lydy | A conversation about creeping

A conversation about creeping

So, I got creeped on the other night. Predictably, I didn't like it. In fact, it made me several different sorts of furious. But what it didn't make me was afraid. And this caused me to think about all the various conversations I've been hearing lately about harassment, creeping, and so on. Almost all of them talk about safety. We talk a lot about how women are much more likely to be raped than men, that women spend a lot of time worrying about their physical safety, about the incontrovertible fact that women are on average less strong than men. Somewhat related, we talk about how women are socialized to be more passive, but usually in contexts where what we're really talking about is women being less able to protect themselves. We talk a lot about wanting women to feel safe.

You know, I felt perfectly safe the other night. At no point was my physical being in any danger. The guy in question was 20 years older than me, a bit frail, and I had on call a large male co-worker. The guy doesn't know my last name, my home address, and I never had any doubt that my management would support me if I needed to do something drastic. There was, at least in my perception, no actual safety issue.

I was, however, intensely angry at being treated that way. It had nothing to do with being afraid of being raped. It had everything to do with someone acting like I wasn't a real person. Creeping revolves around trying to limit or circumvent someone else's choices. It has to do with attempted coercion, and with assuming that your target's preferences are at best obstacles to be overcome, and basically immaterial to your own wishes. And being subjected to this makes me very angry. And I think it's very reasonable for me to be angry. But I feel this nagging worry that I should have felt unsafe in order to warrant this level of anger.

I don't want to derail useful, necessary discussions. I don't want to undervalue the necessity of people feeling safe in their environments. But it seems to me that there needs to be some sort of acknowledgment that physical safety is not the only thing that is important, and that women have the right to exist in environments that are more than just physically safe. That we have the right to be treated as adults, with the right to make real choices, and that our choices are valid even when it is not directly concerned with physical safety.

It is distinctly possible that I am just not aware of these types of conversations. I hope that's true. But I'm not aware of them. And I think that I am not expressing myself as clearly as I would like to on this issue. Anybody want to help me clarify my thoughts? Point me to some conversations about this? Weigh in? I am definitely looking for input, here.

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I think that safety, as an issue, has a kind of traction in conversation that agency does not. It's easy to point to the consequences of a failure of safety; those consequences are illegal and generally accepted as damaging.

The consequences of a failure of respect and recognition-of-humanity are so much more subtle. They get into that murky, deniable area where people who don't want to discuss the matter say, "But I get disrespected too," not noticing the difference between disrespect and a denial of basic humanity.

I suspect I'm not explaining this very well. But I think I'd say that safety is kind of the poster child of these issues -- an easy proxy for a complex population.

And I'm sorry to hear that you got creeped on, because eeew.

I agree that safety is the easy thing to talk about. It seems concrete, and objective. Of course, it isn't, since safety is partly a perception. But it certainly feels simpler. But I don't like the way it somehow frames everything in terms of she-who-might-be-raped. I don't like that conversations about my life and my rights and my value are framed in terms of whether or not I am sexually and physically at risk. That, in itself, seems to steal something from me, and from conversations I want to have. Does that make sense? It feels a bit like always framing me as the victim.

Oh, I wasn't disagreeing with you; I was just trying to figure out why what you observe has come about.

I think it's a really wise and trenchant observation that framing creeping as being only about safety diminishes the conversation. It feels a lot like the (pseudo?) medieval attitude that a man's honor is in his deeds and a woman's in her chastity. It diminishes us from full citizens of the community to people who exist for a purpose, just with the added dimension that we get to choose when/whether to serve it.

If all we talk about is our sexual safety, then we become sex objects. Which is kind of full circle back to creeping. It feels like Le Guin's quote about the Mishnory road.

This is a very eye-opening observation you've made. Thank you for it.

I think that the concerns about safety are actually closely linked to my concerns about agency. It is my budding suspicion that they need to be worked on in tandem, and that omitting the agency issue actually damages the work on safety. In some sense, violence is the ultimate denial of agency.

As I type, I find that my understanding of this is actually even fuzzier than I had thought. I really feel that there's something here, but I am not able to clearly articulate. I feel like I'm nibbling at the edges of something true and obvious, and failing to make the correct thesis statement.

You might find some of the conversations on Captain Awkward's website, about boundaries and dealing with (among other things) creepers, relevant.

But I don't have problems dealing with creepers. I'm good with that. I have good boundaries, and I'm totally capable of dealing with the problems I've had so far. I don't need that particular piece of the conversation, though, again, it is a valuable conversation and I really don't want to undermine it. But it seems like there's another piece that's missing, that I don't quite know what it is. The step after that. The step after admitting it's creepy, and admitting that I'm right to be angry. That step. Whatever it might be.

I'm too deep in the weeds of work to dive into this, but, yeah, I hear you. FWIW, to my eyes, creeping doesn't require a threat to physical safety to warrant a response of furious anger. While I agree that physical safety is important, and that discussions about it are important, there's a little too much "take care of the little woman" built into the whole safety model at the core of why creeping, harassment, and some "mild" forms of assault are unacceptable behaviors. Women have a right to exist in oh, so many environments, regardless of whether or not those environments are deemed safe by society or even by the woman herself.

