the split

Clayton and I talked about how he got really upset when I said that I hate men.

1. he said that he was partly upset because when I said I hated men he assumed I didn’t include him and he feels like people have always not counted him as a man because of his disability
2. also that it just hurt

I tried to talk about “the split” which is really what I am thinking of when I say I hate men. It is just a feeling of parts of you being in a really deep opposition to each other. For example on Saturday a really kind and friendly bad brains man (about twice my age) sat next to me on the bus and I loved that we talked and it made my whole day better but:

1. he asked me if he could sit next to me and I basically couldn’t say no
2. he kept referring to my looks
3. he made me take off my sunglasses so he could look at my eyes
4. he asked me if I had a boyfriend

This didn’t really bother me because he wasn’t trying to pressure me into giving him information so he could contact me. It didn’t feel the same as that. But it is an example of how I hate men anyway. Why did he feel like that was okay? Why was it so normal that I didn’t even feel bothered by any of it?

This is the split and it’s hard to tell how I feel about it because I want to treat everyone with charity and lovingkindness and be interested in people even if they do something I don’t agree with, even if they do something I think is terrible.

But sometimes I wonder what is me being charitable and what is me being railroaded and just putting up with people’s privilege.

In high school my best friend was this really sweet lovely kid who was also such a straight guy. He didn’t treat me bad for being gay like the other straight guys but he still said ridiculous stuff like that he thought people were just pretending to be gay for attention. I loved this boy and something I love about myself is that I am a person who could love him even though he did stuff like that.

But damn there is something a little strange in it and I occasionally get spitting mad when it occurs to me how calm I am.

Recently I said something horrible to a friend from a minority group I’m not part of. There are a lot of things wrong with what I said but the worst thing is that I didn’t feel instinctively that it was wrong the way I would if it was something that was hurtful to me. So she had to explain to me how bad it was.

She wasn’t mad. She was really sweet about it, and in her calmness, I’m guessing, was the split between her and me.

pink-collar jobs and autism

I take it really hard when I see someone defending the ability of A/autistic people to work or more generally "contribute to society" (not an idea I'm fond of) by saying things like:

*we can hyperfocus on something and do it really well.
*we might seem rude but if we work in a geeky environment, like if we are video game programmers, this won't matter! And if we don't our coworkers can learn to understand and forgive our rudeness because we do a good job.
*we may have more needs in some areas but we have fewer needs in other areas because we don't party/spend time on Facebook/care about fashion/play sports/something else stereotypically non-autistic. (It's too bad because the blog where I read this had a good point about "special needs" not always meaning "more needs" but I thought it wasn't helpful to rely on stereotypes this way.)
*we might have special interests in science or art that lead to us being amazingly skilled in those areas./We might have "splinter skills" or "savant skills."

People with and without autism say these things and they mean well. But I don't like it, not just because I am offended by stereotypes or something, but because it is personally threatening to me.

Every job I've ever held, and probably every job I've ever even applied for or been interested in, has been a pink-collar job.

I feel a little weird using the term pink-collar because it was coined for kind of a critical use--it refers to jobs usually done by women and the reason these jobs are in their own category is because they tend to be lower-paid than traditionally masculine jobs that have the same workload and educational requirements. But pink-collar is the only term I can find that easily covers the sort of jobs I am thinking of.

Some examples of pink-collar jobs are hairdressing, nursing, teaching, and waitressing. These jobs are a bit different from the kinds of jobs people are usually thinking of when they talk about how Autistic people can succeed in the workplace, because a lot of the job is about interacting with people other than coworkers. These don't all apply for every pink-collar job, but some of the requirements for a pink-collar job might be:

*treating people courteously and being friendly
*not hurting or abusing people
*being well-suited to working with kids
*remaining polite when someone gets mad at you
*being able to put someone else's well-being ahead of your own
*doing everything you can to fulfill someone's request

It is probably apparent that none of these qualities are stereotypically Autistic. I even see comments to that effect thrown around without much thought--that people with autism aren't good at customer service, or that we don't like kids. I'm not just trying to be all, "I'm good at customer service and I like kids, your argument is invalid!" but to point out that when even "positive" descriptions of Autistic people's work imply that we can't do certain kinds of work, it makes it harder for us to get jobs, or be open about our disability if we do get those jobs.

I know I'm not a super rare exception in a world of Autistic people who want to be electrical engineers, because I know lots of Autistic people, especially women, who want to work in special education. Special ed is a really good example of a field where, if you were applying for a job, you would want to convince your potential employer that you had all the qualities on that list. Which is to say that if your employer has been fed stereotypes of what Autistic people are like and what kind of work we can do, telling them you have autism could really hurt your chances of getting the job.

I know some people who will be open about their autism when applying for a job. I would never, ever do this. Right now I am looking for a job in healthcare and it scares me a lot to know that my disability label is associated with being violent, rude, and uncaring. I really love having this blog because I always wanted to write something that people liked and got something out of, but I regularly consider deleting it because it would be so easy for anyone who googles me to find out I have autism.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that even though my disability doesn't make me better at doing pink-collar jobs, I don't think it makes me worse at them, and I would like my suitability for them to be judged by who I am as a person instead of my disability label. I feel that even when people try to talk positively about what Autistic people can do in the workplace, they often ignore the fact that some Autistic people don't want to work in an office or in a stereotypically un-social field like science. So they don't defend us against some of the stereotypes about what we can and can't do, and sometimes they even reinforce those stereotypes by implying we are best at certain kinds of work.

I'd also like to point out that while my family was able to pay for me to attend college and I was (barely) able to finish my degree, a lot of people with autism don't have the option of the white-collar jobs we're supposed to be so good at. If you spend all your breath arguing that we can be engineers or architects, that doesn't help people who don't have the money or don't have the ability to get the education to do those kinds of jobs.

(NB that this post might not be relevant to people with autism who can't work, and some of it might be relevant to people with other disabilities like mood and psychotic disorders and intellectual disabilities.)

I also think you could write an entire gender studies textbook about the dynamics of ABA.

I mean, quite a lot of the time it boils down to a bunch of young, idealistic women trying to control the bodies of little boys--and getting bizarrely affronted when the boys resist.

