But I'm a Creep. A Lab report.
This text warmly wishes to accompany you before or after attending our workshop:
ON CREEPY OLD MXN & BEYOND - & playSPACE
Saturday, 18.12.2021 - Workshop10:00 - 17:00h - PlaySpace 20:00 - 1:00h
serrat(u)s bodywork, Zwinglistrasse 40, 8004 Zurich
Book you tickets >>here
How to make the cold shivers go down your spine
"How about I follow you around all day tomorrow?" - "But then I would know that... Maybe you could hire somebody I don't know to follow me around in secret like a stalker?" - "Oh, that's a good idea!"
Two people plot how to get to that feeling that sends cold shivers down your spine. Because something feels off, even if nothing clearly dangerous is happening. They are surrounded by a whole group of people who are compiling some sort of curiosity cabinet of such weird ideas. One person is thinking of designing jewelry out of clipped toenails, while another one wants to take up a creepy passion for a private collection: to secretely cut off a lock of hair from each of her lovers and catalog them. One woman kneads pizza dough to put on her face as a grotesque mask, because she was deemed too young and pretty to trigger this specific affect of horror. Two people agree on a voyeuristic classic: watching the other in the shower through the keyhole. One man requests a special massage in which the masseuses keep sidetracking in their quality of touch because they secretly pleasure themselves instead of focusedly being in the service of wellness for their client: touching him 'accidentally' with their own genitals or staring lustfully at his crotch while massaging him. Volunteers are happily found to dare trying out this experiment with him and add refining suggestions to it - they could avoid eye contact, mumble and sneak up unexpectedly from behind before the massage starts ...
"Creepy" is the name of the quality so eagerly harvested here in those self-experiments. A word hardly translatable into other languages. In German the metaphorical 'Lustmolch' might be an apt term because it epitomizes those slimy-sexualized elements - usually attributed to older men. But a Lustmolch or lecher - similar to 'womanizer' - describes a rather frankly and obviously courting person, while creepiness is characterized by the fact that nothing is open and clear. It is precisely for this reason that the group looks at creepiness with slightly obsessed interest, in order to find out what this elusive quality is all about. How does it feel to be the creep ourselves? In what circumstances have we already behaved creepy, maybe without even realizing it? What thrill can it be to be creeped on in a safe setting? And more broadly: how do social power relations and sensory experiences become entangled in sexuality?
From annoyance, avoidance, aversion, adjudication to adventure, awareness, amplification, alteration, animation
These questions were explored in ON CREEPY OLD MXN & BEYOND, a workshop we offered in various queerfeminist, kink-, and sex-positive contexts. The idea came about because in these contexts we encountered the ever-same ways of dealing with creepiness: annoyance, avoidance, aversion, adjudication. Fair enough! Especially women* risk dangerous counterattacks and victim blaming when defending themselves against unwanted creepy behavior. And even in 2021, despite all attempts at emancipation, girls* are still taught to people-please and avoid self-advocacy and conflicts. So we tend to smile off disgusting pick-up attempts, just so to not make a scene. Being outraged about the creep after encountering them and searching for allies who will listen to us and our indignation is an important resort. It is equally advisable to follow suit with the famous last line from Radiohead's song Creep: "She's running out the door, she run, run, run!"
And yet, I couldn't help thinking how to deal with creepiness in more and other ways and whether it could even be appropriated as an interesting and creative force to be reckoned with: adventure, awareness, amplification, alteration, animation.... Especially for contexts where sexual motives and unconformist behavior are explicitly invited, where BDSM practices and thus also the 'dark sides' of the human condition are being explored and played with. Yet, while kinsters manage to eroticize power relations to the point of rape play, slave education and defecation games, I hardly encountered anything like creepy play. Why not, actually?
Awesome or awful? The sublime vs. ugly feelings
One reason could be that classic BDSM games - the roles of dominance and submission with their extravagant use of refined instruments such as leather floggers, jute ropes, latex suits - have something sublime about them that can be assigned to the canon of philosophical aesthetics with its great awe-provoking passions. They are about stimulatingly obscene grace, unleashed archaic or animalistic forces or about confrontation with distance-dissolving affects such as disgust, shame, pain. They are about the positive reevaluation of commonly avoided experiences of control loss or sadistic excess - at best in artfully staged scenarios. These exceptional states can have a potentially cathartic effect, which is why so much of the discourse in the BDSM-scene revolves around transformation, processing, healing, exposure, break-throughs, awareness and so forth.
