Say a guy comes up to you, a total stranger, and says something mildly flirtatious, (some equivalent of “How YOU doing’?” that you’re totally unoffended by, just some polite, amusing chit-chat), you exchange a little more banter, 15 seconds’ worth, and as he leaves your presence he smiles at you and asks if he could see you sometime, continue the conversation, maybe at lunch. You decline: “Well, we’ve hardly met,” you say, being a proper lady and unaccustomed to dating total strangers.
He follows you for a few seconds, trying his best to persuade to change that answer to an affirmative one. You continue to decline his offer, and you part ways.
A few days later you run into him again, and again it’s a public setting, nowhere you feel uncomfortable encountering him, and he chats you up again, and again asks you out. You decline again, and request that he stop asking you –you DON’T want to date him, you say firmly but sweetly.
Let’s say this goes on for a while, with the same results. My question is NOT whether you break down eventually and change your mind, and it’s NOT whether there’s a point that a stranger asking you out persistently feels so creepy to you that you start getting alarmed by it, and it’s not even how much time has to pass before you start getting creeped out by his not taking “No” for a definitive answer: my question (and here’s where your honesty comes in) is “How much does this guy’s LOOKS affect your feeling (or not feeling) creeped out?”
I raise this question because my eyebrows always go up just a smidgen when women complain about unwanted attention. When a woman complains that some guy is being a pest to her, by persistently asking her out, flirting, being smarmy or too personal with her, behaving inappropriately in the workplace, etc., I’m always slightly suspicious that, if this unwanted attention were coming from the woman’s personal equivalent of Brad Pitt, she would gladly tolerate it (to say the least) for a much longer period of time, if not indefinitely (assuming she’d be able to resist it at all.) I’m talking about the same exact approach, the same voice, the same words, the same exact behavior, mind you, so there’s no “Oh, well, coming from Brad Pitt, with that sexy voice of his…” because it’s the pattern of behavior that you are complaining about, just coming from someone far less attractive, not his appearance.
I’m not for a second contending that you don’t have an absolute right to be attracted to someone on the basis of his looks—I’m sure looksism got me much undeserved female attention in my twenties and thirties, and I thank you (generically) for that—but if your negative response to being hit on by someone you don’t consider so attractive has to do with his appearance, then isn’t that simply the price you have to pay for attention that you DO want? And not simply something you can object to as offensive, creepy, etc.?
I’m asking this question of you, and not guys, partly because I take for granted how enormously looks-oriented guys are, but mainly because guys very rarely complain about unwanted attention. It’s my contention that complaints about creepy come-ons are largely affected by the recipient’s attraction to the person coming on to her. Confirm or deny? And please, let’s be rigorously honest.
) I might even find the whole thing creepier. After all, what does that super handsome guy want with me, if it isn’t some evil kidnapping scheme, an elaborate frat boy prank, or maybe he just wants to sell me some AmWay shares?