Just take comfort in knowing that female attractiveness usually drops off a cliff far earlier than male attractiveness does. The same girl writing that essay will one day be 40+ and begging for any of those "genetic superiors" to give her five seconds, while the same male "uggo" with a stable income and decent hygiene will be able to take his pick of a bunch of nicer women who didn't view the whole of humanity throug…
yeah, female skin ages faster, and skin is what we see on others. this ain't fair, but we can't fool genetics (for now). unconscious behavior like this made me lose much of the respect I had for women (and I started with lots of it!). the better I knew them the worse it got. sheepish mentality, playing all kinds of weird mind games all the time, frequent need of assurance of attractiveness and constant looking in the…
A Theory of Creepiness
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, female skin ages faster, and skin is what we see on others. this ain't fair, but we can't fool genetics (for now). unconscious behavior like this made me lose much of the respect I had for women (and I started with lots of it!). the better I knew them the worse it got. sheepish mentality, playing all kinds of weird mind games all the time, frequent need of assurance of attractiveness and constant looking in the…
> Unconscious behavior like this made me lose much of the respect I had for women. I agree. What really gets me is that you're told to open up and talk about your emotions. They paint to bottle up as a negative trait, but women usually lose all respect for men – friends and partners – who share their own fears and worries. One time is enough to ruin your image and dismiss the good times. Empathy is replaced by disgus…
I mean, if you expect perfection, provide perfection, nothing less.
my theory is that they feel weak (this goes beyond obvious physical weakness compared to men), hence the strong urge to have alphas 'guarding' and providing for them.
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're being a bit sensitive. It's a writing style meant to provoke.
Denying essential humanity to anyone is always and everywhere unacceptable. "Unattractive men are animals, not human beings" isn't provocative, it's totally beyond the pale. If the essay called an ethnic or religious group animals, would you still link to it and characterize it as "interesting" and "provocative?"
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
"creepy" has been adopted into younger people's language. And while there may be no direct translation that has all connotations of the words, I believe the concepts expressed with other words are basically the same. Do you have an article/other reference discussing the differences?
I think it is well explained here, including additional links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuCy_UkKBcs
"Dibs" -> "Meins". "I call dibs on the last cookie" isn't one word either, so of course you wouldn't use one word in German either. However if you put it like that, you'd just say "Das ist meiner". But that'd be rude, which is why you're more likely to hear "Möchte noch jemand den Keks?" ("Does anybody want this remaining cookie?"). This isn't a translation problem, it's a culture problem.
"Creepy" -> "Gruselig". A person can be "gruselig". It means exactly the same thing. Yes, there are additional meanings to the German word that don't match the English word and there are additional meanings to the English word that don't match the German word but that's how language works. Good luck finding a single word pair in both languages that matches exactly -- it happens, but it's the exception, not the rule.
"Backwash". That seems oddly specific. I guess "Sabber" ("drool") would be the German word used in the described scenario but again her example seems fairly rude. If you don't want to share someone's drink, you don't tell them it's because you don't want their spit in your mouth (because that would imply there's something disgusting about how they drink or that they're somehow unhygienic).
"Awkward". Again, this is a cultural thing. There is not one German word for each meaning because the different meanings are lumped together in English but not in German. A social faux pas is "peinlich" (my favourite slang equivalent of the valley girl steoretype "Awkward!" is "Schwierig!", which in this sense doesn't translate well either -- it literally means "difficult").
"Cooties". Again, culture. There is no German word because this isn't a thing in German.
"Attitude" -> "Einstellung". "Having an attitude" is not one word, in fact it strongly suggests an omission (because on face value the sentence is trivially true about most people). "Don't give me an attitude" is not one word either and I'm pretty sure "Stell dich nicht so an" (or even "Reiss dich zusammen") is a reasonable equivalent -- an armchair psychologist might observe something about the German version being more about the person demonstrating the behaviour and the English version more about the person inconvenienced by the behaviour but armchair psychology is rarely meaningful.
"Jaywalker" -> "Rotgänger". Yeah, there's not really a verb for it in German but again this seems awfully specific.
From her companion video on German words:
"Schunkeln". This is kinda like arguing there's no English word for "Umlaut". Why should English have more accurate words for this if it isn't a thing in the English-speaking world? Also, how familiar you are with this term as a German speaker strongly depends on where in Germany you live, though I'd wager few Germans don't know it at all. She's in Munich and Schunkeln suits itself to Oktoberfest because of the beer benches, so she'll probably be exposed to it a lot more than the average German.
"Kummerspeck". This is fairly specific and only works because "Speck" is already a slang word for (belly) fat (not even limited to overweight people). I'd wager it's actually originally a play on words: "Babyspeck" is "baby fat" which toddlers typically lose as they grow up, so "grief fat" would be something you typically lose as you stop grieving). I don't see any obvious reason "grief fat" isn't a word in English.