In contrast, creepiness tends to belong to the unglamourous aesthetic categories of "Ugly Feelings," as described by cultural theorist Sianne Ngai. Those evoke vague discomfort and confusion about what exactly one is actually feeling. There's something stringy and sticky about them, which makes the confusion persist, with no prospect of emotional relief - catharsis. While strong clear feelings like anger or sadness can lead to transformative action, ugly feelings (like envy, paranoia, or, I would add, creepiness) suspend agency. One feels stuck. Stuck in an uncanny valley of ambiguity, between two opposite mountains:
- In being-creepy between invasion and inhibition or curiosity and timidity.
- In being-creeped-out between inner alarm bells that prepare for self-protection, and simultaneous paralysis, because there is no tangible threat (yet). Incidentally, this difference seems to be useful in distinguishing creepiness from assault, even if the dividing line can be blurry. If a clear assault or harrassment takes place, the person is no longer a creep but a perpetrator. Then it is too late, but before that it is too early. In between there remain debatable gray areas, where several factors decide whether one can confidently deal with the unpleasant and frightening; whether the perceived distress is violent and should be avoided at all costs because of the possibility of (re)traumatization; or whether one is making false assumptions and becomes violently exclusionary, censoriously judgmental and normative oneself.
Workshops as artistic research - Findings, results, insights
The challenge of our workshop was to approach the creepy-crawly sensation with attentive research interest, to endure the nebulous zone of this in-between twilight zone. It's hard to catch the quality of creepiness. It quickly turns into something else: clear disgust, nerve-wrecking horror or silliness. But then it's not creepy anymore.
Moreover, as in a laboratory, we observed a kind of chemical reaction that could be another reason why there is hardly any kinky creepy play in BDSM scenes: consent and creepiness dissolve each other. In an effort to create a safer space, our participants were asked to specify precisely how they would like to be creeped on by their fellow playmates. However, this was unsatisfactory for most. To get to the exciting and arousing aspects of awkward discomfort, most opted for giving up control and move towards 'consensual nonconsent': "Just do it and I'll say 'stop' if it gets too much for me!". This brought some volatility of creepy play to light when indistinct boundaries were crossed and crisis interventions had to be initiated. Or when cis-male participants had to take a break and stop the exercises because it became unbearable for them to embody the very masculine archetype they always feel subliminally projected onto them as a general suspicion.
None of this is to say that creepiness otherwise never appears in kinky play spaces. When I do encounter it, however, it tends to be some form of unplanned collateral damage. For example when the rather old and male playparty organizer's pick-up pattern is fixated on the beautiful, inexperienced, young "fresh meat" among the participants. Or when a person is wandering around suspiciously alone through the playspace and then solo masturbates oberserving the others who are enjoying each other - somehow too close and yet too distant from them. These creeps conform to stereotypes that many of my male friends want to avoid at all costs. Even if it means denying themselves something they would actually enjoy - and possibly their playpartners might enjoy it, too. After all, some of the young women* can also get their kicks out of being wooed by the older players. And it can be tremendously appealing to portray oneself as an unattainable queen who despises the voyeuristic randy old lechers.
But how exactly can one get to the point of making creepiness a perverse pleasure play for all involved? Like caviar or Mac&Cheese: somehow disgusting, too much, too slippery - but awefully awesome!
I would like to share an anecdote that illustrates one example of turning a yucky situation that needed to be rejected to an experience I confidently used as an opportunity for growth myself. It happened when my first unsolicited sexting reached me. "Feel like fucking?" a Facebook user I don't know, but who for some reason is in my friend list, asks me out of the blue. Immediately my stomach clenches. I answer "No thanks" and call a good friend to ask for help. His advice is so out of my repertoire of possible responses, yet his perspective immediately catapults me back into my power. "Why don't you start by asking if his dick is big enough and anyway where he knows you from?" I laugh, grateful for the feeling of ease that now sets in, and also for the fact that the recruiter quiets down in response to my "no." Isn't there actually something refreshingly honest about his directness? In a way yes. Still, the circumstances make this situation creepy anyway, due to his opaqueness with fake profile picture, missing info about his person and the out-of-place nature on Facebook.
