Also… do read the comments on that post, especially down to the point where a poster who claims to be “Creeper #1” shows up being all fumbling and self-defensive while still seeming to maybe be starting to get the point a little bit. To the degree that he’s learning anything at all, it seems to be because he’s being called out on his behavior in no uncertain terms. Without a wakeup call like this, he’d probably still be happily going along doing what he’s always done. Maybe he’ll go looking for some kind of training or practice scenarios now that he knows how badly he’s been messing things up, but without the motivating factor of harsh criticism, it seems unlikely that he would have ever bothered with such a thing, or even considered bothering with it. I would wager that most guys who provoke these kinds of responses in women either don’t know they’re doing it or don’t care, so it will usually take a lot more than just the availability of “How Not to Be a Creep” training classes to get them to change their ways.

Other women in the comments there also point out that, while it may be true that men are on average worse at social stuff, it’s *not* the case that most men are *so* bad at it that they are completely incapable of detecting when they’re pushing a woman’s boundaries, even if they don’t entirely understand what it is about their behavior that’s problematic. If men were, on average, really as inept as some excuses seem to suggest, we would never have been able to form the complex societies we have today, because they’d be unable to read social signals well enough to avoid having to fight each other to establish dominance every time they got on a crowded bus. A non-neurotypical woman notes in that thread: “As soon as we enter the territory of sex and romance, the same guys who are leagues beyond me in this business and would never cut me slack for, say, difficulty telling if someone is bored with what I’m saying, will start bemoaning how impossible this body language thing is, and how it is totally unfair to expect them to get it.”

It’s not that most men can’t tell when they’re doing something they shouldn’t (even my almost-stalker friend seemed to have a sort of hangdog realization that being so omnipresent was really not cool), it’s that they’re not socialized to treat women’s boundaries as inviolable. They think that pushing things a little in regard to sex and relationships is like going five miles per hour over the speed limit, and so they don’t see cornering women in elevators as a serious transgression. It’s only a little naughty in their minds, not seriously harmful, and so they’re pissed when a woman calls them out on it, just as they’d be angry if a cop gave them a ticket for a 5 mph speeding violation.

They don’t understand, because they generally don’t have to, that for the women on the other end of such microaggressions it’s a far different experience. Being called out in a very forceful way is how they learn to appreciate this fact. And the thing is, once they recognize how seriously others take such behavior, they generally do in fact know perfectly well how to avoid it, in the same way they (for the most part) know how to avoid pissing in the punch bowl. Or, at the very least, if they later transgress inadvertently, they know how to respond gracefully to being called out on it, just as they know that if a host at a party reminds you that they prefer for you to take off your shoes in their house, you apologize and take off your damn shoes instead of making a huge deal about how their rules are so complicated and you need practice.

I’ll grant that there are certainly some guys, particularly those on the autism spectrum, for whom practice really probably is the best prescription. And there are probably even a lot of guys who, while they’re well-intentioned, are so low in confidence or so poorly socialized that a certain amount of practice in a non-threatening environment wouldn’t hurt them either. But it still seems to me that the biggest problem isn’t so much that some guys fumble, it’s that behavior (fumbling or intentional) that has serious negative effects on women often isn’t called out as serious. Consequently, the guys who do it don’t have very strong incentives to correct it, and it becomes entrenched, and then everybody’s lives are worse.

Richard, I apologize for resurrecting a dead discussion, but I ran across this today, and I think it’s very relevant to what we were talking about and might give you a little bit more perspective on why I responded to this issue the way I did.

In particular, the response the blogger suggests for creeper #1 (cut off contact completely and explain to him and the rest of the friend group why you’re doing it) is very much like what I ended up having to do with the almost-stalkery friend I mentioned above. I literally sat down with him one day after a particularly provocative incident and said, “Look, I’m sorry, I really like being your friend, but this other stuff you’re doing has to stop, and no matter how much I ask you to stop it and you say you’ll try, you can’t seem to stop it as long as I let you hang around with me. So I don’t have any more choice at this point — I can’t let you hang around with me any more.” And then I had to back off and let the rest of our friend group pick up the pieces. After that, it so happened that I left school for a year, and when I came back, everything had settled down enough that we were able to be friends again.

