I am making a conscious decision to ignore his posting history and simply take the Facebook meme as it stands. While I don’t think the Facebook post he quote completely supports his interpretation, neither do I think it completely supports any other interpretation offered in this thread. Accordingly, I don’t agree with many others in this thread that Dr Deth’s take on the Facebook meme is an unreasonable one.
Specifically: the reason I feel that way is because different people with different life experiences will come to have differing ideas – but also honest, good-faith ideas – of just what “creepiness” entails.
OK. So, we’ve got some facebook post where someone says “if I hear another story about some creepy guy followed me at so n so Walmart, then […].”
What is your interpretation of what “some creepy guy followed me?” entails? What is the good faith interpretation of that which does not include the kinds of stories other posters have been making reference to, which is to say, stories in which people are being sexually harassed by strangers at Walmart? Why are those interpretations not supported?
That happened to me, and with my oldest son, I was 27 when he was born. I resented it, did not feel ‘I was just doing my part to right past wrongs by the patriarchy’ etc. I thought the mom calling over a cop to have him ask me why I was at the playground was being an asshole, though cop just doing his job. I didn’t raise a fuss with either, not worth it.
Society or elements of it is now IMO overly paranoid about stuff like this. Which doesn’t mean bad stuff doesn’t happen. It also in particular doesn’t mean anyone has to hesitate to remove themselves from a situation if that’s what their instinct tells them. ‘Judging’ or being called some kind of ist/phobe, be damned. IMO everyone has a full right to play the odds as they see them when it comes to avoiding strangers or being on guard. Calling in the authorities when nobody has actually done anything, or even taking it upon yourself to interrogate people who haven’t done anything, that’s where it gets dicey. Physically assaulting people who are ‘acting creepy’ is just a crime, wouldn’t have thought a need to debate in general about whether you should commit crimes.
There are exceptions to every rule so I don’t think concocting one would do much to counter this point, though nobody has to agree with it either.
And the internet is loaded to the gills with bullshit of every kind so no debate from me that ‘stuff you read on the internet’ isn’t always reliable. My impression of this is not just from multi-hand internet anecdotes or just the one personal experience I mentioned.
Dr. Deth, you really need to shut up about anything to do with women. You’re one of the very few guys here who like to stir up shit on this topic. Then you feign innocence. Stop mansplaining, stop patronizing, just STOP.
You and Dr Deth posted right past each other, and I feel like it’s going to happen between you and I as well – you’ve already cordoned off two broad sets of interpretations and implicitly declared that only one or the other can be reasonable. We’ve got different perspectives that likely aren’t easily reconcilable.
Nevertheless:
Good-faith interpretation which does not include the kinds of stories other posters have been making reference to (e.g. sexually harassed by strangers): The author of the Facebook post may categorize, say, a guy who she keeps seeing in her same general area several times throughout the store as “creepy guy” because he apparently kept popping up wherever she was. And perhaps at first sight the guy seemed to fancy her, made eye contact (a second too long?), smiled, but never entered her personal space at any time. Maybe the eye contact and smile came off as smarmy and/or invasive in an indefinite way – hey, she’s just at WalMart trying to shop and in no mood cater to any prospective Romeos.
Interpretations not supported: Keep in mind that my main point is that the Facebook meme is written with insufficient detail to clearly support any interpretation – instead, the reader must supply the detail. Why do I say that no interpretations are supported? Because the Facebook post lacks explicit detail. For better or worse, with some topics and for some portion of a mixed audience, pretty much everything needs to be spelled out. People aren’t all coming to the topic with the same assumptions and experiences.
…
In case it’s not clear: I mean “good faith” here to mean “come to honestly, without cynicism, malice, or a desire to ‘score points’”. I don’t mean that a good faith interpretation is necessarily a correct or even likely one – only that it’s a reasonable one.
In case it’s not clear, part 2: The good faith, guileless interpretation I just gave above is also not supported by the text of the Facebook meme. But someone can, in good faith and without cynicism or malice, mentally fill in the details similar to those I laid out and come up with (what I consider to be) a reasonable take.