And yet I liked the mode of making creepiness work for me instead of automatically keeping it at bay. What if, at said events, I walked right up to the person outcreeping me most and tried to do something productive with their alienating energy? Like my dominantly-playing friend Anna, who simply used an insecure-looking guy, who was shunned by everyone because of his needy-greedy aura, as her human chair - no, her throne! It made them both happy. And magically he also lost his creep factor after being included.
Underrated misfits that can empower you to give less of a fuck - or entitled intruders that need to back and fuck off?
My interest towards such processes is not only directed towards facilitating interesting erotic interactions in subcultural scenes. Just as something can be learned about power relations in "normal life" through kinky enactments of domination and submission, I wanted to approach our workshop as some sort of training or research field to learn more about creepiness - and life - itself, which reaches to diverse areas of everyday life with its long thin fingers... Thus, on the one hand, I associate the term 'creep' with quaint misfits who, according to psychologists Francis T. McAndrew and Sara S. Koehnke, are perceived as creepy even when they commit the single crime of not being normatively attractive: greasy or unkempt hair, pale skin, dark circles under the eyes, advanced age, extremely thin body, or a peculiar fashion style were significantly often cited in their study to characterize creeps. This is where creepiness becomes particularly appealing to me, because it radically opposes the need to be liked in a normative society. The study inspires me to take the promise of BDSM-friendly sexpositive spaces to embrace non-conformity (as long as it is consensual) more seriously, so that next time when attending a play party I will dare to leave my sexy slutty outfits at home and see how much more intimate and 'naked' it will be for me if I show up there with unwashed hair and no makeup on to cover my non-flawless skin. Interestingly, this approach to creepiness seems akin to the feminist-activist project of body neutrality. Or is it just a disrespectful transgression of polite etiquettes?
In addition to these outsider figures, who are almost enviably indifferent to certain customs, creepiness intends to violate boundaries around private space. This form is, in turn, the opposite of outsiderism, since it is sadly just as universal as patriarchal sexism and entitlement is. Recent creepy everyday-experiences have been gathered under the feminist hashtag #metoo: inappropriate shoulder massages from coworkers; guys who intrusively dance their way into a group of besties trying to hang out with each other in a club; the 'nice' uncles who celebrate summer as "mini-dress time!" and whose well-meant smacking and hair-sniffing are disturbingly nightmarish...
Both classifications have in common that creepiness as a judgment serves to reject it and keep it far away from oneself, to attribute it to others - perhaps also in order to dissociate from one's own creepy parts? Who has never been carried away in a high-spirited mood and then sharing "too much information"? Who hasn't ever caught themselves smirking or being overpowered by a laughing fit out of nowhere or even in an inappropriate situation? Who has never wanted to share a gesture of sympathy, but then out of insecurity or being too self-conscious the touch doesn't come naturally, you still do it and it just feels tense, cramped and awkward, or your hand even lands somewhere weird - it touches their earhole or breast?
When is dismissing a person as creepy appropriate and when is it based on vicarious embarrassment and kneejerk prejudice?
It's also about empathy when asking about the causes of creepiness. Is someone a self-righteous prick or is someone insecure and lonely? Does he*she want to belong, to hide their own shame and inhibition? Do they try to do everything right - so much so that any attempt to not seem creepy only amplifies the effect after all (like the man in a friend's anecdote who was in an elevator only with another woman and tried to calm her down by starting to sing a nursery rhyme)?
But it's not just the accidental embarrassments that make us creepy. If you've never stalked someone thanks to social media, then cast the first stone. And it's quite striking that the functions on those platforms are even called "Following" or "Watching Stories" and some typical social media behavior has the uncanny name "Ghosting"!
At the end of the workshop, one participant expresses the fantastic idea of ritually paying homage to a creep deity who embodies all our awkwardness as something that returns anyway when we try to repress it. "Holding all our insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of asking for things, our taker energy, entitlement."
