Creeps

No one wants to believe their affections are unwanted, or worse, unwantable. Bad luck, bad timing, incompatibility, misunderstanding, injustice, karma: these are all easier to accept than the notion that you might be a creep. 

A creep is someone whose attention is repellant, and whose intentions are not fully clear but definitely tend towards the malignant. It doesn’t actually matter what those intentions are—that stranger slowly approaching you at the bus stop late at night may just be asking for directions, or he might want to store you under his house—they just feel bad. The archetypal creep is an ugly, unkempt man, leering from a dark corner, following you at a distance, peering through your window blinds. But anyone hungry, scheming, and invasive enough can be a creep—recent fictional examples include the clout-chasing stalker Ingrid in Ingrid Goes West, the serial-killing stan Dre in Swarm. The creep’s motives are also often assumed to be romantic or sexual, but fame, money, prestige, friendship, vanity, and even plain attention are just as common. 

How does the creep go after what they want? They might be confident enough to approach you, but not confident enough to seem confident. On some level conscious of their tendency to repulse, the creep rarely makes a clear, serious request. Instead there is a sort of one-way flirtation, the proposition swaddled in irony or innuendo: they might make an obscene catcall knowing full well it will be rejected, or craft an indirect ploy (the scripted conversation starter; the work meeting that is actually a date). It feels gross to play along, aware that you’re being somehow inveigled or schemed against, but you don’t know what will happen if you don’t; based on how much they seem to want it, probably something bad. Soon enough, you might find yourself ensnared, having been breadcrumbed into greater levels of commitment and proximity until it is too awkward, too difficult, or impossible to say no. A creep may loiter in your vicinity at a party until everyone else leaves and you’re drunk; or they may befriend you over several years, never disclosing or expressing any attraction, but bursting into a jealous rage if you become involved with anyone else. They hope to wait you out. To be there at the moment you realize you have, for whatever reason, no other choice.

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Counterintuitively, creepiness shares certain features in common with mystique, in that they both involve having your attention captured by someone whose intentions are unclear. Yet someone with mystique is attractive but elusive, needing nothing from anyone, whereas the creep is manifestly repulsive, wants something from you, and has nothing to offer for it, so instead tries to figure out how to trick you out of it. But what creepiness shares with mystique—the force of the unknown—can have its own perverse allure. 

In George R.R. Martin’s 1988 horror story “The Pear-shaped Man,” a young book cover artist named Jessie becomes morbidly obsessed with her downstairs neighbor, whom everyone calls the Pear-shaped Man: a pallid, obese man who eats only Cheez Doodles. The Pear-shaped Man lingers in the hallway, repeatedly offering her Cheez Doodles and inviting her into his apartment with the same offer—“Would you like to see my things? I have things inside to look at.” Despite Jessie’s disgust, she finds herself obsessing over him, drawing him, hankering after Cheez Doodles; when a friend asks whether the man is sexually harassing her, Jessie says, “That isn’t it. It’s not sexual. Not in the normal way, anyhow.” She dreams about him touching her with fingers “as soft and pulpy as earthworms.” At least functionally—fantasizing about him, imagining his touch—her obsession looks a lot like infatuation. When she finally relents and enters his apartment, he strips naked; she stabs him, but it does nothing; and when he engulfs her in an embrace, she physically becomes him, and starts looking for his next victim. 

The creep might hope for reciprocal attraction, but another symbiosis is possible: a repulsion so powerful it commandeers the mind, forming an obsession based not in coveting but in paranoid self-defense, and the desire to understand how you’ve elicited such a powerful unwanted response. Creephood can be infectious. And for the creep, it’s good enough just to get under your skin. 