Once again, that entirely depends on exactly what behavior is meant by the phrase “acting creepy”.
If what you mean by “acting creepy” is some rando groping your ass or pressing his erection up against you in a Walmart, then no, physically assaulting the perpetrator to get him off you is not a crime.
Recapping the whole situation once more:
There are first-person accounts all over the internet of women getting seriously, criminally, creeped on by random dudes in a Walmart.
Some woman writes a post that it makes her angry to read women’s accounts of being “followed in a Walmart by some creepy dude” and not doing anything about it except “I went up to an associate. I spoke to a manager.”
She thinks the women should instead be responding to the (unspecified) behavior on the part of the “creepy dude” with direct confrontation, calling the cops or even acts of violence. This post gets a lot of enthusiastic reposting.
Now, which is realistically the most plausible interpretation of the attitude of the people who posted and applauded these remarks?
A. They like the idea of women aggressively defending themselves against actual disgusting criminal behavior on the part of “creepy dudes”, rather than just complaining to a store employee who doesn’t “get hazard pay” to deal with it.
B. They like the idea of women illegally getting violent with strange men in a Walmart on no stronger grounds than their own, probably paranoid, suspicions that the guy might be “following” them or merely “looks creepy”.
The author of the post didn’t explicitly specify either A or B, or any position in between, to justify her response. The OP and a couple other posters are indignant about the post because they subscribe to interpretation B, while everybody else thinks they’re overreacting because it’s probably interpretation A.
There’s no one definitive way to read the meaning of that viral post, but I stand by my opinion that the posters here doggedly assuming that it must be B are being unreasonable.
I don’t know about all that. I mean, DrDeth took a very particular unsupportable position, but I don’t think I wasn’t hearing him take it. It doesn’t mean that all positions that aren’t mine are unreasonable. It just means his was.
Sure, and I take your point that it’s plausible to come away thinking that creepy could imply some indicia that are far below some criminal level of behavior (in fact, I once had to very uncomfortably represent someone close to me, in court, against entirely overblown charges related to just that, so I know that it happens). But the fact that this may be a reasonable starting point doesn’t mean, well, all outcomes from here on out are equally reasonable. Once it is pointed out to you* that:
Everyone agrees with you that nobody should be assaulted for manifesting those kinds of indicia; and
a reference, on the internet, to lots of anecdotes about creepy men following women at Walmart, is probably a reference to lots of anecdotes on the internet about real sexual harassment that includes being followed by creepy men at Walmart, and not to some other prevailing theory that previously unimaginable acts of random grocery violence should be visited upon people for what their heads are shaped like;
then it is no longer in good faith if you* keep complaining about how everyone thinks it’s ok to assault someone for nothing but “looking creepy.” Because no one has said that. And multiple people have repeatedly said no. No, not that. You* don’t get to cling to the initial ambiguity for-fucking-ever, in order to be scandalized by the thing that isn’t what anyone’s saying. Because whether the facebook post, on its face, admits of multiple possible readings without any more information, once you have the rest of the information (that is, the fact that there’s lots of stories on the internet about women being followed and harassed and assaulted by creepy men at Walmart), you* no longer don’t have it. Those kinds of facts should change the course of the discussion, if nobody has an agenda.
IMHO, there are things shared on Facebook which are worse than the one referenced in the OP. Just off the top of my head: pictures/video clips of random babies spewing shit everywhere.
Yet another argument for a like button. Actually, this would get a heart react. So would a few others in this thread, but I frankly don’t have the energy to go through it all again.
That is not ‘acting creepy’. That is committing a physical assault. A person has a right to use force to defend themselves against a physical assault, obviously.
Hard to believe anyone could actually interpret “physically assaulting somebody who is just acting creepy is a crime” as meaning “you can’t defend yourself with force if you are physically assaulted” but I guess now and on internet pretty much no assumption can be made about common understanding of the meaning of plain English even among people who appear to speak English as their first language. Especially when there’s perceived potential for demonstrating superior/inferior socio-political virtue with regard to a -ism/-phobia type topic.
