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Girls, This Is Why You Should Trust Your Creep-o-meter
Whether those on the right should accept gals labeling guys “creeps” is contested. Some argue the label is anti-male, merely stigmatizing regular guys venturesome enough to display a typical male behavior: approaching gals who might not find them hot. “It’s not creepy if he’s hot” is considered biotruth by some. On the other hand, many on the right also want women to be more risk-averse about sex, and part of risk aversion is trusting your spidey-senses.
I just found out a longtime spidey-sense of mine has been validated. As a child, I found Barney the Dinosaur creepy. Now we can all know why:
While training to be “a software analyst at Texas Instruments”, the actor we would come to know but not-necessarily-love as “Barney” developed an interest in erotic esoterica, and is now a tantric massage specialist “and spiritual healer”. He heals his clients (“goddesses”, he calls them) spiritually by pleasing them sexually, a process described as releasing a woman’s “blocked energy”.
***
Which, if you’re up on your historical gynecology, resembles, at least in theory, how doctors used to treat female “hysteria”. Treating hysteria was perfunctory and unromantic compared to what the man formerly known as Barney offers, though:
A full session with tantra massage specialist and spiritual healer David Joyner lasts three to four hours and costs $350. For that price, female clients—the only kind he accepts—can [also] expect to receive a ritual bath, chakra balancing, and a massage.
So it’s not just wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. It comes with a pampering spa treatment, too! Godly pampering spa treatment, if Joyner is to be believed, for Joyner has long led a regular prayer life, praying to God to be used as a conduit of divine love.
He’s the type of guy prone to spitting out a quote like this: “When you [redacted – this is a family website with a wife website and kids at home], it should be just like you’re saying grace, like blessing the food you’re about to receive. No food in the world can compare to goddess nectar because spirit is involved. Before you taste the goddess nectar, give thanks. Say grace.”
Being thankful for the good things in life is important, but what’s most disconcerting about Joyner’s prayer life as erotic masseur is its similarity to his prayer life while he was Barney:
“Before I got into the [Barney] costume, I would pray and ask God to allow his loving divine spirit to flow through me through the costume and let that draw the kids. That energy would always draw them in,” Joyner says. “Children are more connected spiritually than [adults]. A lot of times when I see infants and I’m out and about at the grocery store or whatever, they start staring at me. I make the joke, ‘You know who I am.’”
Joyner says he also used his tantra training to maintain his energy during long days on the set where he wore the hot (temps could reach 120 degrees inside it), 70-pound costume for several hours and numerous takes for various scenes. Tantra helped him “maintain an abundance of joy during the process,” he says.
***
We civilize ourselves by rising above our instincts, but that’s not the same as ignoring them. Girls’ spidey-sense about creepy guys is a valuable instinct, one girls should not be trained to dismiss, despite the possibility of false positives, of classifying guys as creepy when they’re not. It’s not uncommon for detection systems to feature a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity: the price of false alarms might be worth it if it means catching more true alarms.
The optimal balance between the risk of ignoring true alarms and registering false alarms can, of course, be debated. I’d bet most of us have known a smoke-detector or two whose balance we’d call into question – perhaps with a sledgehammer if we could. But because men have a physical advantage over women, a false negative on a woman’s creep-o-meter could spell real trouble. Hence, female spidey-senses are geared toward sensitivity at the price of specificity. Which isn’t fair, but then life rarely is.
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Maybe we shouldn’t judge the man formerly known as Barney as threatening or “creepy”. After all, he doesn’t have to go prowling for unsuspecting targets: his livelihood relies on women knowingly coming to him. He’s never been accused of harassment. California law (of course he lives in California) does, however, categorize “massage with the intent of causing arousal [as] solicitation”, a categorization which seems especially applicable when Joyner offers his paying clients internal massages with one particular portion of his anatomy. In his defense, he explains,
“Not all of my sessions have sex or ‘spiritual intimacy.’ It’s only in the full-sessions… Because then it’s about understanding that when the lingam and the yoni connect there’s a spiritual exchange that takes place, not physical pleasure. It’s not about sex… It’s about removing emotionally blocked energy.”
Joyner’s quaint exotic euphemisms might leave the reader wondering why he doesn’t pepper his conversations with yab-yums, too. And why the doctors treating hysterical women back in the days of Empire didn’t think to combine their duties with Orientalism. (Or maybe some of them did.) Though, to his credit, he seems to have come by his talents as erotic masseur relatively honestly:
[W]hile practicing massage on the side of his main gig at TI, clients began telling him his touch aroused them, he says.
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While Joyner was employed as Barney, Barney’s attorneys (of course Barney had attorneys) informed him he could not be openly tantric. Nonetheless,
“I often shared with the crew that the energy I brought up in the costume is based on the foundation of tantra—love,” he says.
