CREEPY CREEPING CREEPINESS CREEPS

or, The Other C Word

[credit: istockphoto.com]

“The world’s stable now.  People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.  They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave.”

Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

“We’re closer to Brave New World now than we are to the world of its author, but we have to resist this approval-seeking shit.  1984 just took a little longer to get here than Orwell and Huxley predicted, and the soul of humanity will disappear altogether if we don’t collectively become ungovernable in the face of being boxed into invisibility.”

Winston Border

Protagonist of Grapevine Kudzu

I had a great conversation with my 20-year-old daughter the other day, inspired by recognition that – like most women, young and old – she’s in the habit of frequently referring to men as ‘creeps.’

Let’s stipulate up front that, as difficult as doing so can be, she and I made every attempt to strip out all extraneous issues.

I asked her to define ‘creep.’

“Guys that are creepy,” and she laughed even before finishing the phrase, knowing our discussion wouldn’t end there.

“Right,” I deadpanned; “ – can’t use the same word to define itself, but you did already start narrowing down the definition.”

“How so?”

“Well, you said ‘guys,’ so that means that creeps are men.”

“Not always, but, yeah, pretty much mostly.”

“Mostly as in almost always,” I asserted, “at least in the minds of most men and almost all women.”

“Well, yeah, but a woman could be creepy.”

“Of course she could, but let’s test whether anyone would label her one; when was the last time you called a woman a creep?”

“Maybe never?”

“And when was the last time you heard anyone label a woman as a creep?”

“Probably never.”

I replied that, at age 70, I was certain I’d heard that term applied to females more than once in my extended geezer life – but that it was still the equivalent of the verbal needle in the Creep Universe haystack.  “Next question: are all men creeps?”

“No.”

“So what makes certain men creeps?” I inquired, “as in, what characteristics or behaviors must these men exhibit before they deserve the ‘creep’ label?”

And this is where the squirming began in earnest.  I’ll skip past a good deal of back-and-forth and dancing-around-sexuality to land on the eventual clear conclusions – creeps are:

·         “men who are too old” who flirt with “women who are too young for them” (as defined by individual females); or

·         adult males who never give any indication that they would ever act on it even if aggressively pursued by a minor female but who in any way whatsoever indicate that teenage girls are sexually attractive.

At this point in our dialogue, I asked what the corresponding term would be for older females who are sexually attracted to or proposition significantly-younger males.  Again, a little dancing, but our two-person consensus was that — in our culture — when it’s a man, he’s a ‘creep,’ but, when it’s a woman, she’s a ‘cougar.’

“Are those equally pejorative?” 

Clearly, no, they’re not. 

To be labeled a ‘cougar,’ at worst, has some ‘oversexed’ connotations, but to be labeled a ‘creep’ is the kind of shaming that can cause a man to be shunned or result in reputation destruction. 

In other words, use of the word ‘creep’ (and, men, consider just how often men simpingly tag other men with this insult — aka white-nighting) is very purposefully intended to regulate male behavior for the purpose of ‘protecting’ women so women are spared from having to experience anything that they’d prefer not to experience.  This is one of the foundational building blocks of our gynocentric society: “Happy Wife, Happy Life” taken to its logical extreme to ensure that women not only almost always get their way but that the only legitimate role for men is to make women happy.  In the eyes of most Modern Women and Modern Men, women are entitled to the labor of men and exempt from having to feel any obligation towards or appreciation for the men who provide that labor, whereas men are required to venerate any female contributions.  Thus, a man’s generosity just brings him up to even, and any break in providing women their required happiness is evidence of failure.

Women label men as creeps because women would prefer – no matter how many bad choices they themselves make along the way – to not only have a steady supply of (a) paramours (lovers or potential husbands) among the men those women consider to be attractive, and (b) chore-providing suitors who will most typically remain permanently in The Friend Zone, but also for men to (1) reassure women that their preferences are entirely legitimate, and (2) regulate their own male behavior so that no one outside of female preferences ever propositions those females.

We thus operate under a dichotomous societal assumption that what women want from men is pure and holy but that what men want from women is debased and disgusting.

In essence, women feel entitled to advertise themselves sexually to whatever extent their own scruples permit – but expect men to not only figure out on their own what the individual preferences of women are in advance but entirely refrain from inconveniencing any and all women who wouldn’t want to be approached  (or even looked at, for that matter) by them.  Because it’s not just age gaps; most women consider any man they aren’t attracted to who approaches them to be a creep who should know better than to indicate interest.

Women, in other words, insist that men pretend – and far too many men lack the courage to break free of their own cowardly (and feminine, because bowing to social pressure is the opposite of masculine) acquiescence to this demand – that they’re only interested in women who are both (a) in their ‘appropriate’ age range, and (b) in their attractiveness lane.  Furthermore, as already mentioned, many men take it a step further and demonize their own gender by declaring men who (1) pursue much-younger women, (2) dare to admit being attracted to women under age 18, or, heaven forbid, (3) actually gaze with lust at young women who dress leaving nothing to the imagination – to be creeps of the lowest order.

My daughter asked me why I cringe every time I hear a man being labeled as a creep.

“Honey, it’s a reflection of the profound level of disrespect women typically have for men in general,” I began, “and women feeling entitled to destroy men in this way not only hurts those men, it has everything to do with why, nowadays, most women end up old, alone and miserable – and, more often than not, despite their supposedly-awesome careers, broke as well – bitter that men are no longer hovering around begging to perform chores for them without reciprocal compensation.”

The disrespect toward men is this profound: men are expected to be invisible other than when women deign to acknowledge them.