But otherwise the statement I made is true. It is a crime to physically assault somebody because you claim they were following you. Like I said somebody could always construct an extreme example where it’s preferable to technically commit a crime rather than risk the alternative, but in general I believe my statement was obvious, and it’s absurd to include eg. groping, ie felony sexual assault, as ‘acting creepy’. If the ‘creepy’ person committed a sexual assault there would be no rational reason to describe it as ‘acting creepy’ rather than specifying it.
Just kind of too ridiculous in that initial bolded part to even read the rest of it.
Hysterical idiots who imagine boogeymen around every corner.
What he and many other men fail to realize is that women don’t usually take a blip on the creep-o-meter as a verdict. We know that a man who may seem a little creepy is not necessarily a creep. No sane woman would confront a man for being a creep until she has more evidence than just a vague sense that something’s not quite right.
That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t ignore her instincts, however.
Here are some scenarios:
I’m at Home Depot. I notice a man is in the same aisle as me again, and he seems to be staring at me. I go to a different aisle and keep an eye out. I don’t see him again.
I’m on the platform waiting for the PATH train. I notice a man standing too close to me. I casually move down the platform so I’ll end up in a different car. He doesn’t follow.
These don’t describe any particular incident because when stuff like this happens, I forget about it immediately. Were the guys actually creeps? Most likely there is an innocent explanation for their behavior, but a cost/benefit analysis of going vs. staying clearly shows that moving away was the better option.
I wonder what DrDeth and the others think I should do in these types of situations - especially because if the guys weren’t in fact creeps, they probably weren’t even aware I was deliberately leaving the vicinity.
Here’s another scenario:
I’m at Lowe’s looking at landscaping stone. The area is very dark and secluded. I need some help, so I go find a guy who works there and ask. He calls over another guy to help me. That second guy had helped me previously, and I found him a bit creepy. I consider whether I want to go to a dark and secludedT portion of the yard with him, and decide that he’s not really creepy, just a bit odd. We go over there, he pleasantly helps me with my stuff, and I go on my way.
This really happened. It’s an example of a time when a woman did not take that blip on the creep-o-meter as definitieve evidence a guy was a creep. I’m sure we all realize that sometimes we get false positives and behave accordingly.
And yet you reference a number of popular third-hand reports. When I looked at the published data behind popular reports like those, I found that in the actual data, “someone who was known to the child” included “creepy man who had been seen at Walmart”.
I’m not backing down from this: at the time when I was familiar with the data, those popular beliefs were misleading, in the sense of being “false lies that people tell each other”
I’m not posting this in GC: you are welcome to believe whatever you want, including selecting individual cases to make your point. I’m not totally ignorant, I know what has been claimed. At the time when I was familiar with the data, the popular beliefs promulgated by respected third-hand sources were false.
What’s notable about this remark is how naively it assumes that actual physical assault is such an extraordinary and clearly differentiated thing in women’s experience of creepy behavior that a woman who vaguely refers to “creepy dudes” can’t possibly be including dudes who are committing actual physical assault.
Again, nobody here is defending the illegal use of violence. But the people here who keep insisting that the phrase “being followed in a Walmart by some creepy dude” must necessarily mean that the dude hasn’t actually done anything bad, and therefore that suggesting violence against him is necessarily encouraging illegal acts, are deluding themselves.
This is the class of creeps equivalent to your ten year old brother, ‘I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!’ He’s not assaulting her, he’s stalking her and fondling himself. And he thinks he’s safe because he can just pull his hand out of his pants and say, “I never touched her!’
Keeping in mind most all women have been groped or rubbed up against or molested in some inappropriate way. Which raises this brand of creeping to the level of terrorizing.
In a world where no one is gonna care until he actually assaults me I’d throw the tin of peas and defend myself in front of the judge.
I have to disagree with you there. I’ve met a pedophile. SO’s relative we have nothing to do with. Repeat offender, is on the list and last I heard he was awaiting trial for doing it yet again. He DOES look creepy. Some pedophiles actually do ACT and LOOK creepy.