He adds,
“I always said it was never an accident, and that I was meant to do this character,” he says. “Because a lot of the elements of Barney were a lot of the things I was training with in tantra.”
Many folks can behave decently when called upon to do so despite having skeletons (or, in this case, yonis and lingams) in their closet. But finding out Barney had his closet stuffed full of Orientalized erotica while he was on set cavorting with children strikes me as explanatory: no wonder the big purple dino creeped me out.
It’s no surprise that the man inside the Barney suit had private, adult interests. Nonetheless, girls (and boys, too, though Joyner seems strongly gynephilic) shouldn’t be discouraged from having a guy like Joyner ping their creep-o-meter. Whatever we make of Joyner’s tantric practices, practices which appear to feature an… unusual configuration of sexual boundaries, they risk clashing with the more customary sexual boundaries we’re better-prepared to enforce. Especially if gals are expected to be the gatekeepers of sex, to be distinct from guys in their tendency – and duty – to be more sexually cautious, the instincts supporting that caution ought to be valued, too.
Published in Entertainment
To be fair, I think it was mainly the drugs ingested by the stoners watching Teletubbies that lowered their IQ rather than the show per se…
I’d have to say that depends on your opinion of the show.
I love you
You love me
Why does it hurt when I pee?
With a knick-knack paddy whack,
Dino gets a bone.
Barneysaur came rolling home!
Had no idea that was their real audience!
Our eldest was born in the late 90’s, so we spent a few years with Barney – particular favorites were the show about the Fort Worth Zoo and the “Greatest Hits” CD. We also watched the Wiggles and Sesame Street; still have some VHS lying around somewhere. No Teletubies.
Other than stray lefty sentiments which went above and beyond the general kid show theme of “be good to each other”, I never got excised about Barney even when it was in vogue for the parents to rail about it. Little kid music is for little kids – that’s why they like it. Besides, I always felt that the window for the kids to be interested in this type of fare was pretty narrow – the real world was coming quickly enough.
In the end, I am much more sanguine learning that the guy inside the dinosaur suit moved on to being a tantric gigolo (i.e., charging adults) than learning about some of the behind the scenes players in the world of “older kid” shows that my kids watched post-Barney. It is despicable.
I’m just trying to imagine the job interview /audition ….
What intersection is there between these two sets? tantric massage spiritualist giggalo and giant purple dinosaur …. ooops answered my own question. Never mind.
Yes, and this is most definitely not it.
Well, if it’s not within marriage, it’s not spiritual from a Judeo Christian perspective. Saints’ spirituality that seems to embrace God sexually is a metaphor, as far as I can tell. They don’t masturbate in their ecstasy. Sorry for being crude.
I was thinking about this last night while walking the dog after I had commented. I used to think Barney was creepy too until I had my child and we watched a few episodes. Watching the actual episodes made me more comfortable with him. I don’t think there is anything sexually suggestive there. I did not find him creepy after watching him a few times.
I watched the far superior Baloney and friends (clip starts at 1:22)
I was exposed to Barney for a short period when my daughter was very young. It wasn’t more than a couple months when she stopped asking to watch the show. I never could stand watching, it was just too sickly sweet and generally strange, but I wrote that off because the show was targeted at 3 year olds.
That said, does it really matter what the lifestyle of the man in the purple dinosaur suit is? Now, if the writing or his actions were sexual, or indicative of sexuality, that would be different. I never had the slightest hint of any such thing. Just a lot of ‘I love you, you love me, we are a great big family’ over and over.
I wonder if it isn’t taking this ‘creep’ radar a bit to far to extrapolate his subsequent belief in tantric massage in to pedophilia or whatever it is that you suspect him of? Must every person who interacts with children, even on TV dressed in a dinosaur suit, meet the highest standard of purity in their personal lives outside the suit?
Also, in a kind of twisted sense, isn’t this like saying if he is of a religion or philosophy you don’t agree with, he can’t be trusted in a costume around kids?
I just wonder if maybe this ‘creep-dar’ isn’t a rather dangerous and capricious method of judging strangers? Besides, in my experience, many unattractive or disabled people give some the creeps… I think it is best to carefully examine any such emotional first impressions, as they may well be revealing something creepy in your reaction as much as that being reacted to?
On a lighter note, after preschool one day my daughter came home singing ‘I hate you, you hate me, let’s get together and kill Barney’. Now that was creepy…
Maybe I was too indirect in my response to you before, so I’m going to be blunter.