I don't feel the least bit unjustified in my fury. I feel enormously righteous about it, actually. But when I go to talk about it, to complain about it, I feel oddly at a loss because I feel like what I want to say doesn't have space in the current conversation.

That makes sense. I was responding to "But I feel this nagging worry that I should have felt unsafe in order to warrant this level of anger." While I'm cautious around enormous righteousness, I agree that there's conversation territory that's less fully covered, less fully explored. Something building from an essay about how it's not just about safety, an essay that looks at the other dynamics involved, just as you've started doing here.

It might be the same conversation, it might be another one, but there's a whole "productive anger resolution" aspect to this. Taking this week's example, you dealt with the creeper. You recognized and identified at least one major source your anger. Now what? Like you said, what's the next step?

If I knew any of the useful answers, my stomach probably wouldn't be clenched right now.

"cautious around enormous righteousness"

I hear you on that. And, you know, one of the things I don't have is any sort of useful metric for how angry is angry enough, and how angry is too much. I am certain that being angry is a reasonable response to being creeped upon. But I'm lacking any sense of scale, here.

I'm sorry about your stomach clenching. I didn't mean to do that.

I suspect that one of the reasons I'm so angry was because it started out with him wearing a D&D shirt, and him claiming close acquaintanceship with Dave Arnason, and me being delighted because I thought maybe he was one of my tribe. So I feel rather especially betrayed. (The offer I refused upwards of five times? It was an offer to play D&D, one-on-one. Um, just for starters, one-on-one role-playing is weirdly specialized, usually boring, and almost always the result of not being able to get enough players together. An act of desperation. The game is not well-designed for that. He was, of course, portraying it as a special benefit to me.)

I realized several years ago when this conversation came up (it was around the time the woman at the skeptic conference spoke up about having been propositioned late at night in an elevator) that I'm very rarely afraid of violence, but always angered by the space it takes up in my brain when I have to confront someone about it -- like the anger I'd have if someone infected my computer with malware and I had to spend a ton of time dealing with it. Because between the "don't make other people angry/ don't hurt other people's feelings" programming and the "you're a coward if you don't speak up for yourself" programming, it's so hard to feel that ANY response is the right one, and I can just keep second-guessing myself to infinity. That's just my own experience -- it may be different from yours.

My experience is very similar. Over the years, I've developed enough automatic responses that responding to creeps takes up less space in my brain than it used to, but it still takes up space. And it's always contextual, which requires processing. The proximate cause of this post happened at work, so my responses were limited because it was necessary that I continue to act in a professional fashion. "Fuck off, asshole," was not one of my menu choices. It's like always running an anti-virus program which requires annoying little interactions. It's wearing.

I think that one of the things I'm finding particularly wearing is the self-doubt. The questions about how angry is it appropriate to be. How strongly should I respond to any individual creeping event? I don't want to be a drama queen who creates a terrible scene every time someone trespasses because, honestly, that would make me boring to be around. I don't want to be the girl who, no matter what, responds mildly and politely to outrage, because that enables the bastards. I don't want to pretend that this has no emotional cost, because it does. I don't want to magnify the emotional cost and have it snowball and become more of a burden than it needs to be.

Arghh with arghh sauce.

"The questions about how angry is it appropriate to be. How strongly should I respond to any individual creeping event?"

Those are two separate issues. In my viewpoint, anger is an emotion, and we feel what we feel, so "appropriate" isn't really the right word for the anger itself; it is what it is. The second question seems to be the one you really are asking yourself. I think there is some territory between "terrible scene" and "mildly and politely"--though each of those is probably appropriate in some cases--and that's the most productive territory for most situations.

I dunno about the anger piece of this. It seems like I do have some control over my level of anger. Partly, this is because I have very early training in how to damp down anger, to the point where it was years before I realized I was capable of becoming angry. Also, anger can feed on itself if you let it. So, at least for me, there's often some level of control over how angry I get. And getting some angry is often a useful tool for motivating behavior. So, possibly only for me, the question of "how much of a scene should I make" and "how angry should I be" are very nearly the same question.

I think you know I would be the last one to claim all humans are the same! I think I get what you are saying, and I should have said, "For me those are two separate issues." I always worked on my reactions, my behavior in response, rather than the emotion itself. Works for me, no claim for others! For anger, when I get angry--and it isn't a particularly common emotion for me--I tend to blow up and then get over it quickly, so I worked on what form of "blowing up" to do--including whether anyone else would be aware of it.

Thank you-- a lot of the time, my conscious concern is a lot more like "I don't want to be involved in sticky conversation" rather than "I might get raped or killed".

Yep, exactly.

I can create an argument that it is more important to talk about safety because until we are safe, not feeling uncomfortable is merely a luxury. But. honestly, I think that's a false argument. I think that these two problems are actually related, and that physical safety will partially flow out of an environment in which women are treated with respect even when the boundaries are not merely physical.

