He has a point though. Women trust their personality detectors way too much. When you break it down, women usually just look for superficial social skills and use those to determine if a guy is a threat or not. But you really can’t tell anything from superficial social skills.
Do you want to hear something really creepy from a creepy guy? The killers Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper had no trouble finding victims even though everyone was on high alert in their areas (there was a serial killer on the loose after all) because they knew that when women were labeling guys as threats vs. non threats were just looking at their superficial social skills. Since they both had superficial social skills (the ability to be charming, to dress nice, to carry on a meaningful conversation) nobodies threat radar went off. Ted Bundy even picked up hitchhikers even though he looked like the killer, had the same name and drove the same car.
Creepy does not necessarily mean dangerous. Creepy is…creepy. A person you don’t want to spend time with. I don’t automatically think every person that creeps me out is going to cut me up in little pieces and float me down the river in an oil drum. That still doesn’t mean I derive any pleasure from their company.
I am astounded that Edmund Kemper was able to pick up so many young girl hitchhikers seeing as he was 6’9’’ :eek: and 300+ pounds (you’d think that would scare most of the girls away for sure if it was a stranger offering a free ride) I read that one victim he basically just smothered her with his huge hands holding his palms over her face.
I worked in the Supreme Court registry office for a while and you know who I could *never * pick? Child molesters. They’d come in, and just seem absolutely normal. Generally they were very well spoken, charismatic and engaging. Until you looked up their case you’ d have no idea why they’d be there… :eek:
Other things I noted:
Marijuana growers were generally pretty good advertisements for their product. Unless they were part of a large drug enterprise, they were generally very amiable and pleasant people to deal with.
Criminals involved in ‘hard’ drugs are scary, scary people. Add another ‘scary’ to that. They’re scary. I remember one guy who I just didn’t want to even go near; he had absolutely soulless eyes (this from someone who doesn’t believe in ‘souls’ as such; yet it’s the only description I can come up with that conveys the look) and you could honestly believe he’d gut you as soon as look at you and not blink while doing it.
(end of Derailment. Please return to your regularly scheduled posting.)
In my opinion, ‘Woman’s Intuition’ is an appealing word for making snap judgments based on emotional cues rather than fact. Sometimes it’s a good thing, sure - and it’s not like I don’t rely on intuition a lot of the time myself - but it’s *not * a lie detector and it’s *certainly not * a substitute for actual thinking.
Nor, for the record, is basing opinions of people on the following:
My dog (or cat, hamster, whatever) doesn’t like them.
My baby doesn’t like them.
They’re the wrong astrological sign - “Everyone knows Scorpios don’t get along with Aries!” Discriminating on the basis of a person’s birth date is just ludicrous.
People are fully entitled to not like other individuals for no better reason than ‘because I don’t like them’. It’s probably unfair, but it’s not written anywhere that everyone has to like everyone else. (Thankfully. )
But making decisions based on the opinion of *a baby or pet * who may simply dislike the person’s cologne or - particularly in the case of Rescue animals who’ve had a bad experience - their clothes, height or pitch of voice, is unfair and unreasonable.
(Animals also generally dislike people who look them directly in the eyes witout having developed a trust relationship, as they perceive it as a threat. Does this mean the person is inherently evil? Um, no, it means they don’t realize that the animal thinks they’re trying to dominate them.)
Couple of things, here. First, unless you caught something I missed, nobody in this thread was suggesting that women were equipped with special personality testers, more accurate gut feelings, or a sharper ‘sixth sense’ than men. All the talk about “trusting your gut” that had happened in this thread up to this point was non-gender-specific as far as I can tell, so this particularly nasty bit of sarcasm seems totally misplaced.
Second, I took Kalhoun’s “don’t open any doors” metaphorically not literally. Kalhoun him/herself can come along and clarify which of us is right in our interpretation, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that if someone is setting off your (gender-neutral) alarm bells, it might make sense not to give them access to details about your personal life.
Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear is an extended meditation on exactly the opposite point: many women (now I’m getting gender-specific, threemae) pay way too little attention to their “personality detectors.” If some guy seems to be trying to give them a hand or asking for their help with something and he sets off their internal alarms they’ll consciously override their fear in order not to seem unfriendly or rude. In many of these cases, no harm has resulted – the guy was not an actual threat. In some of the cases where the guy was an actual threat, these women have lived to regret their decision. And in some cases, they haven’t.
Wesley, you and a couple of other posters have made the point that sociopathic predators devote considerable energy and expertise to camouflaging their nature and the are actually able to fly under the radar of their intended victims. That’s certainly valid as far as it goes. But the fact is, that there are predators whose skill sets are not that highly developed. They can be avoided if people (here I’m back to people, not just women) give credence to their own internal warning systems.
That’s not basing it on gut…that’s basing it on outside voodoo symbolism. Two completely different things. Gut feelings are natural responses to unnatural stimuli.
The problem is that these women can’t tell who is a threat and who isn’t, as Bites When Provoked explained with child molesters. You can’t tell what goes on deep down inside a person’s mind solely by their superficial social skills. Maybe someone has shitty superficial social skills because they are evil, maybe they have them because they are introverted. If someone who is a nice person walks around with a really weird outfit and makes too much eye contact people will be afriad of him. But that doesn’t make him a threat.
I don’t know if sociopathic predators devote energy to pretending to be normal. I think they really are normal on a social level. I don’t believe that you can spot a serial killer or serial rapist by superficial social actions, I think those people really do have normal social skills. But you can’t tell what someone is like deep down inside based on those. There are tons of stories about individuals being arrested for some kind of a crime and people areound him say ‘he was always so nice, we had no idea’. There was a guy near Indianapolis who killed alot of gay men, and not even his wife had any idea that he was like that. There just is no way to tell by whether someone is creepy or not.