I am working on a post about how much I hate this (not this particular post, but the whole discussion), but I got sidetracked by thinking about a particular intersection of sexism and ableism.

I don't think I'm the only person to have witnessed this series of events:

A young woman in a staff role encounters a developmentally disabled guy who "accidentally" touches her breasts, jokes about her being a stripper, jerks off in front of her, etc.

The woman is upset. She talks to a more experienced staff person, or to her supervisor, and is politely told to get over it.

Don't be upset, it's funny. He can't hurt you.

Don't be mad at him, feel sorry for him because he doesn't know any better.

When I talk about this I don't mean to imply that men with developmental disabilities sexually harass women more than other men. I'm also not sure that people's reactions are that different when it comes down to it. The staff/disabled power dynamic is just stacked on top of the idea that men should probably get to do whatever they want, so that both people are getting a shitty consolation prize for not having power.

I mean, what you tell a woman in this situation basically boils down to, "Why not be a good sport and let him have this one thing? At least you're not disabled."

apologies & far future promises

Gosh I don't post very much do I. Sorry about that. I'm not quitting. I do post on tumblr a lot, and fairly often converse about disability stuff on there. But when I'm at school it's kind of like there are the things that I run away to when I'm stressed, and it used to be this blog but now it's more often tumblr. But you know after I graduate and all I'll be able to focus and write here more. I have lots of ideas, unfortunately, as usual, including:

1. disability and gender expression, especially painful gender expression. If you have sensory & cognitive problems, being feminine or masculine can hurt, maybe being feminine especially. Among liberal people, I feel like it's often seen as a weak/oppressed behavior for someone to care so much what they look like that they would suffer for it, but given the sort of things that cause me to suffer or be overtaxed, not suffering would kind of mean not expressing myself through presentation at all. So that's interesting.

2. this post I already wrote in a notebook months ago where I talked about 3 different ways of portraying disability in pop culture: medical model (dour fiction where authority figures are always right), fake social model (funny and interesting fiction where authority figures are wrong, but the "disabled" character isn't really disabled), and actual social model. And I discuss the movie It's Kind of a Funny Story which was an admirable attempt at making a mainstream movie in social model, but was annoyingly written off by reviewers when they couldn't categorize it as medical or fake social model. So this one I just have to type up.

3. really long post which I have written a lot of, where I attempt to show that both person-first language and disability-first language are offensive, so we basically can't win and should stop caring.

4. possibly a post about The United States of Tara? As someone who doesn't have DID or have any friends with DID, my understanding is that the show portrays DID quite unrealistically so I probably should reject it. But I can't just see it as a guilty pleasure that I stick with because I've been watching it for years--there's something about the show's portrayal of disability that is really down-to-earth.

notes on my awesome book

Maybe you recall I am writing a book where I attempt to parody and reclaim a certain horror/pulp/gothic fiction trope where some or all of the following qualities:
breaking gender norms
same-sex-attraction
oddness, illness, and/or disability
childhood trauma
evil
depression
obsessive, unhealthy love
are treated as being related to each other and causing each other.

EG's mom killed EG's dad when EG was very little and was never caught. EG grew up with her mom in a very cold and isolated unit. Everything was super gothic, down to their house and their town, so EG's experience of life is very gothic as well. (I'm using initials because I don't like EG's current name.)

EG sits in her dad's study all the time and reads all her dad's favorite books and does all the things he liked to do and wear his clothes. When she is about 11, she begins to be sexually attracted to girls, which she sees as a manifestation of her father's spirit inside her. EG feels the way about her dad's ghost that some people feel about the Holy Spirit--it is working in her and changing her to make her more like him so she can stay close to him her whole life. So being attracted to girls is kind of like being able to speak in tongues.

Of course it's also a difficult and frustrating gift because EG still looks like EG and is treated as a girl when she goes out into the world, but she is her dad.

One reason I like this idea is because the narrative of lesbians and masculine women is always a narrative about hate--lesbians hate men, hate society, hate femininity. It's always an escape and rejection. Whereas EG resembles the most cliched lesbian characters but her narrative is one of love and seeking home. The difference between wearing men's clothes and wearing a particular man's clothes.

stuff to say in class

(I used to be joking when I said that and now I'm not, which is an exciting change.)

of course more of an effort needs to be made to include girls with ASD in studies at an equal rate to boys and study differences in presentation and even do all-girls studies

however, I think this is not just because we need to study what ASD is like in girls, but because we need to question commonly accepted values about how to "treat" children with ASD.

the focus is generally not just on communication and other objective skills, but on normalization of behavior, but not a ton of analysis is done on why for example preventing neologisms, preventing stimming, and training eye contact are supposed to be inherently good. But when we think about the fact that (anecdotal but very consistent evidence from professionals, parents, and people with ASD) women and girls with ASD are much more likely to pass for non-disabled, or at least be less apparently/stereotypically ASD than their male counterparts...we actually already have a bunch of passing/semi-passing ASD people to study. We can actually look at these people and see what their quality of life is.

Again from anecdotal but consistent evidence, women with ASD are more likely than men with ASD to have severe anxiety problems. I think at least one study showed that we are less likely to be married. And when you actually think about this stuff logically and not from the standard "non-disabled people>>>>everyone else forever" perspective, it makes perfect sense. Behavior is not who you really are. Focusing super hard on behaving like someone else can cause anxiety and exhaustion. Being impaired and having other people not notice that/make allowances for it, because you pass so well, can also suck. If you are behaving like someone else, you may number one fall into the uncanny valley, and number two be unable to feel things very deeply/experience real connection.

I mean, to me this is common sense and people should already be questioning "non-disabled people>>>>everyone else forever," but if we really need a study to show that forced normalization in every area of life is really NOT SMART, studying women would be an easy way to do it.

some music spamming

This song was on United States of Tara and I thought it was The Usual (girls being adorable, you know) but then I found out what it was and once I listened to it I realized it has really good lyrics and is really catchy. I am addicted to doubletracking, personally, but I think it can sometimes be a really bad idea--the live videos are so much nicer than the recording because the incredibly usual two sets of fluttery/lacy vocals make it that much harder to tell that it's a mega good song.



