Althouse: "Are creeps, and their defining quality—creepiness—to our age what anxiety was to postwar life?"

July 11, 2015

"Are creeps, and their defining quality—creepiness—to our age what anxiety was to postwar life?"

"The proposition is embarrassing, but, then, so is everything the pruney fingers of creepiness touch. Half a century ago, there were squares and libertines, stalwarts and histrionics, private lives and public personalities. Today, in our self-scrutinizing, liberated time, these categories have got scrambled, and distinguishing between a charmingly revealing Instagram post and a bomb of oversharing requires daunting feats of judgment. Looming behind many missteps is the threat of creepiness: a fear that, out of all the free paths open to the modern social actor, you have picked the one that is invasive, obviously needy, and perverse...."

From "The Age of Creepiness" (in The New Yorker).

38 comments:

David said...: Is John Travolta creepy as a disco predator in “Saturday Night Fever”? Hard to say. Is he creepy as a weathered, black-clad gentleman who leers at women while fondling their chins? Yes, very much, and now forever more. What changed?

He got a lot older. That's a big part of it.; 7/11/15, 12:08 PM
Mountain Maven said...: It's the world you wanted and created, progressives. Bad is good and good is bad. Now play stupid, scratch your heads and pretend that you don't understand what happened. Then wonder why your kids do drugs, just like you did, only the drugs now are much more destructive.; 7/11/15, 12:27 PM
n.n said...: Of bellies, sluts, and closets. Rebels with a cause. It's too bad that they cannot reconcile the outcomes based on a consistent set of principles.; 7/11/15, 1:50 PM
Sam L. said...: They refuse to know.; 7/11/15, 2:00 PM
Beldar said...: Who would want to follow that link? Sheesh.; 7/11/15, 2:28 PM
Sebastian said...: Phony, mistuned to social constraints, yet "peculiarly" attractive: they couldn't be talking about our Creep-in-Chief, could they?

Chicks dig it, hence it's part of the Prog PUA MO, the smooth, all-BS-all-the-time, "pragmatic" promise of "hope and change."; 7/11/15, 2:58 PM
Alex said...: MGTOW - look it up.; 7/11/15, 4:23 PM
Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...: Today, in our self-scrutinizing, liberated time...

What "liberated time"? Our National Government forces us to buy products many of us do not want. The Mainstream Media unleashes co-ordinated career destroying attacks on persons whom they judge to have offended some third party.

Creepy? I'll tell you what is creepy. Navel-gazing meterosexual writers for the "New Yorker." THAT'S CREEPY!

FTS. Hammond is going out to the back lot with his chain saw and tractor to clear some more land.; 7/11/15, 4:31 PM
n.n said...: A selective-child or indiscriminate killing policy is creepy. Some of the games boys and girls play in the course of establishing families are creepy. Modern families tend to be both creepy and dysfunctional. Inferring character, responsibility, causality, etc. is creepy. Progressive morality is creepy and literally creeping.; 7/11/15, 4:52 PM
Anonymous said...: Anybody remember Sigmund Freud?

His concept of neurosis, of being "fucked up" for good reasons you don't understand, especially disturbing events repressed since childhood?

All out the window. Now it's what-ev, and that's supposed to be a good thing.

So now it's "let it all hang out" --- including the penises of flashers in parks .

Including teachers bedding their 14-year-old students (mostly males, by females).

"O Brave New World, that has such people in't."; 7/11/15, 4:55 PM
chuck said...: The New Yorker is old and creaky and the article is bloated with inflated words. It is a fart waiting to happen.; 7/11/15, 5:05 PM
The Godfather said...: OK, so some one who's a prof at the "worst college in America" (says the Guardian) is arguing that current concern about "creepiness" is equivalent to the "anxiety" of an earlier generation? I was born in 1943. By the time I was 6, the Soviets had tested their first atom bomb. I can tell you that "anxiety" about getting vaporized is a pretty potent concern, compared to (say) whether some older guy holding the chin of some young woman is "creepy". I grew up in a world that went from virgin brides to abortion on demand. From gay-bashers to bashing bakers who wouldn't do wedding cakes with two Johns or two Janes. I grew up when it was polite to refer to someone as "colored" and now live in an era when members of that race sell millions of records based on their use of the word nigg*h.