"Schnapsidee" -> "brain fart". Yes, it's not a direct translation, but the literal meaning is almost never intended for "Schnapsidee" either. It's just a "stupid idea". And of course "brain fart" can be more general whereas "Schnapsidee" usually refers to a specific plan that had easily predictable flaws.
"Treppenwitz" -> "fridge logic" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic). I don't even know what this word specifically is supposed to be. I guess this is a Bavarian thing? I've never come across this word in 30 years. Yes, the TV Tropes term is not an exact match but it is the exact same idea.
"Verschlimmbessern". Yes, this one is originally a pun ("verschlimmern" + "verbessern"). Puns don't translate well. This is probably a genuine example but the concept exists in both languages -- I'm pretty sure there's already some obscure slang word for this I'm not aware of (other than "fixing" -- with the scare quotes).
Bonus: "Gemütlichkeit" -> "Comfy"/"Cozy". Yes, the German word can also be applied to people in the sense of "relaxed". I think the kids these days use "chill" in pretty much the same way (i.e. things and people can be "chill")?
As you can see, some of these don't have exact matches but a claim like "Germans have no word for Creepy so creepiness doesn't exist for Germans" is incredibly daft.
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#55I found this essay interesting: > It’s not “creepy” if he’s hot. I freely admit it. When a very attractive stranger approaches me and tells me I’m beautiful, it brightens my day. When a guy who is short, fat or balding does it, it makes my skin crawl no matter how tactful he is about it. I just want him to go away. I’m not alone in feeling this way. Most women feel the same, but hide the true extent of it when the gu…
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Near the beginning of the article it mentions the german word "unheimlichkeit" to mean creepy or uncanny. Is that not a word you are familiar with, or not the meaning you associate with it? There is are a lot of other German touch points in the article as well.
"Unheimlichkeit" means more like scary. Scary is not the same as creepy obviously. Also "Unheimlichkeit" is not really a word but a "Substantiviertes Adjektiv" of "unheimlich". There you already can see that you have to bend over backwards to find something with similar meaning. And even then "Unheimlichkeit" doesn't really quiet hit it.
And "unheimlich" is in many contexts further from "scary" than from "creepy", with "scary" more describing something as outright fear-inducing than the other two.
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#57I found this essay interesting: > It’s not “creepy” if he’s hot. I freely admit it. When a very attractive stranger approaches me and tells me I’m beautiful, it brightens my day. When a guy who is short, fat or balding does it, it makes my skin crawl no matter how tactful he is about it. I just want him to go away. I’m not alone in feeling this way. Most women feel the same, but hide the true extent of it when the gu…
That's an over the top rant, but as a woman I agree with her basic premise: the "women are less visual" thing is a total lie and tied neatly into the "women desire sex less than men" lie. Looks are important to many women just as they are important to many men. There's nothing to be ashamed of and there is no point in denying human sexuality.
Is there an underlying assumption 'women are less visual'? It's seems like a bit of a straw man because no one can and should generalize.
The next bits about 'knowing your place' puts the author in the enlightening company of a cave man teling women to 'know their place'. I wonder how many will be lining up to defend that.
Self proclaiming yourself as 'good looking' is problematic in itself because this is purely subjective beyond a 1% that everyone widely agree on. To then use this self created pedestal to dismiss and reduce others suggests a unnatural degree of narcissism and likely necessitates a large leap from reality.
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm stating the obvious but it's spiking every October in anticipation of Halloween. Ignoring those spikes and looking at the growth trend that began around 2007, it looks fairly organic and has remained relatively flat since mid 2014. What kicked it off in 2007 I don't know. The term has simply become a short-hand way of describing something that brings unease. The problem with the term is that people aren't actuall…
>What kicked it off in 2007 I don't know. The internet meme of "creepypasta," probably. See /r/nosleep for the sanitized version. This is the meme cluster that yielded Slenderman, BEKs, and the SCP project.
Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#59Re: A Theory of Creepiness
#60I found this essay interesting: > It’s not “creepy” if he’s hot. I freely admit it. When a very attractive stranger approaches me and tells me I’m beautiful, it brightens my day. When a guy who is short, fat or balding does it, it makes my skin crawl no matter how tactful he is about it. I just want him to go away. I’m not alone in feeling this way. Most women feel the same, but hide the true extent of it when the gu…
In hindsight it's amazing how much young people take this shit personally. Like guy getting angry to a woman for her being fat. Guy getting angry because some random woman is not attracted to him. Gal getting visually disgusted because some guy does not look appropriately attractive. Etc. Etc.
Usually people get over it by their mid twenties. Some don't. Mixing fancy words to it like "feminism" sure does not help.