Creepy behaviour is behaviour that tends to make others feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
If a significant fraction of a group find your behaviour creepy, the responsibility to change the behaviour is yours.
There are specific objective behaviours listed in the articles (for example, to do with touching, sexual jokes and following > people) that even someone ‘bad’ at social skills can learn to avoid doing.
If someone is informed that their behaviour is creeping people out, and yet they don’t take steps to avoid doing these >behaviours, that is a serious problem for the group as a whole, and it needs to be treated seriously and be seen to be > treated seriously, especially by the ‘audience’ who are not being victimised directly.
is flawed as it proves far too much.
We consider the (very plausible) hypothetical scenario of a LW meetup with many men and few women. The men are prone to hitting on the women. The women just want to talk about utility functions, and say no.
The men, being nerds, handle rejection badly. They are uncomfortable and upset.
Therefore by the argument above, the women are engaging in creepy behaviour. Plus, a significant fraction of the group are finding it creepy.
Therefore the responsibility to change their behaviour lies with the women, and they presumably need to start putting out more.
Since this is clearly an absurd conclusion, I think there’s something wrong with the original argument. Probably we need to introduce some notion of legitimate and illegitimate emotional reactions, but that’s a whole can of worms.
I don’t think the argument proves this much, and if it does it’s easily fixable. I agree that in this sadly plausible scenario, “The men, being nerds, handle rejection badly.” They are upset, but are they uncomfortable? Not necessarily so, and even if they are I don’t think the emotional response is the same as a general feeling of “creepiness”. I think the difference is that creepiness includes not just “unsafe or uncomfortable” but “unsafe AND uncomfortable”. The physical and emotional response of being rejected is not the same as the physical and emotional response of being hit on in a “creepy” fashion.
I think this argument:
is flawed as it proves far too much.
We consider the (very plausible) hypothetical scenario of a LW meetup with many men and few women. The men are prone to hitting on the women. The women just want to talk about utility functions, and say no.
The men, being nerds, handle rejection badly. They are uncomfortable and upset.
Therefore by the argument above, the women are engaging in creepy behaviour. Plus, a significant fraction of the group are finding it creepy.
Therefore the responsibility to change their behaviour lies with the women, and they presumably need to start putting out more.
Since this is clearly an absurd conclusion, I think there’s something wrong with the original argument. Probably we need to introduce some notion of legitimate and illegitimate emotional reactions, but that’s a whole can of worms.
I don’t think the argument proves this much, and if it does it’s easily fixable. I agree that in this sadly plausible scenario, “The men, being nerds, handle rejection badly.” They are upset, but are they uncomfortable? Not necessarily so, and even if they are I don’t think the emotional response is the same as a general feeling of “creepiness”. I think the difference is that creepiness includes not just “unsafe or uncomfortable” but “unsafe AND uncomfortable”. The physical and emotional response of being rejected is not the same as the physical and emotional response of being hit on in a “creepy” fashion.