It becomes clearer to us that creepiness is not so much essential as relational. I cannot be a creep on my own. I need to be perceived as creepy. Others for example need to do a little tiptoeing dance of avoidance and disgusted gazes around me to make me appear suspicious. There is a space of agency in which I decide and co-create how creepiness affects me when I encounter somebody who I automatically perceive as a creep. The question is: under what conditions can we enter this space of agency without dissociating from our intelligent somatic warning systems and without downplaying potential danger? This wiggle room consists of a variety of actions: direct confrontation with the obnoxious person, which can mean calling him out and on the carpet; to determinently and clearly reject them; or calling attention to their troublesome actions in a friendly manner. It can also consist of cheekily playing along. Of creeping back or even over-creeping: for example staring back at the staring men on the street... Yes, this can be dangerous. So if you want to try it, please be cautious and at least have a look around and listen to your gut feeling if your immediate surroundings feel safe enough to try it out. Out of experience I can say that marvelous things can happen when trying those other methods of dealing with whomever I perceive as creepy. Some alchemical magic can be set in motion. Perhaps what has been perceived as creepy turns out to be a delusion, behind which sadness, inexperience or simply a misunderstanding emerges. Or the creep turns out to be an actual source of danger that now definitely needs to be banished. Maybe this will result in preventing harrassment or in the necessary "Snap!" that releases from the freeze-response and sends a clear signal to not tolerate harmful misbehavior. Maybe it leads to a clarifying conversation or even sympathy. Maybe to the embracing of one's own inner creep. To humor and self-irony. To questioning one's own biases of gender, class, race, age.
Creepiness' long salad fingers are reaching everywhere
Finally, creepiness currently seems to be one of the defining 'ugly feelings' of our present times, since it appears again and again in the public discourse and (mis)behaviors of notorious people in power. So it makes sense to give it more attention and not let it unnoticedly creep up from behind and get us when we don't reckon with its threat. What other grievances does creepiness point to in a broader sense? Where do other things slowly and persistently creep into our lives that beset and distress us, but at the same time don't seem so bad that we just consistently shrug them off? But what is actually harmful and should be dealt with by responding with a more serious "NO!"? Think about the tracking of our internet behavior and data collection by creepy companies like Google and Co. Think about sneaky advertising. Accepting loud street noises because we accept cars more than using streets as places to socialize. The normalization of working overtime. Your boss calling the team "family". Exploiting oneself under the seemingly chic label "self-fulfillment"...
In summary: Feel warmly welcome to our workshop :)
Regardless of moral values, however, ON CREEPY OLD MXN & BEYOND is last but not least terrifically good fun! Beyond good and evil it is comparable to riding roller coasters, taking drugs, watching scary movies. Next to learning a lot and critically overthink prejudices one can also just enjoy socializing with others in a witty and creative way or have fun with somatic sensations like goosebumps or bouts of surprised laughter.
No matter which way you choose to deal with creepiness: if you decide to deal with it in a more confronting way or even weave it into an erotic play: this for sure needs courage, resilience and self-confidence. These characteristic traits don't come from nowhere and it is fine if they are not part of your resources yet. Who knows what happened in your life that makes attaining them more difficult. So please be kind to yourself. No need to spread oneself too thin if the time is not right.
But if you feel a calling and curiosity: In workshops with the goal of empowerment, this is exactly what can be trained. Maybe like some form of exposure therapy.
This could help not only to have intensive, unique, sensory-affective experiences, to expand one's own horizon and scope of action and to gain insights into oneself and the world, but also to make a difference on a larger level.
ON CREEPY OLD MXN & BEYOND - & playSPACE
Saturday, 18.12.2021 - Workshop10:00 - 17:00h - PlaySpace 20:00 - 1:00h
serrat(u)s bodywork, Zwinglistrasse 40, 8004 Zurich
Book you tickets >>here
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*we use the star because we cannot know for sure if the people who in the explained case scenarios actually identify as women themselve. Also it is possible to be treated with similar misogynistic behavior if one does not identify as female but is perceived so for any reason.
