Everyday Ignorance

(I don’t think this needs a trigger warning, but I mention unwanted advances and rape culture in passing in this post.)

I read this article with my friend Jeaux last week and he was just as disgusted as I was:

The Case of the Creepy Dudes: Captain Awkward deals with letters about “Creepy Dudes” in two people’s social group and how rape culture and male privilege is hampering these ladies’ ability to address hugely problematic behavior that’s being tolerated and enabled among their friends.

The follow-up to it is actually really wonderful too:

The C-Word: Further explaining to all the offended people why their fee-fees getting hurt over being called creepy and all their blaming it on Asperger’s and whatnot really needs to be addressed, and in what context.

Let me just say I LOVE what it says about the Asperger’s issue—how some people are trying to say that so-called “creepy dudes” “just have Asperger’s” and how it’s ableist to expect them to not be creepy. I SO agree that what’s ableist is to assume they can’t help it and don’t deserve to be talked to like people about whatever they’re doing wrong just because some of them have issues with social cues.

I think as a society most of us (allistic people) are used to others reading our expressions and cues, and we perceive people as creepy if they continue to act in ways we’re “communicating” that we hate. We just have to learn to SAY it with those particular people who don’t/can’t read us, and the author of this piece is right that if an autism-spectrum element is involved in this behavior, the person will likely respond very well to explicitly worded requests for behavior modification.

Oh, and I really like that the author of this article verbalized something I’ve been saying about the whole “nice guy” and “friend zone” thing for a long time: that attraction isn’t “fair.”

I’ve mostly been saying this in the context of asexuality discussion, while explaining that people who have a crush on me think they have to “do something” to change how I feel about them and the fact that they won’t stop trying really annoys me sometimes. What I hear from some guys is that if girls go with a guy perceived to be an asshole, those girls are horrible people because they didn’t “try” dating them even though they’re so nice. And they really perceive this to be a case of “unfair” treatment—which communicates that they obviously *deserved* the kind of attention they want, and that the girl is reneging on a perceived contract of sorts if she does not reward the man for his niceness with sex/romance.

Some people have a really hard time understanding that whether someone is attracted to them IS in fact the deciding factor in whether they “deserve” that attention (because it generally needs to be mutual in ways all parties are comfortable with). That they don’t get to decide a woman is a bitch or that she is reinforcing a social dynamic which Must Be Stopped because all these really nice guys aren’t getting laid enough. Honestly, if you think you deserve sex from someone who doesn’t want to give you sex, that’s not very nice.

John Scalzi has good advice for not being a creeper, too.