That friend had a comparatively minor case of creeping — he didn’t engage in all the sexual innuendos and weird touching and other such stuff that a lot of guys do, he was just *always there*, whenever I turned around, whether I wanted him to be or not. It got to the level of him repeatedly showing up at my door in the mornings wanting to hang out while I was still sitting around in my pajamas, because he saw that I’d logged in to the school’s computer system. After that I set up an email reader to automatically check my email every eleven minutes (simulating a login), so that he couldn’t easily track my wakeup times any more, and I told him that I’d done it and why, but even this didn’t stop him from being oppressively over-present in other ways. I was the only woman in our group that he’d acted that way toward (he was looking for romance, not just sex, so he was a little more focused in his attentions), so he wasn’t a habitual creeper like the guys described in the post. Thus it was a hell of a lot easier to be charitable toward him, and his behavior was a lot easier to correct.

I was also fortunate in that our mutual friends were aware of what was going on and were understanding about why I did what I did. I didn’t have to be the “Bitch Who Doesn’t Like To Be Touched” in order to explain my actions in his case. (I *had* previously developed a “Totally Asexual” persona as a more general form of protection, but this incident happened when we were freshmen at a predominantly male and very nerdy school, an environment where it takes considerably more than a couple academic quarters for a woman to convincingly deter all the men who want to take a shot at her, and where unattached means “available” in a lot of guys’ minds no matter what the woman might say.) Also, because we were both freshmen (me being the more assertive personality of us two, even though he might have been a little bit physically stronger), there wasn’t any significant power imbalance between the two of us. So this particular sequence of events, unpleasant as it was for everyone involved, was comparatively minor by the standards of things one might classify as male social ineptitude towards women.

My point with all this exposition is that given my experiences it’s not entirely clear to me that training is necessarily always a very workable solution even with otherwise decent, well-intentioned guys, leaving the hideous misogynists out of the discussion entirely. My friend had multiple chances to try to moderate his approach to me and to learn how to back off. We had numerous careful discussions about what he was doing wrong and what he should do instead, and then I would forgive him and try to let him put the fruits of those discussions into practice, and he’d go right back to the same behavior patterns all over again. He never could manage to take these gentle lessons to heart, and the process of trying to let him learn caused a lot of misery for both of us. The lesson only really stuck when I finally took the drastic step of cutting him off completely. The problem was that he’d internalized our society’s stupid ideas about how romance works, and these were driving him at such a deep level that he was well beyond the reach of any mere friendly education, right up until the point where I was forced to do cut him off, which effectively constituted serious emotional violence. It was only then that the things I had been trying to convey more gently finally began to overwhelm all the nonsense that he’d imbibed with his mother’s milk.

So even with the possibility of training, and even with the most gentle and decent guys (and he *really* is a very good person — it still makes me ridiculously happy to know that he’s got such a good partner now), I still think that the most important thing is just to make it very clear that certain behavior patterns are flat-out unacceptable, and to enforce social consequences on those who engage in such behaviors. No matter how well-meaning they may be and no matter how many chances they’re offered to learn better ways to do things, some guys just can’t help themselves, right up until they’re hit with a really serious social shock that forces them to re-evaluate. “Social consequences” doesn’t necessarily have to mean complete ostracism and devastating vilification of the person, but it *should* at minimum include uniform condemnation of the behavior in question, even if it’s just at the “whoa, dude, not cool” level, and even if some people who aren’t the victims still want to reach out to the perpetrator in other ways. There’s a difference between education and handholding, and the reality is that sometimes education necessarily involves getting your views and actions slapped down hard, if they’re genuinely beyond the pale. If we respond too gently to major transgressions, perpetrators may not learn to appreciate the seriousness of their actions and therefore may not make an appropriate level of effort to correct their behavior. Sometimes it really is necessary to bring the hammer down, even when one would rather not.

A perpetrator’s response to such chastisement is how one measures their character — in my friend’s case, he accepted my verdict and did not continue to try to hang around with me, even though he was pretty broken up about it. (He was sufficiently distressed that I felt the need to ask our other friends to make sure that he didn’t hurt himself, but he did stay away as asked.) In the case of the more recent MRAsplosion, the response of some men to a relatively mild general reprimand (“Hey guys, don’t do that.”) has been to escalate to major harassment and threats. But despite its potentially devastating impact, socially stigmatizing certain behaviors is probably the most important tool in our toolbox, and I don’t think any training program is going to completely negate the need for it, even with people who actually are, for the most part, nice guys.

