My working definition of creepy, most typical case: a man who interacts with a woman in a way she doesn’t want that doesn’t fit in another category. This seems a decent extensional map, though if you’re using a different one we’d be talking apst each other and I’m willing to switch.
The important thing to me is that being creepy is bad. You are causing an interaction someone doesn’t want, this is a priori bad. I believe that there are women who are unhappy because men who are unattractive interacted with them in a way that they would have appreciated had the man been attractive. That’s OK. People are allowed to have preferences. Just because I could be non-creepy doing X if I was attractive, doesn’t mean that I should feel it is acceptable for me to do X. Attractiveness is not morally different from generic social skills. It is objectionable for people to make others feel bad, regardless of where that comes from. Yes, this means that if you’re unattractive, you’re obligated to be more cautious in your social life.
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The other important thing to note about your definition is that it’s asymmetric. Unwanted interactions are taken to be morally weighty, but unwanted non-interactions are neglected, and in fact are more or less required. There is no moral reason for this. (There is, of course, a social or in some sense “political” reason, which is that attractive people make the rules.) I believe the SSC post “Radicalizing the Romanceless” addressed this.
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I never said that unwanted non-interactions don’t matter. I didn’t focus on them, because I was discussing unwanted interactions, but I agree that they matter. I liked Radicalizing the Romanceless.
The thing is, it’s good signaling for women to complain about unwanted interactions and bad signaling to complain about unwanted non-interactions, so we probably way overweight the badness of unwanted interactions just based on availability heuristic from complaints we’ve heard.
I’d prefer the marginal guy to hit on me and it’s hard to say that in a way that doesn’t sound low-status. Girls complain in private that guys never ask them out, and then in public join in the general whining about “Ugh, creepy guys hitting on on me, so exhausting.”