Sexual Creepiness

Abstract

Accusations of sexual creepiness are on the rise, but are such accusations morally problematic? Legal scholar Heidi Matthews thinks so, arguing that sexual creepiness as a category is in tension with liberal and progressive moral commitments. Principled liberals and progressives can reject creepiness as a category, but the costs of abandoning sexual creepiness may be high. Empirical findings about who gets accused of being creepy suggest that the creepiness norm is being 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 deflecting eligible older men away from young women and towards older women (“redirection”). If something like this hypothesis is correct, the ethical question liberals and progressives must wrestle with is whether these benefits justify maintenance of a norm that is (inter alia) lookist, ageist, sexist, sex-negative, and neuronormative.

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Dan Demetriou
University of Minnesota, Morris

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References found in this work

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Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz, Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109.
Plain sex.Alan Goldman - 1977 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (3):267-287.
The Creeps as a Moral Emotion.Jeremy Fischer & Rachel Fredericks - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7:191-217.

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