Sexual Creepiness

Accusations of sexual creepiness are increasingly common, but are such accusations morally problematic? Legal scholar Heidi Matthews thinks so, arguing that the category of sexual creepiness conflicts with liberal and progressive moral commitments. While principled liberals and progressives may reject creepiness as a legitimate moral category, doing so may come at a cost. Empirical findings about who gets accused of being creepy suggest that the creepiness norm has been repurposed to control male sexual advances in two ways: first, by discouraging substandard male suitors from approaching young women unlikely to be interested in them (“prefiltration”); and second, by stigmatizing age-discrepant relationships in order to steer older men away from younger women and toward age-matched partners (“redirection”). Repurposing creepiness in these ways would benefit women in mating markets transformed by liberal sexual norms and technological change. If something like this hypothesis is correct, the ethical question liberals and progressives must wrestle with is whether these benefits justify maintenance of a creepiness norm that is (inter alia) lookist, ageist, sexist, sex-negative, and neuronormative.