It's unfortunate because the whole doubletracking, sincere, really simple tunes sung by a woman thing is actually awesome but it's getting sort of old. At the same time I sometimes feel that the idea that it's old is pretty sexist--I mean, there's a lot more music by men, so when someone is like, "oh, Marina and the Diamonds just sounds like a lot of other people," and so on, it's like...well, Marina and the Diamonds sounds like a lot less people than most male musicians do.

Like, the thing with Kimya Dawson? When I used to actually play music in front of people I knew, they would tell me I sounded like her and I'd be sort of annoyed because that's not how I think of my music and I feel like people have such a small frame of reference for female singers that just because I sing in a talky way, I automatically sound like Kimya Dawson. (The real reason I got started on that track was because of Jenny-Lewis-before-she-was-awful. Saddest sellout EVER. I mean she still sings in a talky way but--everything else sucks. And the singing isn't really as good anymore either, she's trying to fit herself into "good female singing," at least a little.

)

At the same time, even though I don't think Kimya Dawson is amazing (which she arguably could be, she's just not ambitious and settles for making a kind of music that I think is often small) I actually like her music a lot--or I did before everyone decided that Kimya Dawson is dumb because--I don't know, because she was in a mainstream movie, oh no.

But! Mainly! This is about Laura Veirs who I am lately really infatuated with and I think really takes the talk-singing thing to a fantastic conclusion, and doesn't just do it, like Dawson, but does it and makes it beautiful.



I mean, I have a lot of feelings about talk-singing, it's basically my religion. I should explain I don't mean necessarily that the person in question isn't singing--it's about how they pronounce words. I hate absolutely nothing more in the world than mainstream female singing where you pronounce everything with this gooey accent that doesn't sound like the way anyone would really talk. I totally admit that talk-singing is not always a more genuine expression of the way someone talks--I for example don't always pronounce words the same way when I sing that I do when I talk, but this is sort of because my singing voice is the way I would talk if I could. It's like a more intense expression. But it sounds--I don't know, I'm just really infatuated with it, even when it's really really overdramatic talking, like Conor Oberst. I get really mad when I see YouTube covers of good songs that were originally talk-sung (or at least not done in the gooey singing accent) and the 14-year-old girl or whoever has decided to do the gooey accent. NO NO NO.

Like, I know it is maybe frustrating to hear Marina and the Diamonds and Regina Spektor and everyone making such an intense effort to show everyone that they figured out interesting ways to pronounce words--but that is at least, in my opinion, an attempt at getting more directly at the heart of the words. I don't think everyone needs to be trying really hard to not do a gooey accent, some people just have nice vocal tones and they can pronounce words in a way that is just not especially gooey, like Jenny Owen Youngs. But the goo makes me so annoyed; it seems so heartless and unintellectual at the same time.

In addition to all the good reasons to hate Glee, I was also just mega frustrated by the Lea Michelle>Amber Riley fallacy they kept reinforcing in every episode, because Lea Michelle is probably the gooey-ist singer in the entire world, while Amber Riley is not some sort of anti-folk twang junkie, but does actually pronounce consonants.

For the excuse to listen to a lot of TALK-SINGING/weird-singing*, some more videos of people I mentioned above.

Pre-Kimya Dawson comments: If you don't know what this woman sounds like you are probably removed enough from pop culture that you can't possibly care about any of this and are probably wondering when I'll get around to my epic post about stuff that's actually important. But I am including this song because, from what I've heard of hers, I think it's in a way the best. I think that the way she sings and the crowded/pop-culture-reference nature of her songwriting is actually at its strongest when the subject of the song is her really dark experience with alcoholism. For her to sing this song, this way, screws with the whole idea of cuteness--that someone who sounds/talks like Kimya Dawson isn't a grownup with grownup problems--and sort of explodes that fallacy from the inside. The lyrics could be pretty triggering, even aside from the alcoholism, so keep that in mind.







*I'm afraid talk-singing is nowhere near enough broad a term to include everything I'm really talking about. I just sort of mean any kind of singing that is sharp and aggressive--and I think singing in an overly soft/gentle way, like Rose Melberg, is also aggressive.



Actually, please just read this article--Twee as Fuck: The Story of Indie Pop. I know it's Pitchfork but I read it in high school and, as the kids say, it changed my life.

okay, so

really brief question: do you ever think there's some really fucked-up gender thing going on in ABA environments, given that it's usually a bunch of young women who are telling male children and teenagers how to act, talk, and think?

I'm not sure if I'm joking or not.

Slightly Happier Math Exercise

As you might but probably don't remember, because you weren't here (except Ari who creepily went back and started arguing with me about my calculations), I one time wrote this really complicated post called the Sad Math Exercise about how I can never get married because I only want to date people with ASD, plus I'm gay, and ASD and gayness are both more common in boys which I am not, THE MISERY!

I guess it sounds like this might be a lead-in to a post about me announcing I'm in a relationship, but don't worry, that will never happen. I was just thinking today when I was at work that maybe the Sad Math Exercise doesn't have to be quite as sad as it is because I think I could date a regular person if they had cerebral palsy.

Like, I think the main issue is really my physicality--okay, part one, I think it's harder to communicate with someone who is not a stimming person, but part two, it's just very uncomfortable to be a woman who moves like I do and I spend a huge amount of time feeling jealous of guys for being allowed to move stiffly or bouncily when I have to constantly feel terrible about myself because of the way I walk and feel like I'm so much worse than practically everyone I know just because I'm stimmy and sometimes trying not to be stimmy and my proprioception is terrible so all my movements are very dramatic. I think that it would be nice to have a relationship with a person with CP because I would be able to go places with them without unfavorably comparing my movements to theirs.

However, while I was thinking this when I was at work, I was sort of backing it up by being like, "the one person in the world I feel terribly, easily close to is a person with CP, so maybe there's actually a specific body language overlap," and then I got all excited and was drawing ASD + CP = true love forever on the imaginary tree in my head

but then I was in class and my friend called me like eleven times, it was really awkward, and when I called him during the class break he started yammering about how he took the Simon Baron-Cohen test and I was like, "buddy, you don't need to have autism, I still like you," but then he started listing the billions of things that he read that prove his ASD, and telling me about his mom's problems when she was a kid, la la la, and I started, somewhat gloomily, to sink into the belief that there was no magical ESP connection between our disabilities and that the reason I like him so much is just that he's really been like me all along.

