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RomanDavis comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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They totally told me I was doing things wrong. All the time. It's just they were doing so in a code I didn't understand and expecting me to operate by rules I wasn't told about. If a woman did something like this seven years ago, (And, while the same thing didn't happen, a lot of the subtler cues did.), I would have done the same things the man did. I was never, ever told, "Hey man, you're being creepy. Cut it out." I wouldn't have known what to do, and I would have done the exact wrong thing.
I wouldn't do it now. I'm roughly as good of a person as I was then, I just understand the rules better.
Saying "You do NOT touch me" or "Don't want to talk about this", as that person did, is not a code.
Great! Now speak in non-code when people are approaching the line, not five miles past it.
If (1) a population varies widely in terms of how direct a demand needs to be before they recognize it as one, and
(2) framing a demand much more directly than necessary for a particular target to recognize it is viewed as socially inappropriate ("hey, OK, you don't have to make a federal case out of it lady! Jeez. Some people have no friggin sense of proportion, y'know?"), and
(3) framing a demand much more weakly than necessary is both ineffective (that is, my demand gets ignored) and viewed as socially inappropriate when I eventually ramp up to the necessary level of directness...
...well, you tell me: what should I do in that situation, when there's a demand I want to make of an individual whose sensitivity to demands I don't know?
You forgot (4): not recognizing a demand and refusing to comply are indistinguishable.
Can be. Depending how the refusing is done I'd even suggest that not recognizing can be 'creepier'.
This is troubling if true. The worst offenders described in the OP's links are creepers of the latter type, who know their behavior is bad but do it anyway. And yet this is seen as not as creepy as behavior from someone who is socially inept but not malicious?
No.
In that case I am confused. Which is seen as creepier, deliberate bad behavior or ineptitude? Or do I completely misunderstand?
Ineptitude mostly. Doing something that could be interpreted as creepy in full knowledge is either a calculated risk or the act of an asshole. Assholes might sometimes be worth hanging out with, or being associated with from a social/political point of view. Creepy people have well below average social skills more or less by definition; associating with them is harmful to ones reputation. That's why one gets the feeling of revulsion/contamination.
I haven't actually made a claim about either deliberate bad behavior or malice. I do claim that there is a subset of situations and responses where the form of aware-noncompliance is less creepy than the ignorance. I doubt that subset overlaps all that much with the other subset of noncompliance which also constitutes either bad behavior or malice.
Not even noticing demands really does have the potential to convey a lot of creepiness.
Female perspective- I see deliberate bad behavior as MUCH MUCH worse than ineptitude.
People who act deliberately bad are bad people and I don't want them near me. Assholes are NOT worth hanging out with. Men who are ok with hanging out with these sorts of people ("Well they act deliberately bad towards women, but have social status/ are fun to be with, so...") are supporting their deliberately bad behavior, and showing that they will not support women when men are deliberately bad towards them. I don't want to hang out with THOSE sorts of guys either.
People who are just inept are not as scary, and can learn "ept-ness". They might occasionally creep me out accidentally, but are not doing the deliberately bad things that I believe SHOULD result in social shunning.
Given the structure of the sentence, I can't tell if you endorse that "oblivious is worse than malicious"
Oblivious is more difficult to deal with, in that it takes a more subtle intervention over a longer period of time. But I'm not sure that difficulty of correcting the problem is correlated with how "creepy" the behavior is, or appears to be to the target.
No.
Can you clarify why you consider this something I forgot?