Okay, then. I think we agree after all, at least mostly, and any remaining minor points of disagreement probably aren’t worth picking apart. Sorry it took so long to work out exactly what the difficulty was.

You’re right. That’s silly.

It conflates two completely unrelated problems: ineptitude and misogyny. “Elevator guy” was inept. The people who reacted negatively to being told about him were misogynists. Not the same people.

Richard, I’m going to leave a lot of things unaddressed, because I think you’re right that we’ve been talking at cross-purposes. In order to straighten this out, I’d like to remind you that my entry point into this particular branch of the Elevatorgate discussion was an objection to NHBU’s original comment here, a comment which included the following:

I’ll surmise that every Elevator Guy who watched it felt their faces flush hot with painful memories of previous embarrassments at the hands of women. And that’s where all the ridiculous anger and misogynistic screaming stemmed (still stems?) from, in my opinion.

“You [insert plural gender epithet here] keep telling us we’re doing it wrong!“, they screamed immaturely. “What the hell do you WANT from us???

Until artificially intelligent female androids can be tasked with the thankless job, how can we do a better job training Elevator-type Guys to respect women and approach them in ways they find less threatening?

As far as I can tell, the three of us agree that the internet screaming fit that arose after Rebecca said, “Hey guys, don’t do that,” has involved a massive amount of misogyny (even by your narrow definition above). In this comment of his, NHBU seemed to me to be proposing “training” these guys as a way to avoid such explosions of misogyny. My objection to this proposal is that if somebody’s response to being rejected by a woman (or even many women) is interminable misogynist internet harassment, then his attitude toward women is a far bigger part of his problem than any failure of social eptness.

I’ve long been an advocate of being gentle toward the merely inept and helping them understand how to do it right. As a nerd who’s spent most of my life hanging around with primarily male nerds, I have friends whom I’ve had to help through that stage of ineptness, one of whom, in trying to convince me to date him, did stuff that, if I hadn’t known him sufficiently well and been sufficiently fond of him at the time he did it, would easily have been interpretable as verging on stalking. Fortunately he got past that stage and we were able to be friends again, and now he’s married to a wonderful woman who is a far better match for him than I could ever have been.

But the misogynist harassers, and even the casual objectifiers and sociopaths and “alpha” bullies, are another story entirely, and we’re not going to reduce that kind of behavior just by training the so-called beta and gamma men to interact better with women. My “beta” and “gamma” male friends would never have pulled the kind of shit that the ERVites and their like get up to, and while some kind of formalized training might well have been beneficial for my friends, I am really not convinced that the availability of such training would do much to drain the sewer that Rebecca inadvertently uncovered. For that, I really do think that the only sure remedy is to make it clear that misogyny is just simply not acceptable any more in our society. This means that we do actually want to marginalize the people who engage in it, rather than encouraging them in their delusion that they deserve some kind of kid gloves accommodations for the disability of being born male.

I think the failure to carefully distinguish between these two groups in NHBU’s original proposal may be part of the reason we’ve been talking past each other. Training socially inept but otherwise decent guys is nice, and quite possibly even important as part of an overall feminist agenda, but I don’t think it really addresses the particular problem that Elevatorgate brought to light, and proposing it as a solution to that problem has some offensive implications on a number of levels, as I’ve mentioned previously. So this context is what I’ve been responding to, but perhaps you were not intending to take this context on board in your own comments. Does the distinction I’m drawing make sense to you, and does this clarify for you where I’m coming from on this?

Oh, indeed. But we weren’t discussing the emotional damage done to women by other women. We were discussing the extent to which men get poorly socialized by the same toxic environment during puberty and adolescence.

And there it’s not the trope that “naive girls like douchebag alpha males” I am referring to, but the fact that girls in those environments often reinforce the marginalization of the boys targeted by the alphas and their chosen betas. It’s not simply a matter of hanging with the bad boys (who are often not tagged as “bad boys” by the adults, but treated with favoritism by them, thus reinforcing the toxic social dynamic), but of joining them in devaluing them, verbally and in every social interaction and selection of shared activities.