It's sort of depressing. I'd like to believe in fluidity, or love or something. This doesn't really discount my Math Exercise though, it still makes sense even without this particular experience to back it up.

Is Kevin Girardi a jerk?

I slept really badly last night and for some reason I started thinking about Joan of Arcadia, which is a sort of sappy TV show that I loved way too much last year. Anna at FWD/Forward has made several posts about the show's treatment of disability, which is really good.

To sum up: Joan's brother Kevin was a really conventionally masculine, popular teenager who was going to get a basketball scholarship, but was in a car accident in his senior year of high school and became paraplegic. The show starts a year or two after that and Kevin has been depressed for a while, but during the course of the show he gets a job at the local newspaper, discovers he's a talented writer, starts dating again, etc. He's sad that his old plans for his life aren't feasible anymore, but it's obvious there are still a lot of things he can accomplish and get excited about.

Yeah, so anyway, there's one scene in the first season where Kevin is dating a girl he works with at the newspaper. They're lying on the floor making out, and he says, "wait," and flips them over so he's on top, and they continue kissing.

Someone--I think the Television Without Pity recapper for the show--reacted to this scene by thinking that this was a creepy and sexist thing for Kevin to do. When I read this I was surprised, because my reaction to the scene was "Go Kevin." I thought that if Kevin really liked being on top before his accident, he shouldn't just acquiesce to not being on top because that's the expected/more convenient position for someone who's paraplegic.

This reminded me of a comment I read on the Internet Movie Database board for the documentary Murderball. IIRC (I have to go really soon, and shouldn't even be posting right now), the comment said that viewers of the movie are willing to cut the subjects a lot of slack for their sexist and generally unpleasant behavior, because they're wheelchair users, and it seems cool to see them acting like any other guys.

So, I don't know. I shouldn't have started this post because I don't have time to finish it. People with disabilities should be able to be individuals and shouldn't be held to a higher standard than non-disabled people and be expected to be saints. Guys with disabilities shouldn't be expected to be extra sensitive and feminist. On the other hand--that's not really true, all guys should be expected to be feminist.

I don't think it's ever jerky for someone to want to be on top, in real life. But given how Kevin is portrayed on the show in general as someone who is mourning the loss of a ton of stereotypically-masculine-guy privilege, I don't know if that scene was supposed to be about him being sexist, or about him being himself. I mean, if people are sexist, then I guess we shouldn't want them to be themselves.

I cut my hair and it looks PHENOMENAL

(it's in a ponytail, I didn't cut off the back)

I mean, it's not super brilliant and accurate, but I'm really glad I started cutting it. I don't always do it myself but I have been doing it myself most of the time for about a year, and this means not having to wait for things, or rely on other people, or sit still, or put my head next to something loud. And all those things amount to HEAVEN.

Anyway, this summer I had a blog that I was using to keep track of what I ate, but because it was a new blog I got overexcited and would post these really detailed and thought-out posts about music and ASD. I've had a livejournal since I was 14, but I tend to post whatever comes to mind and not really work hard on it. So my blog this summer ended up being kind of the beginning of this blog. And I found this post that I think is good:

I kind of hope I marry another person with ASD. In my very very brief relationship experience I've always felt like a curiosity at best. It's been like I'm this CUTE THING. Which is sort of how I get along in life, because I don't process information very fast etc., so a person has to think I'm cute or they get frustrated with me. It does serve me well, but it also makes me angry if a person and I actually become good friends, or something else, and that's still what they think of me. I'll just come out and say it: I think I'm really smart--in terms of the way my brain actually moves, not necessarily in a way that other people can see on a regular basis. And although I'm not a good musician technically, I think I'm good at the kind of music I do.

So here are things that don't work: people not thinking my music is good--like, it's fine if they don't like it for a good reason (RL told me in detail why he didn't like it, and I really enjoyed that), but I feel like people just IGNORE the fact that I'm a good writer and singer and have good melodies, because it's childlike. And, people not thinking I'm smart. People being really fucking surprised that I know what things are.

Also, people thinking that I can't handle myself and they need to like comfort me or make decisions for me. I consider myself a moral person and all but that doesn't mean I like all that lesbian shit, like epic amounts of cuddling and holding hands and no snark. OR GETTING ENCOURAGED TO ACT MORE CONFIDENT. I process stuff really slowly. I pick up on things really badly. It's a legit thing about how my brain works and my anxious affect is a)perfectly justified, and b)a pretty good defense mechanism so people know what to expect.

Or people acting really shocked and horrified when I get angry. I mean, I think my anger is possibly more disturbing than other people's anger because it's so straightforward; that makes sense. Even when I intensely express my opinions about something, some people have a really negative reaction because I guess I look so serious, even though I'm usually happy when I'm talking about something like that. Plus, I'm sure it's even worse after all the CUTE--it probably feels like a betrayal or something, this CUTE THING suddenly speaking loudly and not smiling and demanding to be listened to. So. Fucking. Boring.

The way it is is that I'm really all those things. A lot of ASD people are. There's the childlike stuff, the jumping around and spaciness and innocence, which I wouldn't want someone to try to coach me out of, and it's cool if you DO think that's cute, but then there's also the "bad"/guy-ish stuff, the devoting myself to projects for four or five hours without a break, the getting overwhelmed and not liking surprises, the very harsh-looking reaction when I hear or see something that I think is wrong. Anyway, I want to be with a person who likes/understands all that stuff. And I want to do the same for her.

I'm officially Pop Culture Normal

okay, so I just finished giving myself the Adult Asperger Assessment and would like to share that as I expected, I am Pop Culture Normal, i.e. I don't have Pop Culture Asperger's Syndrome.

