You Can Be Autistic AND an Asshole
You Can Be Autistic AND an Asshole
As a woman who was diagnosed late with autism (at age 46), I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to figure out what autism looks like for women and why it took so long for me to figure out that I was autistic and why it still takes so long for me to convince other people that I’m autistic. Sometimes, when people respond, “But you don’t seem autistic,” I dig into their assumptions and realize that autism=lack of empathy and then there is a long conversation that follows. There are so many stereotypes to autistic behavior as well, and one of the main ones is that, well, we can be unyielding, in particular. It’s tricky, when talking about so-called “high-functioning” autism, to distinguish between what is autistic behavior and what is merely being an asshole. I will admit that the difficulty here increases, in my opinion, when talking about male-centric autistic characteristics. Ultimately, I think this has to do more with how society genders us and pressures us to adhere to gender than it has to do with autism. But more on that later.
As a woman, I was constantly taught that my job was to do emotional work for others. I was supposed to be a nurturer, a carer. I was “naturally” empathetic and giving. I was supposed to pay attention to social cues and follow them all the time. I was supposed to see people’s faces and read their intentions and react to their unspoken feelings and desires. I was supposed to be good at helping others and also supposed to enjoy this without any compensation or really any acknowledgment. When I turned out not to be good at these things, I was often perceived as unfeminine (my lack of feminine clothing or hairstyles and makeup added to this). The remedy for this was often to teach me more explicitly how to be kind, compassionate, and feminine in support roles.
When I was still unable to do this, I was often labeled “selfish,” “rude,” or “obstinate.” I often wanted (at least when I was younger) to figure out how to be better at understanding others. I often thought it was my job to figure out if anyone was upset and to defuse the situation, often by apologizing myself or by explaining one person to another. I wasn’t great at this, but I did it willingly and when I became a mother and started caring for small children, much of the criticism of my perceived masculinity disappeared because I was less threatening to the patriarchy.
But I still was told that I interrupted other people, was rude, or talked incessantly about my special interests. Men who do these things might be more often diagnosed early on as autistic. Women are often missed in the same way that women who present with heart attack symptoms are missed because they don’t appear to be exactly the same.
I think some people who interacted with me in my teen years and into my twenties and thirties might have thought of me as purely an “asshole” when I monopolized the conversation or missed what they thought were obvious hints about what they wanted me to do. But there is a distinction in my mind between people who refuse to pay attention to other people’s emotions and people who struggle to notice or pick up on social cues and facial expressions or body language.
There are certainly autists who won’t listen to helpful explanations about other people’s feelings, social expectations, or hurtful ways of seeing the world in black and white terms. These are, in my mind, deliberate assholes and not just autistic. But it can be hard to tell the difference, I admit, when you aren’t adept at talking to autistic people about what is going on socially.
My experience has been that most autists are well aware (by about age 16, anyway) that they are often putting their foot into it and are actually eager to hear some helpful feedback about what they might better do to figure out how to speak in a better way or notice things that are actually possible to notice. (You can actually speak fairly bluntly to us about such things, though I do recommend speaking to an autist privately and not publicly because it can be embarrassing.)
Getting a diagnosis for autism has made me more keenly aware of my deficits in social interaction. Before the diagnosis, unfortunately, there were times when I didn’t necessarily think that the neurotypical way of existing was valid and I sometimes dismissed other people’s expectations of me as ridiculous. Then I went through a phase where I hated everything autistic about myself and thought anything I did naturally was wrong. I’ve come to a middle place since then where I try hard to balance social needs and my own needs in some way.
We might have a discussion later on about how much more effort female autists seem to be expected to put into pretending to be like other women socially, or how much more effort women in general (autistic or not) are expected to put into caretaking and social reciprocity when men are not expected to do the same, and if they do, are given far more praise than women are.
In the end, I think autists are often clueless. We make mistakes. We hurt feelings. But we don’t usually do this intentionally and we often want social connection. We don’t necessarily see ourselves as superior to others, though I won’t pretend there are autists like this, especially male autists who are undiagnosed and very intelligent and some autists who are diagnosed and still consider themselves superior.
Weirdly, some autists really like being around other autists because we have our own social rules that make more sense to us, and being blunt and rude is often assumed as normal and natural. But I still think there is a difference between being an asshole, which I think is when people knowingly treat others badly and refuse to change their behavior because they don’t care about anyone’s feelings and autists who are just making social gaffes and have good intentions. And yes, I think this often can be divided on gendered lines, though that says more about our ideas of gender than it does about autism.