It’s not only women. I don’t know where anyone got that idea. The point is, you develop a gut by exposing yourself to situations (or by drinking too much beer). When something doesn’t read correctly, based on various physical or spoken queues, you get creeped out. People who don’t expose themselves to a variety of people won’t be able to pick up on as many queues as someone who does. Some of the ability to pick out creeps, however, is inborn. Nature’s way of telling you to back away slowly.
[quoteI don’t know if sociopathic predators devote energy to pretending to be normal. I think they really are normal on a social level. I don’t believe that you can spot a serial killer or serial rapist by superficial social actions, I think those people really do have normal social skills. But you can’t tell what someone is like deep down inside based on those. There are tons of stories about individuals being arrested for some kind of a crime and people areound him say ‘he was always so nice, we had no idea’. There was a guy near Indianapolis who killed alot of gay men, and not even his wife had any idea that he was like that. There just is no way to tell by whether someone is creepy or not.[/QUOTE]
Again with the violent criminal types. That’s not the only kind of creep there is (and certainly not the kind most people in this thread are referring to).
I’ve always found the ‘he was always so nice’ response highly suspect for two reasons. First, and most superficially, it almost seems like a cultural script – people saying what they’re expected to say, what everybody always says. They may even believe it when they say it, subconsiously refusing to recall the signs they saw that all was not right. Or they may never have known the person more than to nod to on the street, but enjoy the attention of the microphone and camera. Second, and especially in the case of the killer’s wife, it serves as a kind of self-protection. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose, psychologically speaking, if in media interviews she admits that she always thought her husband was strange, frightening and dangerous.
And I’m emphatically not trying to argue that anyone can infallibly serial killers or serial rapists by their social behavior. What I am saying is that human beings, as social animals with thousands of years of practice at and genetic rewards for picking up on subtle social cues that may indicate danger, are frequently able to intuit from those social cues that a specific individual may mean them harm. It’s not some miraculously accurate sixth sense, it can certainly be wrong. A genuinely harmless social misfit can suffer unwarranted isolation, and a socially skilled killer or rapist can go unremarked. But the benefits to the individual who pays attention to little things that seem off about the person who does mean him/her harm far outweigh the risks to that individual in also keeping at arms-length the harmless social misfit who doesn’t.
Kalhoun, all of your claims lie on the basis of the claim that you actually have an ability to detect dangerous behavior through creepiness. As many posters here have demonstrated through their own personal experience or through news events, it’s not at all clear that people with creepy behaviors are disproportionately violent. In a word: cite?
Can you point me to a study that ranks individuals on creepiness and the number of antisocial behaviors that they actually commit?
As to your second point where you conceed that there are a lot of creepy people that you don’t regard as threats, but you still think that withholding all social contact possible is the best course of action just because you won’t derive any pleasure from it. I’m sorry, but in a workplace, I find that attitude rather cruel. Would it kill you to eat lunch with your creepy coworkers occasionally? I have a fair number of coworkers that I dislike for any number of reasons, but it isn’t worth it or necessary to try to socially isolate them. Maybe you should just try to be nice occasionally, or is that advice something you decided to reject back in middle school and haven’t reconsidered yet?
Look at my posts and *read * them. I never said i could detect violent people through creepiness. In fact, my arguments repeatedly say that creepy doesn’t necessarily mean violent. Don’t attribute statements to me if I didn’t make them. And you might want to check the community college for a remedial reading course.
No. Never said I could. I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
READ MY POST, EINSTEIN. I said to be cordial. If you want to eat lunch with people you find creepy, be my guest. Jesus christ…what the fuck is wrong with you? I mean, aside from the ‘creepy’ thing…
Fair enough. however most people equate creepy with dangerous and equate not creepy with not dangerous. So sometimes people just assume that those who are creeped out by someone are also scared of them.
On another note, since this thread is in part about what makes someone creepy, being bothered by creepiness does seem to be mainly a female trait as I don’t know many men who get creeped out nearly as often or as easily as women. Not only that but women only seem to be creeped out by men, not by other women. So it seems to me at least that the vast majority of ‘creepiness’ is women being crepped out by men, not men feeling that way about other men or women feeling that way about other women. So there is probably some sexual connotation behind it but I don’t know what.
The problem with that is that the major threats are not setting off those alarms. Most of the time if someone molests your kids it will not be the weird looking guy who makes too much eye contact, it will be someone you trust enough to leave alone with your kids. If someone rapes you it won’t be the guy that says weird things all the time, it’ll be someone you trust enough to be alone with. So I think that worrying about who is creepy or not is actually counterproductive because it offers a false sense of security.
:dubious:
“Gee, this person upsets and disturbs me and makes me feel like I may be in danger! Think I’ll go hang out with him.”
I don’t find people actually “creepy” too often - I seem to be fairly good at figuring out when it’s just a lack of social skills. The last guy I was totally creeped out by… I found out later that he’d followed a friend of mine back to her dorm room when she was a freshman (he was 35 or so) and kept propositioning her sexually until she ran and hid.
Sometimes people seem creepy because they’re actually creeps.
Well, I for one have been creeped out by women. Not as often as men, but it happens (and for the record, I don’t get creeped out all that often). Some men can do the “leering” creeposity stare, which definitely has a sexual connotation. Even if they don’t act on it, feeling like they’re thinking about it is…creepy.
Thanks to these boards, I read up a little on sociopathy/psychopathy, and you really can’t define sociopaths as “normal.” They are not motivated the same way as normal people, but apparently, they can somewhat mimic normal, if it is in their interest to do so.
Very interesting read, that article. So, if Dr. Hare is correct, and 1% of our population are subclinical psychopaths, they definitely are living among us.
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