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Even when the creep’s gambits fail, they may persist anyway, either in the name of revenge, or as a ploy to turn things around. Often this leverages the natural guilt that their rejector may feel: in long florid letters, or deluges of texts and voice notes, the reject flaunts their pain, exaggerates it, implies that their rejector must be heartless for allowing it to continue. On the Facebook page Revenge Dioramas, Natalie Zina Walschots wrote about the “dying wizard,” a term coined by her friend Audra Williams to describe “an intensely dramatic, emotionally overwrought mode of writing, often deeply manipulative and definitely soaked in self-importance” to the point of sounding like the final monologue of a dying wizard, typical of messages from spurned lovers. Walschots shares an example she’d received: 

It's been a very long time, nearly two decades, since the children we once were took a shot at love. In the aftermath of our brief time in the sun I spent the next half dozen years in a drug-addled haze, desperately hiding from the pain. It took at least another 5 for the tortured dreams and the screaming nightmares to abate.

That whole time and beyond, I held on to my greatest regret: I wished that I could have made my mistakes on some other poor girl before I ever met you, so I could have already learned my lessons beforehand. I believed that I understood what I had done. I thought that I realized my errors and the flaws in my motivation, thought that I knew the when, where, and why of my failure. I was convinced that if I could have done it over, I wouldn't have wasted my chance. 

Pity is no substitute for love, but in the shift from bidding for their love to cajoling them for pity, the motive tends to shift. These kinds of messages may try to bait the recipient into regretting their poor judgment, or revealing themselves unworthy. Rubbing it in can also be a way of prolonging contact, and whatever guilt they cause functions as a consolation prize: You may have rejected me, but not without paying for it.

It’s easy to forget that rejection usually distresses both parties; except when the proposition is especially rude or pushy, it’s rare to enjoy rejecting someone. Proust writes: “Although everyone talks, untruthfully, of the comforts, forever denied to us by fate, of being loved, it is no doubt a general law…that we should find the person whom we do not love but who loves us unbearable.” The social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dawn Dhavale, in their paper “Two Sides of Romantic Rejection,” support this: “The would-be lover perceives outcomes ranging from agony to ecstasy, but the rejector perceives only those from bad to neutral…It is, in an important sense, a no-win situation, a problem to be solved or a burden to be borne…The rejectors’ stories were more uniformly and consistently negative.” It’s terrible to realize that someone has chosen a no-win situation over accepting you; for some rejects, the guilt of potentially causing guilt might keep them from reaching out.

But not the creep. This accounts for the tone of dying wizards, equally self-admonishing and self-aggrandizing, as they try to reconcile the acknowledgement of failure with the continuing heroic pursuit. 

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Beyond the most extreme cases, much of what reads as creepy behavior is simply desire plus awkwardness: not knowing what to do in a given situation, which is especially common in the ambiguous arena of romance. For this reason there has always been a drive to conceive courtship as a game: a system of manners with rules, goals, competition, and standards of conduct. The nature of these games is ever-evolving—a calling card on a silver salver, a pithy classified ad, a ping—but tacitly signaling interest, desirability, and availability have always been the subject of angst. Don’t cross your arms, show up a few minutes late, make eye contact, not too much, stand close, eat light, don’t split the check. If she plays with her hair, she’s interested; if he’s slow to text back, he’s not. Like all systems or norms, these rules are meant to be followed and read, with the assurance that you will find success, and if you don’t, then it’s not your fault. 

As societies get less homogenous, consensus codes of courtship are mostly done away with, leaving nothing but flirtation in their wake. With flirtation, intentions are conveyed through glances, smiles, hints. There is a strategic value in the play of these noncommittal gestures: they’re easy to deny or rescind if you change your mind, and it makes outright rejection seem like an overreaction. This ambiguity is also what makes them easy to abuse. 

More recently the pas-de-deux of flirtation has been reformalized into what’s been literally called “game.” The nineties and aughts saw a wave of dating advice bestsellers with titles like The Game and The Rules and The Rules of the Game that, beyond explaining the new norms of courtship, encouraged readers to exploit them. In his 2005 book The Game, the journalist Neil Strauss chronicles his ascent in the pick-up artist community. Based loosely on misconstrued or junk science (evolutionary psychology, hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming), many of their seduction techniques—wingmanning, peacocking, and negging—have long since seeped into mainstream parlance. 