I have never in my long life--at least as far as I can remember--felt afraid or physically unsafe in any situation involving just one man. I have, however, experienced what you describe as "creeping": "Creeping revolves around trying to limit or circumvent someone else's choices. It has to do with attempted coercion, and with assuming that your target's preferences are at best obstacles to be overcome, and basically immaterial to your own wishes."

The thing is, I have experienced it more often (but not exclusively!) from women. And certainly your description fits all too well a situation you and I are both familiar with, being done by a woman to a man.

I suspect that's one reason it doesn't get talked about much: the creeper can be anyone, and the creeped can be anyone. And as soon as one suggests that women can do highly unpleasant, even damaging, things to others, one gets accused of derailing any conversation that involves women's safety. (And granted, it can do that. But the problem is, as you point out, there generally aren't any conversations about this.)

Sometimes I get angry when someone does this kind of creeping to me, if it is interfering with my enjoyment of the larger situation, event, etc., and I have to take my time and energy to deal with it. Otherwise, I may be annoyed, exasperated. This is a partial explanation for why I have been a freelancer, lo, these many years--bosses pretty much have carte blanche to do this regarding one's work conditions. Frequently, however, I am slightly amused; someone "trying to limit or circumvent" my choices, or attempt coercion, reminds me of something Kara Dalkey once quoted regarding me and someone trying to intimidate me: "He don't know her vewy well, do he?"

Y'all familiar with the 80s feminist archeologist/anthropologist work on the formation fo the patriarchy, or at least the Fertile Crescent version that gets into Western Civilization?

It's about defining a hierarchy of legitimate agency, and the construction of slavery probably derived from the construction of the status of women under patriarchal norms.

(Which are also about defining "female" as "can bear children, a property right of their male owner".)

So "creeping" is mostly about "acting to enforce the hierarchy where women have no independent agency"; some of it is about a perverse response to "unowned female, maybe I can acquire?" The focus on physical/sexual risk is a way to address the concern without venturing outside the patriarchial context, so it's traditional and really, really difficult to get past in a conversation because the conversation as a whole has got to ditch a whole bunch of normative assumptions in one go.

We're in a possible cultural transition; if we get to a different fundamental organization, creeping behaviour will be increasingly recognized as unacceptable for fundamental reasons, rather than superficial things like "rude", which is just a legitimate desire improperly expressed. Keeping focused on safety keeps the conversation focused on "is this rude, under enlightened modern patriarchial norms?", which really isn't helpful if one doesn't accept the legitimacy of the patriarchial norm.

Wow. No, I didn't know any of this, and it creates a whole new context for it. Thank you.

Having children is a property right of the man? Do I understand that correctly? If so, my mind is blown again, and this puts a new bit of spin on the attempt to control women's sexuality and fertility. Utterly fascinating.

In some ways the biggest thing to come out of that research, which so far as I know has held up entirely well since, was that control of reproduction (and thus female sexuality) wasn't a consequence of, but rather a precondition for, patriarchy.

Well, that explains a great deal, doesn't it? It explains some of the ways that the abortion arguments go. Rather than it being a symptom of something larger, it is part of the bedrock of the thing.

I agree that it explains a great deal.

I'd also go so far as to believe the amount it explains also explains why that research remains obscure.

Edited 2014-03-18 20:53 (UTC)

What you are describing makes sense to me and sounds familiar. Like, familiar from the inside.

To be specific: After Jim Frenkel did the thing to me that I reported him for, I noticed a trend in what some people were saying to or about me. They referred to how horrible and damaging the incident must have been for me. Some of them seemed to practically insist on the damage, and on how much fear it must have caused me too. I began to wonder if there was a weird sort of points system whereby some particular and significant amount of damage and/or fear was required in order for it to have been legitimate harassment in their eyes.

I talked about it with Juan and a friend later. "It's like they all assume that I was crushed by the experience -- or require it, even!" Juan snorted and said that he had talked to me on the phone the morning after it happened, and in his words, "You did not sound crushed. Incredulous and pissed off, but hardly crushed."

So yeah, kinda what you said, here.

Hmmmm. After a certain event at the meeting at our house, people were extremely concerned for me, having to deal with it. I was a bit perplexed at this, as I was not at all upset, just somewhat sad at having to tell someone to leave our home.

I guess it's a human trait to think that everyone reacts to a situation as we ourselves would react. Some people--not all!--then take a different reaction as either (1) meaning it can't possibly have happened/been as bad as the person says or (2) being implicit criticism of ME. That is, there can be only one way to react, and either my way is right, which means the other person didn't experience what they say they did, or my way is wrong and I am a failure even at being a victim.

Edited 2014-03-18 12:14 (UTC)

Me, I was just grateful that the person who had to deal with the unpleasantness was someone who could do so competently and at little cost to herself. So very grateful that it didn't hurt you, too.

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A conversation about creeping

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