Before you suggest that maybe I just don't have AS at all and this whole blog is a ridiculous lie, I would like to remind you that as a kid I was mistakenly thought to have been molested because I was such a weirdo, and sent to a psychologist who told my mom, "It's almost like autism, but autistic children can't talk," then diagnosed with PDD-NOS at age ten, then diagnosed with Asperger's at age 14, and went to a psychiatrist when I was 16 who casually confirmed that I seemed AS to him (I was there for other reasons--basically a less competent psychiatrist had put me on antipsychotics because I talked too much, then put me on Adderall because like most people who are taking unnecessary antipsychotics, I was really depressed and listless). To be 100% honest, I also got kicked out of a study for AS kids when I was 16 because I was too good at reading facial expressions, but they didn't actually say I wasn't AS, just that I was either not impaired enough or already too good at coping in that particular area to be helped by the product they were testing. So like a lot of women I compensate too well to be considered legit, but there has been lots of professional opinion my whole life that I am ASD.

But let's see what Simon Baron Cohen says! I'm not posting my whole comments about the AAA, but just the ones that I think are striking.

Social Impairments

2--failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level. This is an example of how dumb Simon Baron-Cohen is! When I was 18 my relationships were way behind but now that I’m 21 they’re not so behind. That’s because once you’re an adult, the kind of relationships you’re expected to have stays the same, so if you have ASD, you get a chance to catch up. If this is supposed to be an assessment for adults, SBC should realize that developmental level is a really weird idea to apply to adults, and he should think about whether ASD people can catch up or not. My opinion is that some ASD people can catch up in many ways, and be completely happy socially with normal people, but they’re not going to socialize in exactly the same way as normal people. I think it would be smarter for SBC to see if someone socializes in an atypical way, instead of only counting someone as AS if they’re actually bad at socializing.

This section has a lot of silly symptoms that are hard to understand, like “does not enjoy social situations.” What does that mean? I don’t like parties. I don’t like being with people I don’t know. Yesterday I watched Battlestar Galactica with my roommate, then went to visit my friend Gabe while talking to FFD on the phone, and stayed at Gabe’s apartment for several hours, talking and reading. I enjoyed all these experiences a lot. Aren’t they social? I guess if you put me with a lot of really normal people, and expected certain kinds of socialization, I would do really badly, like I did in the UK. I go to a school that fits me like a glove, socially, as much as any school can fit a person like me like a glove. I guess I had all these symptoms when I was in the UK, so we can say yes on “failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level.” At least, I think we can.

4--lack of social or emotional reciprocity. Here SBC says a lot of stuff that is really insulting, like, “is not concerned if late when meeting a friend.” That isn’t social, it’s just a rule. Everyone is taught as a kid that you shouldn’t be late. So if someone doesn’t care about being late, it’s because they’re being a jerk, not because they’re impaired. SBC just thinks that AS is the same as being a jerk. Also, “does not spot when someone in a group is feeling awkward or uncomfortable,” is funny, because if normal people were good at identifying and helping awkward people, then Simon Baron-Cohen would be out of a job. I do think comforting people is scary (but interesting), so I guess I could say I have some of this. And “is not upset by seeing people cry” is technically true; I like seeing people cry because it makes it easier to figure out what they’re feeling. But the person described in this section is just such an asshole that I’ll go ahead and say I don’t have #4.

Stereotypy/Obsessions/Rituals

3--stimming, which for some reason he gives no examples of like he does the other symptoms. People try to leave stimming out of pop culture AS because it doesn’t fit into the brilliant jerk scientist stereotype. Anyway, I stim of course.

4--persistent preoccupation with parts of objects/systems. #4 is weird. When I first read it it didn’t seem like me at all. Then when I actually looked at the examples, some were things like “usually concentrates on the small details rather than the whole picture.” Wouldn’t it make more sense to describe #4 as “having trouble generalizing” or “having trouble seeing the whole picture or the ‘gist’ or the socially important part of a situation?” SBC makes it sound like this is all about some weird interest in license plates or something, instead of a learning impairment. Well, by his standards, I don’t have #4.

Communication

2--marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others. I feel the same way about #2 as #1 (turning conversations back to yourself/your interests)--sort of, a little, but not to the extent that he’s implying. I don’t like parties because they feel unpredictable and I feel like no one says or does anything important and I feel lost and anxious and like I should be doing something else. But I like just talking to one or two other people for hours, and don’t consider that a waste of time at all.

4--inability to recognize when the listener is interested or bored. Oh look SBC has actually taken into account that ASD people adjust their behavior: “Even if the person has been told not to talk about their particular obsessive topic for too long, this difficulty may be evident if other topics arise.” GOOD JOB SBC!! Anyway, I guess I have #4, I have no idea whether people are interested in what I’m saying a lot. I check a lot verbally, and basically assume that if someone is my friend, they think I’m interesting, and I try to make the other person talk from time to time, and I don’t really talk about my obsessions at all, and I just assume that all of those coping mechanisms result in me not talking too much to people who are uninterested.

5--frequent tendency to say things without considering the emotional impact on the listener. I guess. Sort of. I’m just having trouble not saying “sort of” to all of these communication ones. But I feel like even normal people would say “sort of” to some of them.

Impairments in imagination

1--lack of spontaneous make-believe play appropriate to developmental level. No. Also! The symptom “finds it difficult now to play games with children that involve pretending” doesn’t make any sense because if the person isn’t at an appropriate developmental level, then wouldn’t this mean that they would actually enjoy being with children? NO IT WOULDN’T BECAUSE PEOPLE WITH ASPERGER’S HATE FEELINGS AND ANYTHING GIRLY.

Prerequisites

2--clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Does executive function count? Wait I didn’t realize that SBC never talked about executive function at all! Executive dysfunction is even more uncool from a Pop Culture AS perspective than stimming.

4--no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or self-help skills or adaptive behavior. Dude! He just kicked out executive function problems altogether because he think AS people only have problems with things “linked to social awareness e.g. personal hygiene.” I don’t understand why SBC even claims to be studying AS at all because he’s just studying “people with bad social skills.” That’s all he thinks it is.

Social Impairments--3/5 required, I got 3, but only because I was stretching it; only "difficulties in understanding social situations and other people’s thoughts and feelings" was inarguably true about me.

Stereotypy/Obsessions/Rituals--3/5 required, I got 3 without trying, but had trouble judging the other two.

Communication--3/5 required, I had a lot of trouble judging this. Somewhere between 1 and 5.