As sabermetrics did with baseball, PUAs (Pickup Artists) reconceive dating as a statistical venture—not just a game, but a numbers game, where men are players and women are integers, and to score is to score. And also a role-playing game: as one acolyte in The Game enthuses, “I’m into the game because it’s like Dungeons and Dragons. When I learn a neg or a routine, it’s like getting a new spell or a staff that I can’t wait to use.” Mystery, one of the book’s antiheroes, opens his seminars by telling the assembled men, “Think of tonight as a video game. It is not real.” Their adopted nicknames—Playboy, Sickboy, Grimble, Exoticoption, Twotimer, Tyler Durden—provide another layer of protection against rejection. It’s not me getting rejected, it’s Grimble. 

In practice, PUA training boils down to creating pretexts for approaching women, and scripts for holding their interest and fast-tracking intimacy—mostly generic party questions, mentalist routines, or personality quizzes. One feature of PUA culture (and cults) is the inculcation of a massive lexicon to create an illusion of scientific formalism to their techniques: “cat string theory,” “dynamic social homeostasis,” “phase-shifting,” “the October Man sequence,” “boyfriend-destroyer patterns,” etc. Practitioners are instructed to carry a literal bag of tricks: runes for rune readings, magic props, a blacklight, bits of lint you can pretend to pick off of women’s sweaters. “How did I ever get laid without all this technology?” Strauss marvels. 

Strauss and his subjects seem to operate under some heavily willed ignorance about what they’re actually doing: the claims that their methods can seduce any woman anywhere at any time, alongside frank admissions that they must approach dozens of women in an evening to find success. Or the selection bias inherent in their pursuit of women at bars and clubs, who are usually young and drunk. Anyone who goes out every night to strategically seduce women would probably find increasing success; that’s just practice. But this narrative is less alluring than that of a learnable system of esoteric knowledge that grants your wishes. 

Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s 1996 bestseller The Rules, aimed at straight women looking to marry, pairs well with The Game. (And aren’t the gendered titles telling?) Its authors describe it as “a simple working set of behaviors and reactions that, when followed, invariably serve to make most women irresistible to desirable men.” Its end goal, unlike The Game, is to find a husband, and its thesis is a life-consuming version of playing hard-to-get: limiting your availability while being mysterious, attractive, and strategically passive. The book’s axiom is that men are attracted to unattainability, and that, having expended lots of time, effort, and resources on a woman, sunk cost fallacy will take care of the rest.

If The Game instructs men to pursue women for sex, The Rules counter instructs women how to prolong that pursuit until the man is invested enough to commit. In contrast to The Game’s masculine ethos of rote and relentless action, The Rules is largely prohibitive: the “Rules Girl” must avoid slurping drinks, talking to men first, talking too much, breathing quickly, dancing unless invited, discussing her feelings until the fourth date, or staying on the phone for over 10 minutes. Don’t “overwhelm him with your career triumphs,” “sound cynical and depressed,” or be “a loud, knee-slapping, hysterically funny girl.” What a Rules Girl should do: always “act as if everything’s great,” “wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt,” and “put lipstick on even when you go jogging.” The authors don’t deny this is fraudulent; rather, by way of cautionary anecdotes of horrific heartbreak and failure, they just argue it beats being alone. “You’re probably wondering how long you can keep up this act, right? Don’t worry, it gets easier!” 

Where The Game takes promiscuity’s appeal as self-evident and worth any amount of effort and deceit, The Rules finds it necessary to continually reassure the reader that the reward—a monogamous relationship resulting in marriage—is worth it. “Abuse doesn’t happen in a Rules relationship, because when you play hard to get and he works like hell to get you, he thinks you’re the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world, even if you’re not. He treats you like a precious jewel.” The flip side of this incredible claim, naturally, is that abuse could happen if you don’t follow the rules, with the added implication that the onus of preventing the abuse is on the woman.

