“Creep” and Other Ways to Oppress Men

Trigger warning: racist and sexist slurs

A few days ago, a person named Wayne tried to post this comment on my post Mom, Don’t Read This:

Rebecca, Isn’t “creep” one those dehumanising words you speak of?

I laughed, forwarded it to Melanie for her Un-censorship Project, and deleted it.

The next day, we received an email from the same person. I responded. This was our full conversation.

Wayne:

Comment: Hi

I tried to make a comment on one of Rebecca Watson’s older posts in which she uses the term “creep” whilst simultaneously decrying the use of dehumanising labels. I would really like to hear Rebecca’s response to the use of this term but my comment seems to have been not accepted.

Me:

Wayne:

Wow is this the way you treat people who read your pages?

I guess its consistent with not wanting to admit to Rebecca’s dehumanising characterisations of men.

Me:

Please don’t read our pages anymore. We find your creepiness dehumanizing.

Wayne:

I have tried to ask a legimate reasonable question.

In response I have no idea why you feel the need to be abusive.

Me:

We have tried to send you legimate reasonable gifs. In response we have no idea why you feel the need to be abusive.

Wayne:

Reasonable would be simply answering my question.

Being evasive just suggests that you know that “creep” is being used by rebecca to be dehumanising.

Mocking is not reasonable, it is abusive.

Wayne (again):

There is amazing irony in the fact that Rebecca travels the world and online gives lectures mentioning abusive emails she receives and when I send a polite request for an opinion based on her story I get responded to with abuse.

To me it eats at your credibility.

Me:

Wayne:

Hi

There is a certain irony that Rebecca travels the world and publishes online lectures where she complains about abusive emails from men whilst skepchick in response to a simple straight forward polite question responds with abuse. Abuse that seems from the follow up responses seems to be the policy of the organisation.

Me:

Wayne:

Thanks is good to know that you don’t give a fuck about being abusive.

Consewquently it is surprising and hypocritical that Rebecca gives a fuck about the abuse she receives.

Amazingly, I got bored of posting gifs before he got bored of saying the same thing over and over again, so our correspondence ended there.

Equally amazingly, Wayne is a full-grown adult (I checked) who thinks that it is polite and reasonable to equate the word “creep” with comments from my post like “you’re a cunt” or that I left a “vagina-shaped hole” when I left an organization I founded. And he lumps a gif response to his email into the category of “abuse,” a category that I have put campaigns to have me arrested or fired from my podcast, and relentless online stalking and rape and death threats.

It’s a testament to men’s place in the world that a man crying “abuse” over a few cute gifs won’t result in anyone saying, “Men are so sensitive! Welcome to the Internet!” Instead, this persecution complex is taken as evidence that women are hypocrites, because they can’t complain about rape threats while at the same time calling someone a creep or a jerk or an asshole or an obsessive stalker.

It’s quite interesting, really – most male supremacists have given up trying to argue that women don’t suffer immense abuse at the hands of misogynists online, because the evidence has grown too great to ignore. So now, they’re focussing on jumping onto the oppression train. They have attempted to appropriate the word “bully,” for instance – just check out the #FTBullies hashtag, which is a, um, clever play on “Freethought Blogs” where most of the bloggers have some interest in social justice issues. The people using the hashtag do so while using dozens of parody Twitter accounts they created specifically to harass freethinkers with an interest in social justice, like Martin Robbins, Ophelia Benson, and me. The irony doesn’t even seem to occur to them.

And so now we have men desperately searching for a word that they can claim is used to marginalize and oppress them in the same way that women “get” words like cunt and bitch, and Jews “get” words like “k*ke”, and African Americans “get” words like “coon” and “n****r.” And the best they’ve come up with is “creep,” which happens to double as the title of two great songs, both of which I enjoy performing at karaoke.

What distinguishes “creep” from a word like “cunt” or “bitch”? Well, for a start, “creep” isn’t exclusively directed at men. When a man is called a “bitch,” he’s being called a low, weak woman. Calling a woman a creep doesn’t imply that she has any inherently male characteristics that are considered distasteful. You’re saying she’s being creepy, which is a nongendered state of being. See?

Girl is literally creeping out of the TV.

No, “creep” describes a behavior, and it’s often an abusive behavior, at that.

But most importantly, “creep” is not a word that marginalizes and dehumanizes men because men are not a marginalized class. For some reason, this is a very difficult fact for anti-feminists to accept. I’ve never had a problem understanding that I’m not marginalized for being white, or for being straight, or for being cis-. Yet some men simply cannot abide the idea that they are not disadvantaged specifically for being men. It is truly baffling.

There you have it, anyway – an answer much more complete than Wayne deserves. But at least the next time someone bothers me with a similar question, I can send them a link to this post instead of using it as an opportunity to procrastinate on my work to look through my gif library and giggle.