The (mostly-male) powers-that-be prefer for men to be demoralized, and women have been hypnotized into believing that it’s righteous to do most of the demoralizing, a great deal of which manifests itself in the form of dismissiveness – and men bear the brunt of responsibility for this cultural dynamic, because they put up with it; hell, in most cases they enforce such disrespectful standards on themselves. 

I find it entirely understandable that women would gladly accept a culture that convinces them that they all deserve kid-gloves treatment – freeing them from the need to self-reflect – but that doesn’t stop it from being irrational to believe that, just because you want freedom without consequences, you’ll actually be free from them.  Common sense, biology, intersexual dynamics – and even Scripture itself – all line up to promote a harsh set of truths:

·         Suppressing free expression doesn’t ultimately suppress truth itself; i.e., pretending that what you want is the only legitimate dating-or-marriage avenue doesn’t make it so.

·         If you don’t like the kind of men who approach you, you might want to consider changing the way you market yourself instead of expecting men to be soothsaying mind readers.

·         Women are generally hard-wired to want men just a little bit older than they are, but if a woman is serious about permanently snagging a good man close to her age she better persuade a slightly-older guy to offer marriage while they’re both still quite young (under 25), because the older she gets the larger the age gap she’ll have to accept if she wants any chance of finding a committed mate.

·         Men are hard-wired to want women younger than them – but this desire for younger women isn’t confined to just those women who are slightly younger.

·         The previous two points dovetail to mean that, (a) as a woman ages, her prospects diminish and increasingly exist among men who are increasingly older than she, and (b) as a man ages, his prospects expand and will remain focused on younger women with childbearing capabilities.

Women are organized among themselves to prevent women from having to accept these fundamental truths: not only is it (a) natural for men of all ages to be most physically attracted to young women – it’s also (b) entirely moral and ethical for men of all ages to pair up with those young women; passing laws intended to regulate men that will ultimately have to be enforced by men will not change male human nature. 

Young women: older women aren’t looking out for you when they program you to see older men as creeps; instead, they’re just looking out for themselves by cutting down on the competition for those ‘creeps.’

Every woman: to label a man as a creep is overwhelmingly disrespectful.  To do so is evidence of being a spoiled brat who thinks she should always have the man of her dreams at the end of her not-so-well-thought-out rainbow.  Especially because you’ve all been rewarded for doing so, I can hardly fault you for wanting to have your cake and eat it, too, but at the same time men are experiencing diminishing sympathy for your Cadillac tastes.  Men keep the world running, and single women have and will always outnumber single men, so your actual best strategy would be to get in the habit of acknowledging that women are far more dependent on men than men are on women.  Almost every man you label as a ‘creep’ performs some function that, taken in the aggregate, amounts to life functions that no woman could survive without if all she had to rely on were her fellow females.  Only in Hollywood Fantasyland are women capable of saving the day.

By tagging a man with the epithet, ‘Creep,’ a woman might as well declare that man to be shit, unworthy to even be stepped on. 

Men, it’s time to challenge every woman who directs that insult toward any man.

And it’s probably also about time to take any man who calls other men ‘creeps’ out behind the woodshed.

*************

CODA I:

What if the use of a word like ‘creep’ that is so thoroughly intended to destroy men who don’t fall in line with womanist orthodoxy is the opposite of the Grrl Power / Female Empowerment move it’s generally portrayed to be?

What if casting ‘creep’ aspersions is instead evidence of widespread arrested emotional development?

‘Latency’ is a child-development term referring to a prepubescent stage of maturation that most children are assumed to go through between early childhood and puberty (roughly ages 6-11), during which sexuality is considered entirely dormant and youngsters are known to freely direct terms like ‘cooties’ toward the opposite sex.  Psychologists typically consider latency to be a protective mechanism that shields children from having to grapple with the weighty and confronting complexities of human sexuality.

What if the pedestalizing woman-centered culture that has been in existence since at least the Middle Ages has created in modern times a situation in which women are predominantly not challenged to fully address their side of the responsibility-for-sexuality equation?

What if – in our collective effort to allow females to engage in sex strictly on their own terms without ever having to fully acknowledge their own drives in the matter – men and women are engaging in a dance that perpetuates their infantilization, leaving the average woman in a developmentally-stunted state that always provides her the option to posture as if most aspects of sexuality are not only out of her control but unwanted, oppressive and unrepresentative of her own desires?

What if tagging men as creeps is ultimately the developmental equivalent of proclaiming that they have cooties?

What if claiming that most men are creeps is a defense mechanism available to any stunted woman to camouflage the fact that her sexuality is just as multifaceted and primal as that of men? 

Again, Winston Borden:

“Women pretend they aren’t as horny as men for many reasons, but here’s the top one: unwillingness to share their men.  Women collectively coerce men into monogamous relationships even though they know full well that multiple wives is a functional choice for men, while multiple husbands for women would never work. Selling male monogamy requires women to pretend that they aren’t the sexual deviants they paint men to be.”

What if it’s time for men to stop putting up with women pretending to be ready for Leadership Prime Time?  What if it’s time for men and boys to insist that women and girls join them in leaving ‘cooties’ on the recess playground?

*************

CODA II:

One Last Set of Questions: Why does it seem to be the case that those women who most frequently cast aspersions on men who prefer younger women typically consider it homophobic to question middle-aged men having sex with young teenage boys? Why are politically-liberal women prone to calling such middle-aged men, ‘Minor Attracted Persons,’ but would never assign the same soft tag to men who simply indicate attraction toward young teenage girls?

Why also are women who toss around the ‘Creep’ label toward men the least likely to condemn female school teachers who seduce their male students (or even acknowledge that that happens more often than male teacher/female student pairings)?

Just food for thought, but the real answers speak for themselves.