After someone else posted the other day about the unfair label of creepiness, and how it is often applied unfairly to older and unattractive men, I thought I'd share my 2 cents, notably about how not only the definition of creepy is subjective, but how it has massively expanded over the past 10 years or so.

The definition of what constitutes "creepiness" has expanded to almost tyrannical proportions, based primarily on subjective definitions and almost nobody seems to have noticed. Maybe part of that reason is because the mainstream media are dominated by a feminist, politically-correct agenda and if they were ever to point out just how radical the change was and how quickly it occurred, with very little balanced discussion, it could lead to a debate as to whether these norms were rightly adopted in the first place.

I remember a YouTube video that became somewhat viral in around 2012-2013, showing a man on a beach trying to pick up girls, and alternating in his behaviour between a "bad boy" and a "nice guy". This guy was really nothing to write home about, in fact he was very average-looking. He looked to be in his early 30s and looked a bit like Jay Baruchel in the rom-com "She's Out Of My League" (maybe slightly more attractive, because he wasn't skinny). He wasn't particularly tall either, looked to be about 5'7", had a very prominent "widow's peak" (i.e. early receding hairline), and while he had a naturally athletic build, he didn't have a 6-pack or shredded biceps, etc. I can't tell how rich he was, but he wasn't driving a Lamborghini, it was a regular car, and wasn't wearing a Rolex on his wrist either. In other words, your average guy in pretty much every sense of the word.

When he was playing the "bad boy" he would make openly lewd comments toward the women, and none of them called them out for it. In fact, he actually received more numbers when he was being rude than when he was being polite and respectful (no idea if those were false numbers, or how many dates he got out of these approaches, but still he seemed to be doing quite well). There was not even any talk of "sexual harassment" or "making women uncomfortable," "being creepy" and all of these other phrases that have basically entered our everyday lexicon. And some of the things he said really were very risqué. For example during one of the approaches, he told a girl he'd ejackulated from simply looking at her and asked the girl to give him the peel from the banana she'd just finished eating so he could "wipe it off." He also made a few jokes referencing the apparent similarities between bananas and male anatomy, and again there was no hostile reaction at all, in fact that woman ended up giving him her number.

That was 2012. By 2017, you had the infamous video where a man was yelled at by a woman for 5 minutes straight at the top of her lungs for saying his name was "Hugh Mungus" and men afraid of losing their jobs for a few awkward interactions with their female coworkers. It hasn't changed since, and in today's society if a guy on the beach did what the guy did in the first YouTube video, he'd probably be escorted off the beach by security, banned from returning, shamed on social media, etc. The only way he could avoid such an outcome is if he were rich and handsome, in which case he might get the benefit of a double standard, but even that is highly uncertain.

I'm not saying this is the proper way to approach women, but it shows just how much society has changed in the past decade and men are just expected to accept that a significant percentage of the female population started viewing them as creeps basically overnight for the most innocuous interactions, and accept it like it's no big deal.