But the contrasts between the two books are superficial; in tandem, they are designed to instruct readers how to play opposing positions in the metagame of heterosexuality, offense vs. defense, turbo-charging existing heterosexual gender conventions rather than defying them. It’s not to say that queer people can’t be creeps, just that the normalized exploitation of heterosexual mores has made creepiness the default setting. Just like The Game, The Rules encourages denial about what makes it effective—before the list of rules even begins, we get a chapter first exhorting the reader to be conventionally attractive, catering to male tastes. “If you have a bad nose, get a nose job; color gray hair; grow your hair long.” Often the two books overlap: where The Rules exhorts the reader to “be a creature unlike any other” (i.e. “being well-groomed, possessing a sense of humor, connecting with people, and being seen as the social center of a room”), The Game says that you “must be the exception to the rule. You must not do what everyone else does. Ever.” 

Notwithstanding their glorification of sex and marriage, the most successful PUAs profiled in The Game wind up falling into anhedonic, suicidal depression and bitter acrimony with even their fellow PUAs. In The Rules, after all their reassurances that a happy marriage is the end goal, readers may be surprised to encounter Rule #26: “Even if You’re Engaged or Married, You Still Need The Rules.”. The unstated goal in each case is not happiness or fulfillment, but inurement. Swaddled in an invincible persona, you too can achieve a strenuous, joyless absence of rejection, secure that you did everything expected of you, and got what you thought you wanted. At least you’re no creep.

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Creeps tend to be discussed with a patina of anthropological condescension, as “we” ask: what do “they” look like, how do “they” make “us” feel? But isn’t there something creepy—something voyeuristic and sidelong and self-interested—about sitting around reading about creeps at length in private, imagining oneself in relation to them? This act of cataloging and description, which has been the thrust of this essay, is a form of social therapy that allows one to assure oneself, by way of following an unspoken rule—Don’t be like this—that one isn’t one. But creephood is less an inherent condition than a state of affairs, and to an extent, it is the status of anyone who wants something badly, doesn’t know how to get it, tries anyway, and fails. 

There’s a better question to ask if you really want to understand. Interested? If so, then read on. But only if you want to understand.  

Let’s play a game. 

Consider what it is you want most, something you don’t already possess yet feel is truly central to your sense of fulfillment and self-worth, then think about why you can’t have it. To be honest, it’s likely your fault. No, no, don’t blame it on society or luck or the past—it’s you, you’ve made some kind of misjudgment, somehow fallen short, but don’t worry, you can still fix it. Someone is out there, one specific person, who has what you want, and it’s only a matter of convincing them to give it to you, even though they don’t seem eager to. Pretty selfish of them, considering how important it is to you. If you try harder, though, maybe push past some of your earlier reservations, you might still be able to make them come around, just keep at it. Giving up would mean you didn’t really want it to begin with. Don’t be too obvious, that’ll make it too easy to turn you down, so be creative, do something they won’t expect, and make sure they get the message. (Oh stop recoiling and feigning disgust, no one’s watching, and you’re still reading—you ignored the warning earlier, so you must want to understand, you’ve already agreed to this, why come this far otherwise? Too late for that.) Any response, even a negative one, means you’re making progress; watch them closely to figure out what works and what to do better next time. If they’re rude or insulting to you, then you certainly don’t have to worry about making them uncomfortable, seeing as they kind of asked for it, and are probably just doing it for attention anyway. The important thing is not to give up, since nothing matters more than this, certainly not whatever reason they have for withholding what you need so badly. Imagine how wretched you will be without it—as good as dead. What you need is right there, just under their skin, and they can’t hold out forever. Any day now they might come around, see things your way, realize you were justified. 

In the meantime, ask: Why don’t they understand?