By Maria Padhila
This week, in between handling some work, family and personal crises, I’ve been trying to get a lead on defining ‘creepy’, something that seems to come up for many out there dating. I thought this would be a pretty easy piece to write because there’s so much out there on the topic. But it all seems to be women writing about ‘the creepy guy’. There’s very little critique, and there’s a huge ‘know it when I see it’ factor when most of these women are writing.
Their fallback seems to be that any man who talks about sex or is honest about his attraction to you is creepy. I’m sorry, but I find that silly.
I can talk about sex with a man or woman without being creeped out. I can hear an honest expression of affection or appreciation or lust when the other person is capable of receiving my honest reaction — even if it’s declining the offer — with grace and ease. But I can talk about fracking with a creepy person and want to run away screaming.
Most of the critique of creepy tends to come from men, most of whom inevitably come off as at best defensive and hurt, and at worst whiny, entitled and, well, creepy.
I know creepy can be women, too — once I was creeped out by a woman at a pagan thing who told me within minutes of meeting me that she was bisexual when no one was talking about sexuality right then, and then she repeated it over and over to be sure somebody — I guess me — got the message. It wasn’t the sexuality that bothered me — it was the obsessiveness and the insistence on calling attention to herself for something that, really, isn’t all that remarkable.