Impairments in imagination--1/3 required, I got 0 BECAUSE THIS IS COMPLETELY STUPID AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH AS. If AS gets remade as something about being a particular kind of nerd who likes taking apart machines, I just don't see what the point of the AS diagnosis is anyway. SBC isn't trying to identify a collection of impairments that people need help and support with, he's just listing a bunch of stereotypes. How is preferring nonfiction to fiction an impairment? How is not liking to play with children an impairment? Is one ASD person better-functioning than another simply because they like reading fiction? How does this make any sense?

The most boring thing ever

A Feministing thread about this video was linked by Ouyang Dan on FWD and it (the thread and the video) is legitimately the most boring thing I've ever seen in my life. Everyone on the Feministing thread is shitting themselves about how great it is for 14-year-old girls to be expressing these sentiments which is like--really?

1. No one who's 14 still plays with Barbies anyway, so I don't see how it's some amazing rebellion for a 14-year-old to make fun of Barbie. It reminds me of how when I was eight my friend and I used to watch Blue's Clues (which is aimed at 3-5-year-olds) and make fun of how Steve didn't know anything.

2. I would have killed to look like these girls when I was 14. Actually I still would. I guess I shouldn't make assumptions about how other people feel about their appearance, but it's just hard for me to imagine that this song comes out of a struggle, that those girls have felt really bad about themselves and now they're writing this song to fight those feelings. These very pretty, thin girls are writing a song about how you don't have to be pretty and thin! Yeah! Awesome!

A good example of something not-boring is Sleater-Kinney; specifically, Corin Tucker. Corin Tucker is different from these girls because she's actually talented, but also, she isn't incredibly skinny or conventionally pretty. I've seen her be called fat. I'm not saying that you should like bands because they're less conventionally pretty, but just that being part of Sleater-Kinney fandom actually made me feel less anxious about the way I look, whereas the Care Bears on Fire video says the right words, but doesn't make you feel anything different.

3. I have to admit to not feeling a ton of pity when women say things like, "I have a super high metabolism, and people always tell me I'm too skinny and should eat something." It sort of reminds me of "It Ain't Easy Being White" by Gob Bluth:



I know that I'm not seen as fat--I'm about a size six or eight--but I know a lot of girls who are a lot thinner than I am, and I've never felt good about my weight. If I somehow get one of those metabolisms and become a size two and everyone keeps telling me to eat something, I'll be incredibly delighted. Maybe I'm displaying insufficient empathy, but seriously, I just can't imagine that these magic metabolism people feel as bad about being skinny as they claim. How can they?

But that said, that doesn't mean that "eat a sandwich" is actually a feminist thing to say. First of all, some women are not thin because of their metabolism, they're thin because of an eating disorder, or another health reason; criticizing them for their thinness is hurtful. Second of all, when women are thin because of their metabolism, it's still kind of a stupid, messed-up thing to say, even though they're the privileged group. And finally, the bogeyman (implied when women bend over backwards to insist that they're thin because of their metabolism)--some women are thin because of a really strict diet. But why insult those women, either? To reference yet another dead TV show, this reminds me of a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which Veruca and Oz have the following exchange:

Oz: Big lunch?
Veruca: I like to eat. I hate chicks who are like, "does it have dressing on it?"

To give some background, Veruca is a villain, though she's a small-scale, human-relations villain, not a Big Bad like Angelus or the Mayor. She is basically in the show to try to seduce Oz away from Willow. Veruca has various things in common with Oz that make Willow feel left out, and in the scene I'm quoting, Willow soon approaches Veruca and Oz and is made to feel uncomfortable because they are talking about music (they're both musicians and Willow is not). Veruca seems to relish making Willow feel uncomfortable and left out.

Feeling stupid and uninformed about music (IIRC, Veruca and Oz are talking about some very stereotypically masculine thing, like gear) is an archetypal feeling for a woman surrounded by men. It seems like Veruca is setting herself up as "one of the guys;" a girl who understands stuff that most girls don't understand. Those stupid girls, feeling left out of music! How could they possibly feel that way? Certainly not because guys don't make them feel welcome, or anything like that. And it's the same with the food. It's Veruca vs. those stupid girls who are obsessed with dressing and don't appreciate hamburgers and stuff, like guys do! Of course Oz would never find a woman unattractive because she was heavy! Of course Oz would never insult or judge a woman for being heavy! No man would do anything like that. This is just some stupid thing that women made up, because they're stupid, and they like to freak out about things that aren't real.

I'm not saying that Joss Whedon is good on weight issues, because that would be the most hilarious mischaracterization of the century, but I think that particular scene is really striking and accurate. A woman refusing to see the ways women are oppressed, so that she (while still being quite conventionally attractive, if slightly less thin than Alyson Hannigan) can be The Exception, the woman who doesn't worry about dumb stuff.

I sound like I'm going off on a tangent, but this is how I feel about that video. I was told in elementary school and in Girl Scouts that Barbie would fall over if she was a live woman. Everyone knows that. "Barbie Eat a Sandwich" is the most wholesome, socially acceptable song you could possibly write about body image. What if Care Bears on Fire wrote a song about a girl's mother criticizing her weight all the time? Or her boyfriend making snarky comments because she eats a cheeseburger? Or a girl who was actually "fat," not a size four or whatever they are, going to the doctor and having her actual health issues be ignored because the doctor is guilting her about her weight? That song wouldn't be so wholesome and socially acceptable to everyone because it would actually be calling out people who discriminate against women for their size and eating habits, instead of criticizing a woman for being too thin and not eating enough (who, okay, okay, as everyone on Feministing keeps saying, isn't a real person--but that just makes the song even more cowardly and makes me even more annoyed that people think it's so brave and great or whatever).

So, to finish up, this song is just incredibly boring and doesn't say anything cool at all, and now I will post my favorite Sleater-Kinney song:



Basically I think this song is really good, and not-boring, because it portrays the narrator's issues with food in a complex way and shows how they come from the oppression of women. Instead of a woman blaming another woman for being so stupid as to care about her weight and what she eats, we have a woman angrily and sadly expressing how she feels and raging against the forces that have made her feel that way.

(I hope it doesn't come off like I think all eating disorders are related to sexism; I know that's not the case.)

I'm so butch I wear nightgowns

I was sort of inspired by this post: on gender and disability. Although what I ended up saying might not be related at all.

