Socially Awkward Isn’t An Excuse

by Dr. NerdLove
culled from:http://www.doctornerdlove.com
It’s that time of year again: convention season gets started, students go on Spring Break and we brace ourselves for a new round of stories about creepers, predators and generally shitty dating behavior. It’s Creep Week 2014: like Shark Week, except during Shark Week everyone is actually rooting for the shark. So it’s time to talk about creepy behavior, how to avoid it and what to do about it.

“It’sssss the mosssst wonderful time of the year!”

And today, I’m going to piss a lot of you off. I’m going to piss a lot of you off and I’m going to do it deliberately. Because today I’m going to take a whack at one of the greatest sacred cows on the Internet: the Socially Awkward Exception.
This is something I’ve seen over and over again whenever the topic of meeting women comes up: the plight of the guys who supposedly have been mislabeled as “creepers” when in reality they’re just socially awkward and we should all be giving them a break, maaaan.
All too often, we hear that someone who’s socially awkward should get a pass because, hey, he doesn’t know that he’s doing something wrong! He’s probably really just a nice guy! Shouldn’t she be nice to him, anyway? Or maybe she should just teach him what he did was wrong!

Sure, he stands too close, ignores signs that people don’t want to talk to him, keeps trying to give women massages and says incredibly inappropriate things to women at the drop of a hat… but he brings Chimay to the party!

Except… no. No, we shouldn’t. More often than not the problem isn’t about being socially awkward, it’s about pushing boundaries; claiming that being socially awkward – or defending someone on the grounds that they’re just awkward – means that we shouldn’t be so hard on them becomes about excusing their behavior and helping them put pressure on women to tolerate that behavior. But even when someone genuinely is socially awkward, it ultimately does not matter.
Assuming you haven’t clicked away in disgust, let’s get into why social awkwardness isn’t an excuse.

The Socially Awkward Vs. Creepers

Being socially awkward is often held up as a defense against being labeled “creepy”; it’s another variation of “it’s only creepy if you’re ugly”, but with the vague hints of ableism or social justice for flavor. Almost everyone has been creeped out by someone out only to be told “Aw, he means well. He just doesn’t know any better,” or “Hey, he’s a nice guy! He does so much for us! He’s just a little awkward, you know?” There’s tremendous social pressure to look the other way, to “give him a second chance”.
Let’s run down just what makes someone creepy again:

• Behaving in a manner that makes someone feel uncomfortable, unsafe or threatened.
• Behaving in a manner that pushes against an individual’s boundaries – especially repeatedly.

That second one is incredibly important and forms a critical distinction: creepers and predators will frequently push against people’s boundaries in order to see what they can get away with. When they get caught, they’ll often claim to be “socially awkward” as a way of deflecting responsibility for their actions and – more importantly – putting pressure on their target to let them violate their boundaries with impunity. Many creepers will turn their actions around on their victim and make it seem as if they’re the one being unreasonable. “Hey, I was just paying you a compliment!” “I just wanted to talk to you!” “It was just a joke, geez, get a sense of humor.” “Man, don’t be so sensitive.”

“Giving out random shoulder massages to women we don’t know is how we say ‘hello’ in my country. Why do you insult my culture?”

Someone who is socially awkward, on the other hand, is someone who has issues with basic social skills. They may have acute anxiety or nervousness in social settings. They may not be used to social norms, have a hard time keeping the conversation flowing naturally, or get nervous and say the wrong thing at the worst possible time. More often than not, someone who is socially awkward has poor social calibration; they may make people uncomfortable because their behavior feels off. When someone isn’t behaving in a way that’s congruent with the social context, we get uncomfortable because they’re inadvertently signaling that something is wrong; it might be that they’re dangerous or there’s a hazard the rest of us haven’t noticed, but that “off” behavior is going to make us instinctively look for a threat.
But being anxious or socially clumsy or inexperienced isn’t the same as being creepy. Someone who is socially awkward will occasionally trip over somebody else’s boundaries by accident because they may not necessarily understand where the line is in the first place. A creeper, on the other hand, knows exactly where those boundaries are… he just doesn’t care. A socially awkward person frequently realizes that they fucked up almost as soon as the words are out of their mouth and will often freeze up or try to verbally backpedal; a creeper who is using “socially awkward” as an excuse on the other hand, will wield their supposed infraction against the other person as proof that they didn’t do anything wrong… or rely on others to do their defending for them.
In fact, we have an excellent example of this behavior. Let’s examine a recent bout of internet infamy for “awkward vs. creeper”, shall we?

“She Should Have Been Clearer”

Last month, the tale of  “FedoraBeard vs. The Hot Topic Clerk” hit the popular image sharing site Imgur and rocketed across blogs and tumblrs into Internet legend. To sum up the situation: a guy developed a crush on a clerk he saw while shopping at a Hot Topic. After getting her name from a mutual friend, he tracked her down on Facebook and proceeded to attempt to woo her… to disastrous results.