Creeps and Creepiness

A few weeks ago, my colleague Georgia Warnke asked me if I have a theory of creeps to go alongside my theory of jerks.  Are jerks creepy?  Are creeps always also jerks?  What's the difference between a jerk, a creep, an asshole, a bastard, and a schmuck?

Interesting and important questions!  Really.  Slang terms of abuse often reflect one's moral vision in surprisingly subtle ways.  (See also my treatment of the sucky and the awesome.)

After hashing it out a bit, I have the beginnings of a theory.

Let's start with being creepy.  The Oxford English Dictionary traces the usage back to the late 19th century: Something is creepy if it is prone to make your skin creep from horror or repugnance.  But that's a little thin.  Why are abandoned houses creepy but not wars (which are more horrible) or puddles of vomit (which are more repugnant)?

Another possibility, suggested by a recent psychological study, suggests that creepiness is related to ambiguity of threat.  That's an interesting idea and, I think, partly right -- but not all ambiguous threats are creepy.  If a schoolteacher tells a child, "you'll be punished for that" or if a mobster says "you're gonna pay", that's an ambiguous threat, but it isn't creepy.

In his forthcoming book Making Monsters, David Livingstone Smith notes that the phenomenon of the "uncanny valley" in robots is a phenomenon of creepiness more than "uncanniness" as the word is used in 21st century English: Robots that look too close to human, without looking exactly human, seem eerie or revolting.  Here's Wikipedia's example:

Livingstone Smith notes that monsters are sometimes creepy in a similar way: Werewolves, zombies, and vampires, for example, are close to human, but not essentially human, and that fact is central to their creepiness, especially when there is malevolence beneath.

A creepy house might be creepy in a somewhat similar way: It's close to seeming like a normal house but it's not quite right.  One senses that something ominous lurks beneath the surface.  Similarly, a creepy doll combines cuteness with a hint of something wrong and malevolent.  The creepiest stories are those where you can tell that something evil is going on, because things are wrong on the surface in a foreboding way, but you can't quite place your finger on that evil.

Oddly, perhaps, the etymology of a person as a creep is quite different.  Per the OED, originally a "creep" was a thief who crept around quietly, a stealthy robber, especially one who worked in a brothel.

The contemporary use of "creep" as a noun to refer to a person no longer suggests thievery, but some of the sexualized tinge remains:  The paradigmatic creep has sneaky, sexual intentions -- the kind of person who might follow a young woman at a distance or peer through her window, taking photos.  Like the thieving creep, there's also something sneaky, something invasive.  Not all creeps are sexual, however.  A car salesman could be a creep if he acts strangely, invades your personal space, and throws you off balance with overly personal questions that superficially seem nice, for the sake of ripping you off on the sale, even without any sexual dimension.

Further complicating matters, not all creepy people are creeps.  A lean, long-fingered undertaker with a soft voice and a thin smile might be creepy.  But he's not a creep -- not unless, maybe, he also has some secret, malevolent intent.

Here's my first pass at pulling it together.  Like a creepy doll or an uncanny robot, a creep is close to normal on the outside, but not quite normal.  There's something subtly off in the creep's appearance or manner, as though the creep is wearing a mask that doesn't quite fit.  Beneath the surface lurks an active malevolence -- maybe sexual, maybe not -- that somehow pokes through.  The creep is sneaky and invasive, not blatantly aggressive.  You can sense, somehow, that the creep is untrustworthy.  But you can't quite nail down exactly what is wrong or what the creep is secretly planning.

[Thanks to Georgia Warnke, Katharine Henshaw, and Tom Cogswell for discussion.]

[Opening picture is a still from Weirdy's rendition of Radiohead's song "Creep" in The Hollow.]

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Update, 1:02 p.m.

On Twitter, Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa posted a helpful pair of comments that I append here:

A "creep" in my experience is someone who misunderstands or misapplies social mores of politeness just enough to be threatening or dangerous in certain contexts or to certain people, but no so much that they are likely to end up in trouble with their friends or bosses.

Subtlety is not necessary. Also see: men who usher you into rooms alone during a party on a pretext, unsolicited nudes, ppl who proposition you in inappropriate locations (ex., work, a cafeteria, groceries), ppl who leer at your body on public transport, ppl who shout innuendo.

I really like the idea that creeps misunderstand or misapply social mores of politeness. This seems central to canonical cases of creeps, including both the creepy sexual harrasser and the creepy car salesman. Without this abuse of politeness, maybe the person really isn't a creep. The creep's misuse of politeness might be both the surface feature that strikes others as ominous and also the guise under which the creep covers his intentions.

Unsubtle creeps are perhaps more of a challenge for my view. A first-pass answer is that the unsubtle behavior might be the final delivery of the malevolent intent, revealing that any earlier quasi-normal, quasi-polite behavior was a facade. It's like when the ghost finally reveals itself in the creepy house or when the salesman finally drops all pretense of chumminess.

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Update, 1:42 p.m.

Also: I seem to have missed David Livingstone Smith's Aeon article on creepiness, which emphasizes the creepy as unnatural and category violating (is a creep also unnatural and category violating, or here do the terms diverge?), and Bonnie Mann's brilliant analysis, in an APA Newsletter article, of "creepers" as men who, through sexual acquisitiveness and feelings of entitlement, steal women's time and pre-empt their ability to structure the relationship non-sexually or on their own sexual terms.