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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”.
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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.
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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
Blue’s Clues was pretty anodyne stuff, and I never had a problem with my kids watching it. It was never frenetic, it was calm.
And the Tonya Harding joke is suddenly timely again!
I remember when our daughter, still a teenager IIRC, told us, “See! I told you he looked like a child molester.” We had not taken her seriously at the time. The truth came out when the man committed suicide rather than go back to jail (which we had not known about). Our oldest son was surprised when he heard the news from us: “He was friendly, but not that friendly.”
I don’t have to. I’ve seen it. I wanted to include it with the other two, but I couldn’t remember its name. Thanks for the reminder. (Yo Gabba Gabba – the most disturbing song I remember from that show was “Party in my Tummy“)
I watched Blue’s Clues with my older two. I thought that one was cute.
You keep referencing spidey senses. I’m wondering how comfortable you are with young men in tights.
Did you have your handy dandy….notebook?
Do they roam around the forest looking for fights?
I see. Yes, that’s a risk. So, how do we overcome it? I’d say more by encouraging curiosity than disabling our creep-o-meter. Cultivating meeting spaces where people can get to know one another in a low-threat environment also helps.
Curiosity and risk-tolerance can both be reduced in the elderly, although it’s also true that some people mellow as they age.
As is often pointed out, there are black people who find meeting a young black man in a dark, deserted alley creepier than meeting a white person there. Meet a young, black man behaving like a normal congregant Sunday morning at your church, on the other hand, and the safety of the environment really ought to take over so that your creep-o-meter doesn’t go off.
There are people whose creep-o-meter is way too sensitive, as well as people who cannot gracefully handle themselves when their creep-o-meter is pinged.
In the workplace, we meet people repeatedly and often (not always) in a low-threat context. It’s sad that familiarity over time didn’t reduce their feeling of creepiness (familiarity is supposed to help). Especially sad if they couldn’t treat him with respect despite feeling creeped. Being rude to someone who creeps you out can sometimes be necessary (if that someone, say, creeps you out by demonstrating contempt for your boundaries), but often there are polite ways to ensure your safety despite feeling creeped out.
I don’t think listening to one’s “creeped out” instincts is the same thing as summarily condemning a person as forever “creep”. Sure, there are people who earn the “creep” label in ways that deserve no reconsideration, but it’s not that uncommon to find someone sometimes creepy and sometimes not, and not impossible to strike up a friendship with someone who first gave you the creeps. You just do it… carefully.
Joyner did not create the character, but as Joyner himself said, his playing Barney was no accident. They may have wanted a dino-suit wearer who oozed smarmy “love energy” through every fiber of the dino suit, and it appears that’s exactly what they got!
It’s video NyQuil.
I admit I like men in tights more when they’re wearing another garment that gives them a bit of privacy at crotch level. On the other hand, American culture is suffused with superheroes who bulge for the world to see, and familiarity renders the effect less eerie.
On the other hand, bending over backwards to ignore ones instincts can be just as much or more dangerous. There’s a difference between choosing to pass judgment based on a quick inventory of stuff that just doesn’t twirl your ticket and actually feeling hackles rise before you’re even clear on what’s causing it. That latter feeling is there for a reason.
I’m completely willing to try and move past any initial, knee-jerk judgments I might find myself making, whether I intended to or not, based on a bad first impression or whatever bias I might have about what’s comfortable or familiar to me, but if, after an honest effort, I still get an uneasy feeling around someone then at the very least, I’m going to give them wide berth.
Of course, all the above goes way past whatever anyone in my family felt about that giant, dopey dinosaur, upon whom we slapped a much more benign understanding of “creepy.” Weird, oversized creatures are hardly enough on their own to truly creep out people who grew up with H.R. Puffinstuff. We just found him smarmy and that was a turnoff.
And it is definitely not just the “different” or “unusual” or “foreign” that can trip someone’s “creep-o-meter”. My mom and both sisters with kids are notorious for being much more suspicious of and guarded around “Eddie Haskell” types than of anyone who just appears at first glance to be “different.”