I'm a pretty laid-back guy. I didn't have lots of nightmares about nuclear annihilation pre-Reagan. I thought Charles Manson's plan to start a race war was more pathetic than scary, but the murders he caused, like the jerk in SC, were chilling. If they ever let him (I mean Manson, but either one actually)out of jail, I'd buy the ammo for whoever wants to give him a graduation party.

But we really did have serious things to be anxious about in my day.

And you know what? WE STILL DO. "Creepiness" is so far down the scale it ought to disappear.; 7/11/15, 5:36 PM
JCC said...: Lena Dunham...again.; 7/11/15, 5:36 PM
Laslo Spatula said...: The concept of 'creepiness" is sexist.

Young men, college men, middle-aged-men, older men: all to be condemned for finding nubile young women attractive.

What is a 'creepy' woman?

Society won't even tar a child-molesting female teacher with the word 'creepy": there is understanding to be had.

I find this Society creepy.

Even while wearing my pants.

I am Laslo.; 7/11/15, 7:24 PM
Matt Sablan said...: I see people acting creepy all the time on the Metro. Most of them do not know they are being creepy, and I bet, most of them are not TRYING to be creepy.; 7/11/15, 7:43 PM
rhhardin said...: Committee to reelect the President.; 7/11/15, 7:56 PM
Quaestor said...: Too many of those wingeing about "creepiness" ought to take a long unblinking stare at themselves.; 7/11/15, 8:41 PM
Phil 314 said...: "an assistant professor at Shimer College"

So you're quoting an article that cites as its key source a book written by an assistant professor at the worst college in America?; 7/11/15, 8:55 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: The point, made but yet not too, is denying everything but that which propels you upward and onward in New York can't last with 18 Trillion "Dollar" debts and climbing deficits.

All of you are all Keynesian all the way down: In the long run we're all dead.

SO fuck it.; 7/11/15, 9:04 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: "what anxiety was" is perhaps the most brilliant of wishcasting effectively (if Althouse be considered effective which is my stance) we can all learn from.

What Anxiety WAS.

Brilliantly, spectacularly glowering with genius never-ending and unbounded.

In a mere 0 years this "what anxiety was" construction will meta....; 7/11/15, 9:16 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=glowering&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

glow·er
ˈɡlouər/
verb
gerund or present participle: glowering
have an angry or sullen look on one's face; scowl.
"she glowered at him suspiciously"
synonyms: scowl, glare, look daggers, frown, lower, give someone a black look; informalgive someone a dirty look
"she glowered at him"

"give someone a black look"

https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=glowering&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8; 7/11/15, 9:27 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: glow·er
ˈɡlouər/
verb
gerund or present participle: glowering
have an angry or sullen look on one's face; scowl.
"she glowered at him suspiciously"
synonyms: scowl, glare, look daggers, frown, lower, give someone a black look; informalgive someone a dirty look
"she glowered at him"

What in the God damned Hell is going on around here, Google. ?.; 7/11/15, 9:29 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: "give someone a black look"
These little Google shits think that somewhere, sometime some little asshole thought saying, OR COINING FOR FUCKSAKE, "give someone a black look" is cool therefore they ain't racist.

The most racist of all believe, like Obama, they cannot possible be racist.

Baked in the cake Others are Racist; Obama is pure, pure hereby intended to mean "better than racists which is everyone but me."

Obama even has white "friends" to fortify the facade.; 7/11/15, 9:35 PM
furious_a said...: Forty years ago Peppy le Pew was a persistent, lovestruck skunk with an uncanny resemblance to Maurice Chevalier. Today's he's a stalker with,a restraining order stapled ro his chest.; 7/11/15, 9:56 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: This is a link lotsa folks just plain don't understand.; 7/11/15, 10:00 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: This is a link many will find upsetting, because they care for nothing but here and now hence don't read nor understand more than TMZ makes money so you ain't all that and that all that matter.

Just kidding, nobody gives no fucks no more.

My experience? The great (albeit having to exclude the prominent racists as Leftist always have been and always will be by definition and not like the definition of marriage 'neither) goodness of Wisconsinites is enough for more than figurative six-digit-miles-driven caring.

Hah.

Amazing people of greatness.; 7/11/15, 10:13 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: "I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes."

Christian Martin Luther King Junior.; 7/11/15, 10:19 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: "These are the hard, brutal facts of the case."

MLK

The context you should know but don't.

I'll tell you.

Whites bad there then, because money.

