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Sarokrae comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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Speaking solely from my own experience and language usage, I think of creepiness as related to clinginess. A creep is a man who gives the impression of trying to insist on unwanted intimacy (there's some sort of emotional/physical intersection there) and of unwillingness to go away. I believe that "skin crawling" is a common metaphor for the experience of being around someone who is creepy.
I've actually been threatened a couple of times, and I went into a useful emotionally dissociated state. The men involved didn't strike me as creepy.
I'm not denying that there can be some status issues, but they don't offer a universal explanation. There are reports of women who find some high status men creepy, and not all low status men are creepy. If women keep saying "No, low status doesn't explain creepiness", then maybe it's incumbent to at least ask what else they think is going on.
I believe part of the problem is that a good many men don't seem to have had the experience of being creeped out, so they're guessing about possible patterns. Unfortunately, the low status model leaves out the possibility that one reason some men are reliably unattractive is that the men quickly give the impression of being bad emotional matches.
I'm just going to give one personal point of evidence which people can interpret however they want: a large part of my own understanding of "creepiness" comes from the fact that at least for me personally, "skin crawling" is actually just unwanted sexual arousal. (It took me quite a lot of luminosity practise to figure this out.)
That's very interesting. Did you turn up anything else that surprised you? After you found that "skin crawling" was unwanted sexual arousal, did that affect your ideas and/or behavior?
The "skin crawling" sensation you describe is probably the pilomotor reflex, which can be triggered by various of excited mental states, including fear, aggressivity or sexual arousal.
In mammals with a complete fur, this reflex causes the animal to appear bigger and more intimidating. You probably observed it in cats and dogs when they fight or do a threat display.
Also caused by Autonomous sensory meridian response which is ironically linked to non-threatening behaviour and altruistic, caring attention. (It can also be linked to deep emotional arousal, such as when listening to engaging music.) Identifying this reflex with "unwanted sexual arousal" is simplistic to the point of being just wrong.
Didn't see this reply as it wasn't directly to one of my posts, but I would like to reassure anyone reading that I can tell the difference between "skin crawling" and "scalp tingling", and no they are not the same thing at all.
Well this is in the context of a long period of introspection on the theme of "When it comes to moral considerations, how much is my system 1 me?" The conclusion is "not very", which is one of the things I changed my mind about fairly recently. (If instinct wants to sleep with someone but reason doesn't, it is preferable for me to not sleep with them. This probably doesn't sound like a surprising conclusion, but I was confused for a long time.)
This observation was basically consistent with the way my ideas were developing, since I developed those ideas concurrently to developing luminosity. I'm afraid I can't tell the direction of causation between the two things, or whether there is any.
Actually, I'm not surprised that someone could take a while to figure that out-- there's what I call the romantic fallacy (romantic in the philosophical sense, though it happens to overlap with common usage this time) that people's unthought impulses are sacred.
To put it mildly, what (if anything) is sacred about people is a complicated question.
The frequency with which people are given the advise "be yourself" in our society doesn't help.
The conclusion itself is something most people here agree with, but that doesn't mean your reaching it was inevitable. The space of human beliefs is wide.