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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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It's probably worth noting that later in that chain of posts Scott noted that commenters reassured him that what he was doing wasn't necessarily that creepy in and of itself—that gradual escalation is sort of how things go a lot of the time, and that works out pretty well.

If that is right, Scott was somewhat incomplete in that male weakness analysis of creepiness—although that might be the occasion for the whole thing. It's not from the mere existence of this phenomenon, but from mistakes. Creepiness would come instead from communication issues in this activity—either men showing interest too overtly too quickly, or men failing to pick up/women failing to communicate that they're not wanted, and so interest is shown mistakenly. This is of course made more difficult by the fact that people are not the same.

Another useful Scott post, along the same lines, is this one, where he talks along the same line of deliberate ambiguity.