In other words, girls all too often simply buy the “undesirable nerds” narrative that is created by the alpha males, and thus avoid, mock, and mistreat them. There are exceptions, and I have seen some school environments in the last ten years that have been really changing for the better in this respect, but I don’t know if that’s a national trend (although if it is, the shift in social status in favor of the geek that has occurred over the last twenty years may have something to do with that).

First of all, the shooter you refer to is an outlier and thus cannot be used as a stereotype even for your average misogynist. He was a massively dysfunctional lunatic. Secondly, misogynists by and large get sex when they feel entitled to it, often enough. They are, again, usually the most skilled at doing that. They are therefore not the awkward poorly socialized nerds I’m talking about. As I said, misogynists tend in fact to be very well socialized, and very good at socially interacting with women. Those that aren’t are a relative rarity, and very rare relative to men who are not misogynists at all but merely awkward poorly socialized nerds.

Indeed, such radical behaviors (which were not the subject of discussion until now; another example of your missing the point) are the product of poor impulse control, which is a characteristic of psychopathy and when found in non-psychopaths is a product of toxic developmental environments in which boys are not taught impulse control–and the boys who are not taught that, are the alphas and high-ranking betas, not the marginalized gamma males.

These are therefore two different things: being inept with women, and being abusive of women. They are caused by different things, and disproportionately affect entirely different classes of men. Being abusive of women more frequently typifies alphas and high betas, who by virtue of their status are not usually inept with women but very good manipulators of them. Whereas men who are inept with women are so because they were marginalized as gammas, an experience that far more frequently teaches them impulse control (from excessive experience with social punishment).

Misogynists tend to come from the former group, not the latter.

Anne C. Hanna:

mis-o-gyny = the hatred, dislike, or disdain of women.

Insofar as someone thinks that, that would be (mild) sexism, as in assuming without valid basis that a person’s rights and privileges differ according to gender. That’s not the same thing as misogyny.

Obviously, it’s a fallacy to conclude from “men tend on average to be weaker in social skills” that “men don’t have to be socially skilled,” just as it would be a fallacy to conclude from “women tend on average to be weaker in upper body strength” that “women don’t have to lift things.”

I am arguing, in fact, the opposite: that men need to develop their social skills, and could use help doing it, precisely because they do need to be socially skilled.

Which I’m not defending. This may be where you are talking past everyone. You are mistaking what I actually said, for having said this. I didn’t.

I never said women were obliged to do this. I said it needs to be done. By everyone. The responsibility is on humanity.

You will note that I said the opposite: women should punish bad behavior proportionately, regardless. Not tolerate it. Again, this looks like an instance where you are reading past what I actually said, and erroneously concluding I said something else.

I quite concur. Nevertheless, there is a huge gender disparity in how remarks and behavior are interpreted, based on the dynamic, of whether it’s a man talking to a woman or a man talking to a man. That remains a fact, in every context there is. Thus, an etiquette is needed to control for that disparity and manage it.

And again, as I said in my last comment, I am uninterested in and not speaking about the outlier example of NHBU, yet you continue to conflate us and what we separately said. Thus, for example…

Those men by and large aren’t having the problem I am talking about. As I tried very carefully to explain, most men like this are consummately skilled in social interaction. You are confusing the rare few men like this who don’t know what they are doing (in reality, most such men will have perfected their game well before high school graduation), with the vastly greater number of men who are not like this yet still come across badly because they don’t know how they come across at all.

Also, I want to mention that the “women only like bad boys/bullies” trope is another one of those distortions that’s continually used by so-called “nice guys” as an excuse to avoid reflecting on how their own attitudes and actions might be driving women away. It’s true that confidence is often attractive, that bad boys and bullies often convincingly simulate confidence, and that gentle, shy guys often get less attention than their good qualities might merit because of this. But this is something that women tend to suffer from too — those of us who are less well-matched to the conventional model of attractiveness or are less outgoing or less fashionably dressed are often dismissed as unworthy of attention, even by the same “nice guys” who spend all their time being miserable and angry because the pretty-but-shallow prom queen won’t give them the time of day. And then of course even the pretty prom queens have to contend with having their intelligence and emotional depth ignored and downplayed *because* they’re pretty, and with disproportionately being targets of male resentment over rejections by other women, or over perfectly warranted rejections by themselves.