Gender is weird. I sort of feel like because femininity is the default it's invisible, so when you actually use words like "femme" and "girly" it implies someone who wears high heels and dresses and all that stuff. I am pretty alienated by butchness (well, not that I'm alienated by other people being butch, but I start to feel like that's the only acceptable way to be a lesbian and it makes me feel bad because that's not me). However, I also don't wear dresses etc.

If I can get away with using the word "faggy" without being a gay man, that's the best word to describe my gender expression and the gender expression I'm attracted to. For example, in high school I had a crush on a girl who loved theater and fantasy books, cried in class, wore baggy clothes that didn't match, and had really long hair. My holy trinity of attractiveness is something like: 1. emotionally vulnerable 2. "off" and intense 3. pretty (I'm talking about a physical type, not gender expression or how attractive I find someone in an objective sense). I tend to get gloomy about my chances of ever having a relationship because this is a pretty irregular gender expression even for straight girls, and doesn't seem any more common for girls who aren't straight.

I feel like there is a kind of girliness that is about persona and not the way you dress. There has to be, because presenting in a feminine way isn't equivalent to wearing a red shirt instead of a blue one. I think this might explain why I am attracted to long hair without being attracted to dresses, earrings, etc. because having long hair doesn't require that much effort. It's like wearing a red shirt. But taking care of your skin, not having body hair, wearing makeup, having hair that is acceptable in a particular way (straight, shiny, healthy, possible dyed, in buns, in ponytails, in braids), wearing a lot of different uncomfortable pairs of shoes, and just combining different articles of clothing (I swear to God, when I see a girl wearing a skirt and a shirt underneath another shirt and a sweater, and it matches/looks normal, I feel like I'm watching someone sing an aria, except I can't just be impressed because I'm expected to be able to sing arias too and I can't, so I'm annoyed)...well, these are things that take lots of time and skill and planning and just the emotional ability to adjust to things. The last item is probably my biggest barrier.

When my hair isn't down, or I'm wearing a dress, or I use a different kind of makeup, or I'm wearing different shoes from the ones I normally wear, that's so distinct and makes such an impression on me that I would never do it on a day when I'm likely to be depressed or overwhelmed or need to do a lot of work. Lately I've been so depressed that I keep wearing the same pair of pants for way too many days because I can't stand to switch to another pair. So the idea I guess is, I constantly feel like I'm "not a real girl" and it's not because I have another identity as butch or genderqueer, but because I lack the abilities to do a feminine gender presentation. I really like having long hair, and I sometimes like clothes that are pink or have little-girl patterns like flowers or butterflies; I guess that these are red-shirt things, expressions of femininity that don't require more effort than expressions of masculinity.

The way I'm writing this makes it sound like I desperately want to present as femme and can't because of my ASD. That's probably not true. I really love blazers and flannel shirts and sneakers and jeans, in an aesthetic sense as well as in a "they're comfortable and I'm used to them so it would upset me to wear something else" sense. On the other hand, I really like dresses in theory and think about them a lot, and sometimes am even stupid enough to buy them, but I never actually wear them because it's too much. This isn't horribly upsetting to me though. To the extent that I am upset, I'm upset because I feel like there's no word to describe my gender expression and the gender expression I'm attracted to. It's probably silly to be upset about not having a word for something, but because I don't feel represented in either straight or queer communities, I do have a desire to articulate what it is that I am.

The title of this post is a line I wrote down when I was 14 or 15. I never wore pajamas until I was 13, and even then, I would wear a whole set of pajamas (and I still usually wore nightgowns). It took me until the middle of high school to figure out that other girls slept in pajama pants and t-shirts. Because my sleepwear, while supposedly feminine, was a deviation from what other girls slept in, I made up an inside joke with myself about it being "butch." Obviously it's not. But what word are you supposed to use for girliness that doesn't fit?

Privilege + ASD

This is something I said to someone in the comments of my Mad Men Asperger's post on livejournal, about Fuck Pete Campbell and its ilk:

I don't know, I mean I'm white so I feel like it's not really my place to say how people who aren't white should feel; I don't know if I would enjoy watching the show if I wasn't white. And I think that having a lot of privilege and being really unhappy about it is sometimes hard to sympathize with if you don't have privilege. For example, as a gay person I tend to get pretty bored when straight people complain about how hard it is being straight.

Also (I think I wrote about this a bit in the original post, or intended to) it's interesting to think about how different Asperger's looks in different people. For example with women you can't really tell. It seems pretty likely to me that this is because society comes down harder on women who have bad social skills. And it's probably the same with people of color. I mean, Pete's life is crappy now, but if he was a black guy in the 60s with the kind of social skills and temper he has, his family would probably be scared that something would happen to him; like, something violent. (I also think that they'd have more of a sense of him having a disability, even if they didn't call it that. I wonder if he would be sort of a family responsibility, like "shit, who's going to take care of Pete now that so-and-so died.") The way I'm writing this essay comes off as a little anti-Peggy, but of course it's totally not her fault. Peggy would have been fired if she acted like Pete. Peggy sure doesn't have the option of muddling around until she meets a nice guy who will devote all his energy to managing her social impairments.

When Pete feels powerless he kicks around women. When Peggy feels powerless--well, she better find another outlet, because she doesn't have anyone to kick around.

I hope it doesn't come off like I'm saying this all in response to what you said, and trying to correct your reaction or something--I just started thinking about it while I was typing. To be honest I do feel personally hurt when I see all this "fuck Pete Campbell" stuff, or just sort of this attitude that guys who pretty clearly have some kind of social impairment are just The Oppressors, and there can't be any more to them than that. I remember seeing this a few years ago in a post about RealDolls. The guy the article was about clearly suffered from a lot of social anxiety that made it hard for him to handle relationships (or even find them), but everyone on this blog was just like "oh, he hates women, he thinks women are untrustworthy." I love Pete, very much, probably more than someone should love a fictional character. I don't want to ignore his privilege but I don't think it's fair to ignore the fact that he has lower status as a disabled person, whether or not other characters consciously perceive him that way.

