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Adele_L comments on LW Women Entries- Creepiness - Less Wrong
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Comments (472)
I think this is on topic since it seems to be a common complaint about LW meet ups.
Agreed that creepiness usually means disrespecting my boundaries in some way. I don't mind being flirted with initially, but if I'm not interested, and I let you know, I expect it to stop. Hitting on me even harder just makes me feel more uncomfortable and creeped out by you.
Also I am glad that an example where a woman was creepy was included. It seems that while it is more often men who are creepy, women who are creepy get less stigma from their behaviors.
How do you go about "letting someone know?" There may be a gap here. I have a lot of difficulty recognizing an indirectly signaled No. (and indirectly-signaled Yes, for that matter) This has led to creeping people out when an explicit No would have been acted on immediately.
I do agree with your sentiment, however; someone who presses on when he's aware the woman wants him to go away isn't just creepy, he's a jackass.
I don't remember exactly, but I believe I said something along the lines of "I'm not interested right now, but I would still like to be just friends with you." Perhaps it was too gentle? But I gave a more harsh no a few days later, which seems to have stopped the unwanted behavior, with the unfortunate consequence of damaging a potential friendship.
Your first response seems fine to me. I'm generally not very good at picking up on subtle signals, but saying "I'm not interested, let's be friends" or any variation thereof is as clear as day from any perspective I can successfully empathize with (which I know says more about me than about the workings of other humans). Certainly, I strongly oppose the notion (which I've seen several times in different contexts) that your statement was "too gentle". Sure, your statement was gentle - and that's great! You weren't trying to be harsh, and you wanted to be friends, so your tone actually matched your intention in this case. The force with which a statement is delivered cannot override it's content even had they not matched up, or were not understood to match up by the recipient. Just because you gave a nice "no" does not make that "no" any less important. Your response was sufficient to make your intention clear to a fairly strict standard, and the fact that it was ignored does not change that. I really don't want to live in a world where everyone feels like they have to act less nice than they want to just to get their meaning across, and especially not in a world where you skip to the "damaging friendship" response. I am aware that a harsher response may tend to get you listened to more often, but that's not universal and may come at a cost.
It has come up as a potential concern, but we don't necessarily know whether it's an actual problem. If it was, I'd expect to see some evidence of that, either in the anonymous commentary or otherwise.
The recent entry on LW Meetups did include an example of socially clueless and perhaps disrespectful/condescending behavior, but I'm not sure that it qualifies here.
The things I mentioned in my post have happened in relation to a LW event. I won't elaborate more for various reasons.