Whites bad here now, because money.

This is a link back to the South here and now.; 7/11/15, 10:25 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: I think that most creeps find jobs as department store santas, or as television sportscasters in the Twin Cites between 1973 and 1975.; 7/11/15, 10:32 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: Guildofcannonballs wrote:
"Brilliantly, spectacularly glowering with genius never-ending and unbounded."
Sometimes I have a hard time understanding your comments, Guildofcannonballs. Genius? Are you sure you didn't mean penis?; 7/11/15, 10:38 PM
Saint Croix said...: "Are creeps, and their defining quality—creepiness—to our age what anxiety was to postwar life?"

I think this is exactly backwards. What defines our age is not "the creep," but rather a sort of sexual panic. Either our campuses are overrun with monsters, or (far more likely) we are seeing a feminism that is demonizing innocent men. Is Clarence Thomas a "creep" because he made a joke about a pubic hair thirty years ago?

We live in an age where any unwanted advance is defined as a monstrous act. And, simultaneously, an age where we kill any unwanted baby (after first defining the baby with the monster-sounding term "fetus").; 7/11/15, 10:39 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: Look; you need me to do this as much as I need to do it:

This is a link to "deal" within the realm of dead.; 7/11/15, 11:24 PM
Guildofcannonballs said...: Derp derp "creeps" derp.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ginger-fly-teenager-dream-holiday-6045878

I wonder if those conversations about gingers at UM Law meant anything?

They didn't directly line pockets, so how could they have meaning in 2015?; 7/11/15, 11:52 PM
Laslo Spatula said...: Scarlett Johansson and I had just come back to our hotel room in a small rustic town in Vermont when she went into the bathroom; a few moments later, I heard her exclaim an expletive, so I went to see what was the matter.

"Fuckers!" she said, pointing to the underside of the toilet seat, where a squiggle of Magic Marker was scrawled.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Toilet seat lickers," she said, shaking her head. "They're big in Hollywood, but now they are showing up everywhere..."

"Toilet seat lickers?"

"Yeah," she said, biting her lip in a pouty way that I found sexy but realized it was not intended to be sexy at this moment.

"Homes, restaurants, Starbucks, you name it: they go into the the bathroom and lick the toilet seats. Like, lick-lick the toilet seat."

"I don't get it."

"What's to get? They're creeps. Then they sign their tag under the seat to show that they have been there."

"You gotta be kidding me."

"No, no: one actually broke into Taylor Swift's home and licked and tagged every toilet in her house. She was bed-ridden for days."

"I never heard of this before."

"Yeah. It started in Hollywood -- everyone just figured it was Mexicans, but now it is everywhere."

"I'll call for house-keeping..."

"Don't you see that it's more than something some bleach and Lysol can fix? Don't you see the utter violation that was involved?"

"I'll have them bring a new toilet seat..."

"It's like I've been raped."

"That seems a little strong..."

"OK, OK: it's like the bathroom has been raped. I'm not going in there. I mean if they can do THAT, what the hell else did they do? I'm throwing away my toothbrush."

"That's probably not a bad idea..."

"You should hear the rumors. Some people say the toilet seat lickers rub their naked assholes all over the bathroom doorknobs. Maybe even the faucet handles..."

"Madness," I say. "I'll call the front desk and get us another room."

"I want to be far away from this place."

"I'll get us a room in another hotel."

"Thank you, Laslo."

"Does this mean...?"

"I'm not even THINKING about sex tonight."

"Got it."

I am Laslo.; 7/12/15, 12:42 AM
Quaestor said...: Forty years ago Peppy le Pew was a persistent, lovestruck skunk with an uncanny resemblance to Maurice Chevalier.

You must mean Charles Boyer. Pépé le Pew = Pépé le Moko; 7/12/15, 2:04 AM
rcommal said...: No one has to read any sort of magazine to be told, to learn, to know that we are in the age of creepy on steroids.

I despise that notion.

More important, I walked away on account it.; 7/12/15, 2:41 AM
rcommal said...: This is my first statement.:

Althouse and all of its offshoots are creepy.; 7/12/15, 2:48 AM
Char Char Binks, Esq. said...: "Creepy" has pretty much been the go-to insult for the past ten years by adolescents/young adults, and now the not-so-young. About the only uncontested definition of "creep" is any male more than three years older than the person calling him a creep.; 7/12/15, 5:20 PM