Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby Grimstone » Mon Oct 23, 2017 10:53 pm

Marcuse wrote:A guy engineering a situation where one person is isolated and feels like they have no choice but to agree to things because of a real or implied threat, is predatory. The difference is the intention of the person, and the methods they use to achieve what they want. Someone can be creepy out of incompetence or by accident, but predatory behaviour is deliberate and often calculating.


So, basically, the "implication" scene from It's Always Sunny:

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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby Lindvaettr » Tue Oct 24, 2017 2:35 am

Grimstone wrote:
Marcuse wrote:A guy engineering a situation where one person is isolated and feels like they have no choice but to agree to things because of a real or implied threat, is predatory. The difference is the intention of the person, and the methods they use to achieve what they want. Someone can be creepy out of incompetence or by accident, but predatory behaviour is deliberate and often calculating.


So, basically, the "implication" scene from It's Always Sunny


It's important to remember that implications are best used when on a boat. At other times, the prospective sexual predator should approach their intended target using a few simple steps, which will give you the keys to any woman's heart:

Demonstrate value
Engage physically
Nurture dependence
Neglect emotionally
Inspire hope
Separate completely
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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:11 am

DamianaRaven wrote:Are we in agreement that the vast majority of these sexual misunderstandings could be prevented with better sex education for teenagers?


What do you mean by "better sex education"? If we're talking about something that happens in schools, the problem there is that a classroom is not where people do most of their learning. I mean, I'd hazard a guess that every kid in America has been told by a teacher or other adult that bullying is wrong, and yet it still happens all the time. Why? Because that message is often going up against lived reality.

Picture this: a kid goes to class and hears from his teacher that bullying is wrong and not to be tolerated. Then that kid goes to lunch, and notices that the kids who pick on anyone weaker than them get approving laughs from the other kids, not horror and rejection. They go home and notice that when Dad gets angry and starts punching walls, Mom caves and gives him whatever he wants, and Dad receives no apparent consequences. They flip on the TV and see "lovable assholes" like Dr. House, Tony Stark, or Bill Maher being adored by millions for treating folks around them like garbage--not in spite of that behavior, but precisely because of it. Compared against all that evidence that bullying is socially acceptable as long as you pick the right targets, the teacher declaring that it's wrong is like a fart in a hurricane.

The same applies to any other stubborn social script. This time picture a kid hearing from his teacher that no means no, so if you make some kind of move on someone and they express disinterest you should respect that. This same kid has watched girls eventually fall for guys who just kept on asking and never gave up. They grew up watching Pokemon, where Misty secretly has a crush on Ash despite outwardly hating him, and later on they watch a more adult version of the same "woman says one thing and secretly feels another" pattern play out in movies like Goldfinger, or Say Anything, or Iron Man. They hear womenfolk talk about how sexy it is when a guy is persistent and "knows what he wants", and watch girls swoon over characters like Angel from Buffy or Edward from Twilight, both of whom win over the main characters through the sheer romantic power of stalking, even when they're pretty unambiguously told to fuck off at first.

The lesson they learn, over and over, is that what a woman says or does doesn't necessarily match what she actually wants or feels as far as sex and romance are concerned, and a guy has to be prepared to not take women at their word if he wants to get anywhere. Again, a teacher droning on for a class period about how "no means no" is not going to accomplish much if a conflicting lesson is constantly taught outside the classroom.
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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby DamianaRaven » Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:34 am

Why bother teaching the little fuckers anything if they're just not going to listen? Yes, there will be some kids who are going to do what they want no matter what they're told. We call these people "assholes" and they don't fall fully grown off of trees in some Nebraska orchard. At the very least, thoroughly explaining the nature of things to such fuckwads robs them of the excuse that they didn't know any better. "Sorry, Timmy but the class syllabus and attendance record indicate that you were present for EVERY single health class during Consent Week. You knew full well she was too drunk to know what was going on, which is why you took that opportunity (and no other) to fuck her."
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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby Kate » Tue Oct 24, 2017 7:42 am

I don't think Crimson is suggesting it's fruitless because they don't listen because they're little fuckers, but because it's incongruent with the real lessons they get everywhere else. If my teacher says Columbus was awesome and discovered America, what happens when I get more context outside of school? Or if they say everyone thought the earth was flat, or that America is the greatest country in the world, or that we are in a post-racial society? When your lessons in school conflict with what you learn outside of it, and one is playing out in front of you all the time and it's not what your teacher taught you, how effective is it to say "well you had sex ed, so you should know better."
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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby DamianaRaven » Tue Oct 24, 2017 8:03 am

