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Jandila comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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Creepiness is not down to status. High-status people can be plenty creepy.
Can be, sure. The claim is still valid as a heuristic.
What's more, people are more likely to pre-judge the high status person favorably, and thus want whatever behavior would be a "no-no" for the low-status person, and so behavior violating the supposed anti-creep rules is much less likely to be noticed and recognized as such (e.g. my example before about pushy hugs).
Anytime you find yourself saying, "How dare he do X? That's creepy! Don't ever do X, folks!", ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X. If the answer is no, you've misdiagnosed the problem.
I think the truth of that statement depends on how you chunk the behavior.
To get back to this, Rene's approaches to Genevieve would have been appropriate as behaviors in that sort of a relationship if you chunk them as things a person might do, and very inappropriate because she was moving away from him/not responding, etc., so that if your chunk includes what she does (not to mention that a relationship didn't already exist) as well as what he does, you get a different answer.
I agree with the first part of your comment, but the last paragraph seems contradictory:
Creepiness is by definition unwelcome behavior; that's just the meaning of the term - "that which causes someone to feel creeped out". Of course any welcome behavior would not be labelled creepy.
But the entire problem is that its welcomeness is not known until you do it! That's why you have to go based on general standards of acceptable behavior in judging an action, not by whether one person happened to not like it.
Imagine if Elevatorgate started from, not some elevator, but just the mere fact of Watson being "asked out", and she went on to say, "Whoa! Creepy! Guys, don't ever ask a woman out!"
Someone might protest, "Wait, what?"
Do you understand why it's not a very satisfactory answer to say, "It's okay, we're only talking about those cases where it's unwanted"? If so, apply it to your own answer.
I reread your first comment and I think I just misread it the first time. (And you may have misread mine). I think we were just talking past each other.
We seem to agree on the important bits, namely that:
I don't think we agree, in particular, because I don't agree that the particulars of how a specific event was perceived are relevant for general rules of condemnation. That is, I'm fine with saying "Don't do X" if X really is widely disliked, regardless of the person, but not with giving the same advice, while actually predicating it on people's ability to know others' reaction in advance.
I understood it to mean "ask myself if I can imagine someone doing X in a way I welcomed."
Moreover, when a low-status person creeps on me, I feel like I have more freedom to express nicely to them that I was creeped out and offer to explain why. When a high-status person creeps on me, I feel like they have too much power to want to stop or listen to me, and nobody else will listen to me either, because this person has social command.
Yeah, same here. Creepy behavior from people with high status is a big red flag on a group or social situation for me; it implies that at least in some cases they can get away with that, and I categorically don't feel emotionally safe in those environments.
See also: The Missing Stair. Source has a history of overusing feminist memes with the result of obfuscating their point, but I think this piece was particularly well-written.