Essay About Creep

678 Words2 Pages

Creepy
If you’ve been single in high school or college, you know that there’s a word that can potentially devastate your dating prospects: one judgment that can come down like the Great Wall of China between you and the person of interest. It’s a word so disheartening, if you see it applied to someone who you don’t even know, your first instinct is pity. In television, it’s usually the line that comes after the girl at the bar rejects the guy: “that guy was kind of creepy.” Being judged as creepy is a terrifying prospect, largely because it’s so hard to qualify what constitutes “creepiness”. We all know creeps exist, and some people definitely make you think that they are ones. But usually creeps have no idea that they're creeps, don't understand why they're creeps, and get mad when people call them creeps. So why are people so often creeps? Merriam Webster defines creepy as “strange or scary: causing people to feel nervous and afraid.” This definition is not helpful since it’s difficult to predict how any given person will receive a given action. People are subjective and contexts change. Since the dictionary definition isn’t useful for dating purposes, perhaps if we put it in terms of a formula, we can establish a general rule for what creepy is. Here is an informal Creepiness Quotient to describe the feeling someone gives you in the first few seconds they're hitting on you:

Now, let's look at the factors here, with "you" being a potential creep who is hitting on "them," a person of sexual interest. Awkwardness is the extent to which you demonstrate your inability to operate effectively in a given social environment. A person who cannot initiate or maintain a comfortable conversation is an unappealing choice of partner. Forw...

... middle of paper ...

...now have clear idea of why people might be labeled “creepy”: the entitlement/persistence factor. Because of its usefulness as a red flag, the word creepiness can be (and frequently is) used in almost any situation where a person comes across negatively. But simply failing to meet the threshold of attractiveness (or being too forward/awkward) doesn’t mean that the person is necessarily creepy. A person’s creepiness is actually the presentation of several important dating qualities in a particular proportion. Although it would be unwise to be too mathematically rigorous with unquantifiable variables, an interesting manipulation of the quotient’s factors also confirms what Hollywood movies have been telling us all along: so long as you are sufficiently attractive so that Attractiveness > (Awkwardness x Forwardness), persistence increasingly diminishes your creepiness.

More about Essay About Creep

Open Document