I agree that lesson plans should involve more "real-world" practicality and less "this is what's what and any other way is wrong." It would take some talented teachers and brave parents to give it a try, but I really think kids aren't getting enough social conditioning in their lives these days. They're learning all this technology and information, but spending less and less time in each other's company. I'm very self-aware of my "kids these days" tone, but I'm not saying they're all a bunch of rotten little rapists and mindless little fuck-holes. I'm just saying that their lives are different than ours were in the previous generation. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean that we can't keep doing things "the way they've always been," especially when some of those ways were... frankly, rather shitty.
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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Oct 24, 2017 4:45 pm

DamianaRaven wrote:Why bother teaching the little fuckers anything if they're just not going to listen?


For that sweet public schoolteacher's salary, I assume.

Seriously though, kids listen more carefully than a lot of adults realize, the problem is they listen to experience moreso than lectures, especially when the latter contradict the former. For "better sex education" to work, it has to acknowledge the sort of experiences I mentioned and incorporate them into a larger, coherent philosophy that makes sense to kids who've had those experiences. For example, in the realm of "no means no", one could acknowledge that persistence in pursuing someone is often seen as attractive and "no" can easily mean "not yet" rather than "never". This opens up a more nuanced discussion about how to tell when a "no" is final, when to persist and when to back off, how to read body language cues, and so forth.

Kids probably will listen to something like that which addresses their real experience, but schools are unlikely to put any of that in their official curriculum because there's a very high risk of pissing off parents, especially if the subject is addressed ham-handedly as some teachers will inevitably do. If the teacher strays into effectively giving dating advice they'll get it from parents who are furious that the school is "teaching kids how to hook up". If they mess up explaining the bit about how persistence can be sexy they'll get it from parents who are furious that the school is "teaching kids that sexual harassment/assault is acceptable". The fact that such a discussion would be nuanced and complex makes it easy to fuck up, and the cost to the school of a fuckup in this area is unacceptably high. So instead we get the lame platitudes, which kids mostly tune out but the school is very unlikely to get in trouble for

Consequently, this sort of "real talk" about love and sex will generally need to come from someone with a more personal investment in the child, who has the time and ideally the wisdom to discuss the matter thoroughly and make sure the kid gets the right message from the discussion, and the freedom to say what needs to be said without focus-grouping their message into meaninglessness. This person could be a teacher the kid has an unusually close relationship with, but it could also be a parent or a close friend or an older sibling or a trusted aunt/uncle/grandparent/Fonz. Due to institutional factors, schools can't really fill this role in a kid's life adequately. If a kid has nobody in their life who can do this the school can try to patch the hole (ahem) with a Band-Aid, but that Band-Aid will inevitably be flimsy and prone to falling apart under stress.

Ultimately, it takes a village to raise a child. Schools can't fulfill that kind of responsibility all by themselves for all the kids they deal with; somebody in that kid's life has to step up and do what they can't.
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Re: Creepy Vs. Predatory: Where's the Line?

Postby reallifegirl » Fri Oct 27, 2017 4:17 pm

Marcuse wrote:What's the difference between creepy and predatory? I would say that someone who is "creepy" is someone who acts in ways that people dislike or find off-putting, someone who is "predatory" is someone who deliberately preys upon others, choosing to put other people in uncomfortable or compromising situations to extract consent or agreement to something.


I feel like this is one of those things that a lot of people don't get, because you can find yourself in situations where, no, you're not being physically overpowered, but you're alone with someone or in a situation that's uncomfortable to leave -- either because it'll make a scene or because of some other social contract reason that you can't just walk away.

For example, from living in a city where most people don't have cars: I know a lot of people who've gotten harassed by cab drivers. Once, when I was coming back from a party and was drunk, a cab driver (mid-drive) made me give him my phone number (I wrote a fake one) and then, when I got out, hugged me tight around the waist for a long while before he "let" me walk into my apartment building.

Other social contract abuses that tend to come up with harassment: customer-service workers getting harassed by customers, people riding public transit who'd have to delay their commute/ride if they got off the bus/train they're taking, neighbors harassing people who live nearby. All situations where, no, you're not being physically overpowered, but you still can't object without causing an issue or leave without their being consequences.
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