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Warding Off the Creepy
Nov. 5th, 2020 08:05 amYesterday I was refreshing feeds and doomscrolling, as one does while waiting for votes in swing states to be counted, when I got a rejection letter from a progressive American SFF magazine. Rejection letters are par for the course, but the timing could not have been worse. The wording of the email was also quite strong. I have an entire folder in Gmail that I'm slowly filling with rejection letters, but this one hurt more than it should have.
I understand why rejection letters have to be written like that, though. I feel like there are just so many creepy people out there that you have to make boundaries absolutely clear.
Case in point:
I've been receiving creepy "newsletters" from some random man all year. They come once a month through the mail, and the handwriting on the envelopes is just as creepy as the personal nature of the letters. I thought this would stop when I changed addresses, but the post office has been forwarding them to me here in Philadelphia. There is a fading culture of zine mailing lists that I think this person is trying to keep alive, but I don't know him at all, and I don't know how he got my mailing address, and getting these creepy letters with creepy handwriting is... Well, it's creepy.
On getting another creepy letter in the mail yesterday, I finally snapped and wrote this man a three-line email, saying that I know he means no harm, but please stop sending me things because this is creepy, and PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL. So of course he responds, immediately, saying that he did not mean to be creepy, etc etc etc etc etc, and it was... Yeah, it was super creepy.
Can you even imagine being the editor of a fiction magazine and having to deal with men like this? Of course rejection letters have to be strong.
Still, couldn't this magazine have, you know, waited a day or two? Honestly.
Anyway, I recently read that, according to several university studies, men are more afraid of being called "creepy" than they are of being called just about anything else (like "stupid" or "ugly" or "weak"). And I want to say to them, Have you considered not being creepy? There are always going to be Karens who see something that doesn't fit into their straight white upper-middle class view of the world and perceive it as "creepy," and fuck those Karens, but what "creepy" is really all about (at least in this context) is uninvited and unwanted personal contact. Of course women can be creepy too, but I suspect the sense of entitlement that many men seem to have regarding their right to receive attention tends to exacerbate their creepy behavior.
I understand why rejection letters have to be written like that, though. I feel like there are just so many creepy people out there that you have to make boundaries absolutely clear.
Case in point:
I've been receiving creepy "newsletters" from some random man all year. They come once a month through the mail, and the handwriting on the envelopes is just as creepy as the personal nature of the letters. I thought this would stop when I changed addresses, but the post office has been forwarding them to me here in Philadelphia. There is a fading culture of zine mailing lists that I think this person is trying to keep alive, but I don't know him at all, and I don't know how he got my mailing address, and getting these creepy letters with creepy handwriting is... Well, it's creepy.
On getting another creepy letter in the mail yesterday, I finally snapped and wrote this man a three-line email, saying that I know he means no harm, but please stop sending me things because this is creepy, and PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL. So of course he responds, immediately, saying that he did not mean to be creepy, etc etc etc etc etc, and it was... Yeah, it was super creepy.
Can you even imagine being the editor of a fiction magazine and having to deal with men like this? Of course rejection letters have to be strong.
Still, couldn't this magazine have, you know, waited a day or two? Honestly.
Anyway, I recently read that, according to several university studies, men are more afraid of being called "creepy" than they are of being called just about anything else (like "stupid" or "ugly" or "weak"). And I want to say to them, Have you considered not being creepy? There are always going to be Karens who see something that doesn't fit into their straight white upper-middle class view of the world and perceive it as "creepy," and fuck those Karens, but what "creepy" is really all about (at least in this context) is uninvited and unwanted personal contact. Of course women can be creepy too, but I suspect the sense of entitlement that many men seem to have regarding their right to receive attention tends to exacerbate their creepy behavior.
