N.B. misandry is not real because men are not systemically oppressed (uninternalize your reddit MRA today: men suffer some drawbacks under the patriarchy but ultimately still maintain it due to the large amount of privileges they receive under it!)
N.B. misandry is not real because men are not systemically oppressed (uninternalize your reddit MRA today: men suffer some drawbacks under the patriarchy but ultimately still maintain it due to the large amount of privileges they receive under it!)
Not that women who are bad at talking to people don’t exist but you can rest assured this inability would not have been tolerated by whatever parenting or social pressures existed when you were growing up if you were a girl/woman.
I’m not denying that women experience these problems of intolerance and social pressures and I’m not denying that they’re worse and more common than what guys experience. They do and they are. But the ideas that all guys are “trained to inflict suffering” [the comment I initially replied to] and that guys never experience the same or similar problems (although to a lesser degree) [your comment] are ridiculous.
Most autistic people experience problems related to their social inabilities. I’ve been spanked for crying when my dad didn’t understand why I was crying (which in retrospect were mostly things related to me being autistic, like experiencing sensory overload) and yelled at me to stop which just made me cry more. That didn’t train me to inflict suffering on others, if anything it did the opposite. A large part of my social anxiety that developed as I got older is not wanting to bother others to any extent or make them uncomfortable.
To use as a metaphor a related topic that’s IMO more straightforward to discuss and understand due to its direct physical consequences:
CW: sexual violence
I completely recognize that female genital mutilation is much much worse than circumcision. But that doesn’t mean that circumcision isn’t a problem or that all guys in a society that practices FGM are accepting of and perpetuating FGM.
As somebody also on the autistic spectrum I can tell you we experience the same gendered social conditioning as everybody else, and we have an even harder time realizing it due to difficulties accessing the emotions driving our own actions. A lot of autistic people like to think of themselves as martians come to earth who exist outside of human cultural mores. This is a very flattering self-deception. We have to do the same work as everybody else unwinding the things we were taught. It’s fine that you withdraw so as not to inflict yourself on other people, I do the same thing. But is this not an admission that we do in fact inflict suffering on others? How much of that is due to patriarchy and how much is due to autistic social skill shortfalls, perhaps exacerbated by patriarchy?
I really didn’t want to comment on anything in this thread because it looks like a shitshow, but I would caution against implying or even believing that any harm inflicted on others is “caused by” autism. Indeed, everyone experiences the same patriarchal conditioning, including autistic people, but a few things to note.
Be cautious about unilaterally assuming said conditioning. This does not apply to this thread, because this thread appears to be about a man, but many trans women and non-binary people who are AMAB are accused of having “male social conditioning” (and “having experienced male privilege”), which is problematic because it ignores the ways gender dysphoria can outright undermine those forms of conditioning and privilege.
While patriarchy may be able to exploit certain facets of autism to convince or indoctrinate autistic people and then cause harm, autism as a whole, ESPECIALLY the supposed “low social skills” associated with it, does not inflict harm on others. This is a flipping of blame from the oppressor to the oppressed on the part of neurotypical society. If you have low social skills, ESPECIALLY if because of autism, the blame absolutely falls on others for not accommodating for them. Neurotypical society likes to pretend we are the ones causing harm by not understanding social cues or weird invisible implications, but it is that society causing harm by refusing to accommodate our differences that is to blame, not us for having those differences in the first place.
Maybe. There are a lot of times where I’ve caused hurt feelings for reasons that I later came to understand and internalize. I would not put the blame for those feelings on the people I hurt. It’s easy to talk about accommodations for low social skills in the abstract but when you get to what it actually entails it puts a lot of burden on others to not take offense to objectively bad behavior.
If it was because you “misunderstood” a weird neurotypical implication they made that they weren’t explicit about, actually you should blame them for it.
“Misunderstanding” someone’s weird “implications” and invisible social cues is not “objectively bad behavior”. In fact, it’s closer to objectively GOOD behavior because way too many people rely on that shit instead of actually directly communicating which people like us force them to do.