Pathological male responses to not being able to get sex when they feel entitled to it take the form of stalkers and abusive partners and guys who shoot up fitness centers (and guys who engage in obsessive and interminable online harassment campaigns against female bloggers who have the temerity to say “guys, don’t do that”). These responses are not proportionate in any way to the “crime” that women (as an amorphous collective entity) have committed in denying these men access to partnered sex. The fact that some men engage in such disproportionate responses cannot reasonably be blamed on their limited “practice” in interacting with women (but the fact that women reject them might well be due to them giving off subtle signals that they’re this type of entitled creep). Without the underlying and socially-reinforced notion that women exist for the use of men, these men would be unhappy, but they wouldn’t turn into raging misogynists. So I still don’t think this “practice” notion really has very much explanatory power in regard to the current clusterfuck.

Richard, I don’t think we agree on our definitions of misogyny. Part of the problem in our society is that women are explicitly burdened with this notion that we have to be the socially ept ones, and that men don’t have to be. We are pushed into always making allowances for men who trample all over us, because of course the poor dears can’t be expected to do any social/emotional work themselves — they’re just not capable of it, and it’s women’s work so it’s beneath them anyway. It’s true that this isn’t the best thing for men either, because they get trained to be terrible at it, and then they can’t do it when they need to (thus the studies you point to showing that men are indeed worse at social stuff), but suggesting that women are obligated to go out of our way to explicitly construct a set of rules of etiquette for men to abide by, or that women should be tolerant of men “practicing” on us is just another way of once more placing the burden of social eptness squarely on our shoulders. It may be that this is unavoidable if progress is to be made, and there may not be one single misogynist person we can point to to blame this all on, but it’s certainly part of our society’s overall misogyny. So if NHBU feels that he needs some extra help, he ought to be asking in a way that respects the extra burden he’s imposing on the women he asks it of, rather than demanding it as his right.

I’ve pointed out before that there are plenty of social environments in which a man can engage with a woman “cold” without there being dating pressure. Cooking classes, book discussion clubs, atheist meetups, and the like all require people to talk to each other about a common interest (so any guy who’s there participating *has* to talk to the women and vice versa) and don’t set up any other expectations. In addition, you’re interacting in a group setting rather than one-on-one, so there’s less direct pressure on the other people you talk to. So if somebody just needs to learn how to interact “normally” with people of a different sex (or a different race or physical ability level or whatever), these kind of environments are a great place to go.

Of course, if a man’s only goal in going to a cooking club is to figure out how to get women to date him (and maybe even to try to pick up some of the women there) that’s going to come through to the women. You say that women tend to assume that a man who approaches them cold is looking for sex, but this whole discussion here involving NHBU has been about how to make things easier on men looking for sex. And the point I’m trying to make here is that if you do *exactly the thing that women are wary of you doing* (being interested in them only as sex partners), then the problem you’re having in getting women to respond positively is more about your attitude towards women (that women are primarily sex partners, not friends) than it is about your need to practice your “game”. Not recognizing this *is* a pathological attitude, and the men who hold to it are indeed being part of the problem, even if they don’t intend to. It’s similar to the careful distinction Crommunist makes between “being a racist” and “doing/saying something racist”. (And, yes, racism does harm white people too, but not to anything like the same degree to which it harms everyone else.) These men may not be “misogynists”, but they’re doing something misogynist, and the onus is on them to stop it, not on the rest of us to be patient with them until they figure it out. The problem really is their attitudes, not just their level of practice. And the way to correct it is for them to adopt an attitude of greater humility and respect towards the women they are hoping will teach them how to do things better.

Anne C. Hanna:

NHBU aside (he’s a special case, IMO, and thus not a relevant stereotype to project on men generally), I agree with you but for two important qualifications:

[Re: the idea that] such social etiquette is just far more difficult for men than it is for women, so we should see it as normal and acceptable for men to need special training at not completely creeping women out.

It actually is true (scientifically proven, in fact) that men are typically more inept at social cues and interaction than women. That’s not quite the same thing as “social etiquette,” which is just a set of fixed behavioral rules. Being inept at social cues and interaction is, in fact, more important, and more precisely the problem.

