ve seen on the tram a few times who makes my skin crawl. He’s never directed anything at me and I’ve never seen him approach any woman, but he turns around and stares at every young woman who gets up to leave the tram. He comes across as … hell, how to say this without being ableist? He does give me an impression he’s not quite NT, whether through drugs or a medical condition or what (there are a LOT of people in those categories around where I work). At any rate, the rather gormless but unwinking STARE he directs is just ewww, ewww, ewww. I daresay he’s harmless indeed, but alas, he does trip my creep-o-meter anyway.
Though that’s nothing to the guys who want to share life histories with the MacRob High girls (we’re talking fifteen or sixteen year olds) on the afternoon tram … AAAAAUUUGH drop your massive backpacks on them, now!
Yes and no. It’s a culturally recognized term, but it was expunged from the DSM V. All of us now have “autism spectrum disorder.”
I hope you guys don’t mind a bit of a change in topic. I don’t have a lot of feminist friends here and could use some advice.
As I’ve mentioned before, I use to be an Internalized Misogynist, and have now been happily recovering thanks to feminism. Most of my friends (all guys) have been okay with it, if rather leary or even disapproving. My brothers, in particular, have been supportive.
I asked them to stop making sexist jokes and comments and most of them complied respectifilly, with one exception. My “friend, Nate (not his real name) actually told my friends he no longer wanted to hang out with me if he couldn’t make sexist jokes.
Last night, however, we had a Halloween get-together with my brothers and friends, and he was horribly passive-aggressive towards me throughout the entire night. It went something like this:
“Hey Angie, did you hear? I just made a sexist joke!”
“Angie, I just called Cody a ‘girl!'”
“Angie, you totally missed my awesome ‘That’s what she said,’ joke!’
“Oh my God, Angie, calling a protective parent a ‘mother’ is totally sexist!”
“Angie? Angie! Hey, Angie!!”
It wasn’t even the “jokes” he was making that annoyed me, it was him insisting on pointing out every single one of them to me.
This went on the entire night, but I’m not sure what I could do. Ignoring him clearly wasn’t an option, none of my other friends spoke up (I’m not even sure they noticed,) and I knew if I got angry, I would just be falling into his trap.
I’ve checked on line for tips, but most of the advice I’ve found deals with intimate relationships or people becoming passive-aggressive because of a real slight, and I’m confident I’ve done nothing wrong. Anyone have some advice, besides the obvious “get me some new friends?” 😛
lensman: why do you consider it the woman’s job to educate you? Like you wouldn’t have gotten stroppy with her and tried to rules lawyer your way into her life? Pull the other one.
Jesus Christ.
Yes and whatever, dude.
Naltia: a raised eyebrow and a very dry “Wow” tends to shrivel these doofuses up.
RE: lensman
Still, I would have really appreciated it if she had told me back then how exactly I had offended her and what exactly I did wrong.
Um, you said so yourself that you looked like an obsessed stalker. Why on EARTH would someone explain calmly to an obsessed stalker WHY they were so creepy? That’s how you pretty much insure that stalker NEVER LEAVES YOU ALONE.
It would have given me sense of closure and showed me what sort of behavior I was to avoid in the future. Instead, I was left wondering how I messed up, and it ate me up inside for years.
That’s a part of life. And you seem to have figured it out on your own. I certainly don’t feel obligated to explain to people who might come off as obsessed stalkers WHY I’m afraid of them.
creep-shaming doesn’t work to make you less of a creep, especially if it’s of the covert/whispering type.
Um, if it’s covert and whispering, it’s not intended to make YOU feel bad. It’s intended to let OTHER PEOPLE avoid you so you don’t make THEM feel bad.
RE: Naltia
Enh, honestly, I’d just get new friends. That sounds incredibly whiny and childish.
Naltia, I wish I had advice to give, but I’ve never been in that or a similar situation.
Would it be any good to ask your brother to back you up when Nate behaves like this, to help shut him down? Sad fact is douchey guys will respond more to being called out by men than by women.
Or ask Nate straight out, in front of others, why he’s so fixated on being able to make sexist jokes? Like ask him to explain just what’s so important about it to him? I don’t mean angrily, just … maybe in a detached, anthropologist-investigating-these-quaint-customs sort of way? The others might need to know beforehand, to set it up.
Naltia — idk but “dude, you sound like you’re five and had too much candy” might get the point across.
Naltia, Well, getting new friends is always an option, but if you think he can be saved… I like to be direct with PA people. “Friend, it seems like you’re angry at me for asking my friends to stop make sexist jokes. The reason I think this is that now you are specifically calling my attention to it when you make sexist jokes. It’s really weird that you’re doing this, and I hope you’ll stop.”
He will deny everything. That’s okay. If he continues, you may need to explore plan B (get new friends).
I also like hellkell’s dry “Wow” approach, though I never think I can deliver that one as well as it deserves.
Choose a stock response and stick to it. Forevah!
I like hellkell’s raised eyebrow but you have to decide whether you can do it Every Single Time. Wow! is good. Again ? is good. Still? maybe a contender.
You can change the tone from questioning to disappointed to infinite boredom depending on how long it goes on. Saying ‘again’ or ‘still’ the first time it happens can be very useful because it emphasises that it’s a continuation of earlier behaviour and that you’ve heard it all before and you know he wants to get a rise out of you and … and ….
The important thing is that repeating it gives the message to him – and the rest of the group – that regardless of whether it’s a joke or a comment or a conversation, it really is the same. old. tedious. unfunny. stuff each time.
There are cleverer and wittier things to say, but you have to be willing and able to stick to them. And it’s soooo tiring with one of these jerks around. One of my relatives is in this group.
@ neltia
Sometimes we outgrow our friends. It’s sad, but it’s the price we pay for evolving ourselves. I was just thinking about this today — how I’ve had to let certain friends and family members go, or cut them out of my life — and usually because they could not, or would not, respect me, I suspect that being able to tell sexist jokes in your presence is his way to remind you he’s the boss in your relationship — and that is simply disrespectful.
Whoops. That was my other account.