The quote where he talks about his experience inside the suit is ambiguous, but can be read to mean he was masturbating inside it. So, there definitely exists the suggestion of sexual behavior in front of children while he is working, and that suggestion comes out of his own mouth. With that clarified…
1. Do you really think it’s okay if someone masturbates to children?
2. Do you really think it’s okay if someone masturbates at their work place while they are supposed to be working?
3. Do you really think if the masturbation is unnoticed in those settings, that makes it OK?
My goodness, that is a leap!
I’ve never heard the term “biotruth” before, but that’s one I’ll have to remember. A useful shorthand.
I know several women who have admitted that there’s a lot of truth in “It’s not creepy if he’s hot”. (I wonder if there’s an equivalent for guys? “It’s not b****y if she’s hot?”) I’m not sure how it applies here though. “Barney” and “hot” just doesn’t compute unless you’re talking about how hellish it is watching the show as an adult. (There is one other hot Barney exception I’ll explain in a bit.)
Someone gave my older daughters a Barney DVD when they were little (2003 or so). The case never got thrown away but whenever they asked me to watch it the DVD inside had mysteriously disappeared. The few times they did see the show were all it took for me to understand why people hate it so much.
I remarried in 2010 and my wife’s maiden name is Barney. For fairly obvious reasons she loathes the character. But for me “Barney” and “hot” do go together just fine. As long as it’s not the purple dinosaur.
What a scam artist. How is this not considered prostitution?
Barney can’t compete with General Zod (Terrence Stamp)
I bet Brando was up for it.
Once you try purple….
Aw, come on. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who was thinking it.
Someone should have told him if he didn’t stop he’d go extinct.
In my childhood, it was exactly that kind of saccharine, cloying protestation of love that I found creepy.
Perception of creepiness is about ambiguity of threat. It is less specific than suspecting someone of something specific.
Dangerous how?
Here is a paper on the perception of “creepiness”. Maybe I’ll summarize it in another comment. Yes, what deviates from our norms, even when it’s nobody’s fault, can trigger a feeling of “creepiness”.
When earpieces first became common, it wasn’t always easy for us to tell people who used earpieces in public from raving lunatics. Did that make earpiece users dangerous? No. It was not being able to tell that was “creepy”, especially if such an earpiece user’s voice surprised you from behind in otherwise deserted conditions. Similarly, being tailgated late at night on a dark forest road is creepy, even if the tailgater is a cop who’s just checking to make sure your license sticker is up to date. Because unless he reveals to you that he is a cop, you just don’t know.
If, while driving, you’ve witnessed cars whose erratic behavior you were particularly eager to not get close to, you know something of what the creep-o-meter is like. It’s a precautionary alert to what you cannot rule out as threatening, not moral condemnation.
It strikes me as a healthy response to the big purple fella!
I presume that a little death was not what she had in mind.
OK, I understand that, and the general idea of trusting your instincts. My point was that with our instinct to be creeped out by what deviates from our norm, it can mislead us in to thinking people of different races, with unusual or malformed appearance, different religions or even foreign dress or accent are creepy, and not worthy of getting to know. That is the danger I mean. On another thread, I mentioned that my grandmother was scared of black people. She was creeped out by them, simply due to the fact that in her day, there were very few around, and she did not know any. They were different, thus creepy. She didn’t hate them, or wish them ill , she just was uncomfortable around them. (Yes, that is racism… based on creep o meter judgment)
Another example I will relate, I worked with a man for many years who suffered from a lazy eye. It was an extreme case, and very noticeable. Despite the fact that he is a decent, very likeable man, I heard from a number of other employees that he creeped them out. They had let their (understandable) instinct that he was creepy due to his eye not looking ‘right’ override any concrete assessment of the man and his personality.
That is why I say it is dangerous. You may have a first impression based on appearance, or some other ‘vibe’, that precludes a fair assessment of a person. Unless you can make a fair and clear assessment of why your instinct leans toward creep, you may just be discriminating against someone due to appearance.
not in preschool, I hope!
Hey Gabba Gabba was worse than either of those.
You can find it on Youtube. But I don’t advise you looking for it.
@midge, you always write the most interesting, comment generating posts! I wonder, though … did this guy invent the Barney character, or was he just portraying him the way the writers/directors wanted? If the latter, his creepiness factor was not necessarily a result of him personally, no matter how much “spirituality” he poured into it. I will admit, though, that hearing about this now is retro-actively disturbing.
I love you, you love me, Barney gave me HIV…
At least that was how we mocked it when it came out.
I watched an episode of ‘Blue’s Clues’ with my granddaughter a few weeks ago ( she is about 20 months old) after a professor I respect recommended it, and it was a bit annoying- but for a kid that small, it probably is what is needed to keep them interested.
By the tenth time the host flashed his hands and said ‘Look! A Blue’s CLUE!’ I was ready to turn it off, but she seemed to eat it up…