And this is especially true for men (and there are a lot of them) who get poorly socialized precisely because of dysfunctional notions of masculinity affecting our youth culture, in which “manly boys,” i.e. bullies, use violence and intimidation and more subtle forms of social punishment to marginalize boys who do not conform to their ideals, resulting in those boys not getting socialization practice, whereas the bullies then get tons of practice figuring out how to manipulate women (a situation that would be easily solved by all high school girls only ever hanging out with the marginalized boys and not the bullies, but alas, high school girls are as stupid as high school boys and thus actually participate in reinforcing their marginalization, a behavior that is completely contrary to the interests of women everywhere, yet they do it anyway).

The premise is therefore correct. The question then is, does the conclusion follow. And that depends on what exactly you take the conclusion to be.

If you are asking whether the conclusion that follows is “women should let men be creepy because they need practice learning what’s creepy,” then the answer is self-evidently no, since the whole point of learning in this scenario is learning what is creepy, which actually necessitates women (and their male colleagues) punishing creepy behavior. Otherwise you aren’t going to learn it’s unacceptable, or how unacceptable it is–and the latter is why social punishment should always be proportionate and not disproportionate (mildly creepy warrants only mild social punishment, like a plain statement of disapproval).

However, I myself take the correct conclusion to be that many men (disproportionately by far with respect to women) need help assimilating into social environments, because they weren’t properly socialized to begin with (thanks, for one thing, to the toxic and dysfunctional environments in American high schools). That help will consist of instruction (talking to a variety of women about this and listening to what they say), but also practice (at flirting, dancing, striking up conversations, and so on). However, what they need in order to benefit from both with the least collateral harm to others is a basic system of etiquette, a simple set of “act like this” rules that will let them enter into conversations (with anyone, women or men) and seem polite and interesting (and interested) without seeming creepy (which they often will not know, i.e. they do not know what “seems” creepy). Really, as with all social skills, the best way to do this is for inexperienced men to apprentice themselves to experienced men and watch what they do and say, and ease into trying it themselves with the experienced man present as a social buffer.

The major gender disparity is that all women assume that a man who approaches them cold is (or is probably) looking for sex, and therefore even if he isn’t, he is at an extreme disadvantage with respect to how his words and actions will be perceived. They will appear radically different in that context, even when the exact same words and actions would not look that way at all when approaching a man. And without feedback, you have absolutely no way of knowing what your words and actions look like to someone else. And without a lot of socialization, you will have very little feedback to go on. And a lot of men (disproportionately by far with respect to women) experience very little socialization with women until well after puberty.

This is all real. The only question is what to do about it.

It probably is far more common right now for men rather than for women to learn the particular types of attitudes that tend to bias them towards acting creepy, but common or not, it’s something we should be treating as pathological, because it’s part of the overall misogyny in our society.

I disagree with this equation. The problem we’re talking about here is not “the overall misogyny in our society.” To the contrary, misogynists are the most socialized and successful at manipulating women. Those are the very bullies that win access to women in high schools (which is why their misogyny usually only becomes apparent in two contexts: the internet, where they can be honest because they are anonymous; and after months or years of dating, a woman finally realizes she’s being played by a very skillful asshole…if she’s lucky).

So the problem here is not the misogynists (that is a problem, but it’s a different problem), the problem is the poor and negligent way our society socializes many of its men. Most “creepy” behaviors are not born of misogyny, but the inability to read or know how something is or will come across. There is a subset of creepy behaviors that arise from those fringe few sexists or misogynists who somehow ended up both sexists or misogynists and socially inept (again, that is actually very much not the norm: sexists and misogynists actually typically are the least socially inept–they just tend to be the most socially dishonest in face-to-face interaction). But there is a much greater problem (in sheer numbers) with poorly socialized men who don’t know what to do or how it comes across when they try (who, in contradistinction to sexists and misogynists, tend in fact to be the nicest and most honest, but just don’t know how to communicate it).

The solution I suggest, is what I discussed above (apart, that is, from changing the culture of our high schools: we need a simple standard of basic etiquette that permits safe practice for all involved, followed by a lot of practice, preferably while apprenticed to more skilled persons). But there needs to be some solution. Because those men are not pathological. To the contrary, they are the victims of the pathology of our society.