This is v. v. unfinished

Stop barging in here and infecting me with your anxiety: Pete, Peggy, and Passing

Peggy: Well, one day you’re there and then all of a sudden there’s less of you. And you wonder where that part went, if it’s living somewhere outside of you, and you keep thinking maybe you’ll get it back. And then you realize, it’s just gone.
Pete: Why would you tell me that?
--Mad Men 2x13, "Meditations in an Emergency"

I read this really beautiful post on Basket of Kisses that basically discusses the idea that Pete Campbell is (or is supposed to be) an s/m switch. And he lives in a world where there’s no room for being that kind of weird, so it comes out of him in messy, negative ways; he can’t learn control. The reason this was such a beautiful post is because it didn’t look at the show through the lens of period. Or, maybe, because it didn’t have this idea that certain things that are innate in some people, like s/m, are just a trend or a fad and therefore couldn’t really have existed in the 60s--because it realized that all kinds of minority experiences can be period, even if they weren’t recognized at the time. I would like to talk about something else that is innate in some people--Asperger’s Syndrome. I don’t like to use that term because it’s a bit reductive and calls up a lot of stereotypes; I would rather just say, I’m talking about verbal people with autism spectrum disorder.

Because Asperger’s has been portrayed in recent high-profile movies and books, it is popular to say that it is new or made up, but really autism spectrum disorders have always been around, just not identified. At the time the show takes place, a nonverbal ASD person would have been diagnosed with a mental disability and probably put in an institution, just like Arthur Miller’s son with Down’s Syndrome was in 1966. A verbal ASD person would have just been thought of as odd or annoying. But that doesn’t mean that, inherently, objectively, that’s all they were. Not having a name for what you are doesn’t make what you are go away, as Sal Romano unfortunately learned.

I read Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell as people with ASD. Because they live in a time when they can’t know what they are, each of them is a type of ASD person that should never exist:

1. Peggy forces herself to do what’s normal, and usually her perseverance pays off and she gets what she wants, but it also means that she is constantly acting. And also, although she may do all right in the short run, the people who see her every day know she is different and she doesn’t really have any true friends (except maybe Don--big surprise that he would feel connected to someone like her).

2. Instead of fighting his difference like Peggy does, Pete ignores it; because he doesn’t try to be normal, he gets to be more carefree, but he is hobbled by the fact that most people can’t stand his raw guilelessness, which affects him both personally and professionally.

Guileless may seem like a weird word because Pete is so manipulative--but he isn’t actually good at it, is he? Really, setting the two up as opposites is not correct, because Pete tries to do what’s normal too, but with a lot less awareness and determination than Peggy. People say that Pete is like a robot but I don’t see it at all--his boundless confusion is written all over his face. That’s why he’s always throwing things and punching people, it’s why he doesn’t really understand sex, because he is so full of a feeling of powerlessness, and he doesn’t know why.

Let’s talk about hunting. Obviously this is about s/m, whatever you want to call it; Pete gives Peggy a lingering description of killing a deer, carving it up, and taking it to a woman who cooks it for him and watches him eat it, while Peggy listens shivering with delight. But I don’t think it’s just about s/m. Pete doesn’t understand how to do things, he doesn’t understand his life, so he bought a gun to make himself feel better; but he doesn’t live in prehistoric times where he can just prove himself by killing something. He has to do things right, he has to be likable. This seems like a huge mountain to scale for a person like Pete, and he can’t take it, so he thinks about something else instead: a world where all he has to do to be loved is to accomplish a physical act. Where he has a very specific role. And Peggy, who is screwing up all over the place too, is also thrilled by Pete’s fantasy. She doesn’t have to lie, she doesn’t have to dress a certain way; she has a very clear, uncomplicated submissive role as the deer/cook.

This can also be seen when they have sex in the next episode. They’re just two people early at work, and then they create this space between them where it is okay to fuck up, to want too much--Pete hisses creepily, “Do you know how hard it is to see you walking around?” as if he owns her, just as obsessive and needy as taking two trains to drunkenly lean on her door. Pete has gone too far with girls before and he will again, but here, when he pulls Peggy’s hair and tears her shirt, he gets a positive reaction instead of a negative one. Because he doesn’t feel inadequate like he usually does, he’s much sweeter in this scene than he is with other people. He thinks about her feelings about her writing that he was supposed to read; she grumpily says “I know what you’re going to say” and he says “no, you don’t; you haven’t been right once” with a lot of affection. Pete never knows what people are going to say either. Peggy, who is always so tense and ineffective, is very serious and brutal when they have sex, and then afterwards when she does that incredibly cute incredibly awkward thing where she touches his hair--ohhh man. Okay this is not an essay anymore it is just a geekout.

The s/m essay interprets Pete’s rejection of Peggy at the end of that episode as showing that he is threatened by her power and assertiveness, because he is kind of turned on by it and doesn’t know what to make of it. I’m not sure I would say that; it seems to be taking that scene out of the context of the episode. Pete feels powerless and he doesn’t exactly understand why, but the truth is, it’s because he’s weird/off/whatever you want to call it, and everyone thinks he is slimy, and he doesn’t understand how to get what he wants. And he feels like Trudy is trying to control him (I love Trudy, more on this later, but I’m just saying that’s how he feels). I think that when Pete is overwhelmed by how much he can’t seem to do things right, he takes it out on people less powerful than he is. And also, I think there may be a bit of a betrayal, because when they had the hunting talk, and then when they slept together, those were both very weird outsider bonding sessions. Now Peggy has succeeded at something and is cheerfully doing the Twist; she seems normal and is asking Pete to do something normal with her. The way Pete sits in this scene is striking; I’ve experienced this myself, that when I am made very conscious of my difference, or when I am overwhelmed, I try to calm myself with these very stiff postures, things like wrists out, or ankles turned out. Pete is very prone to these tense little gestures and he is doing it here. He says “I don’t like you like this” partly because he wants to make someone, anyone, feel bad. But it’s also true; he liked Peggy because she was his home, a person he could make this tiny strange-person world with. Of course, Peggy still did want to make that world with him, he just couldn’t see it.

One of the most upsetting things about the way Pete treats Peggy is that he seems to forget they have the same problem. When he freaks out about her promotion, or snits, “Everything is so easy for you,” there’s the obvious dramatic irony that he got her pregnant and she had to deal with that while he remained blissfully ignorant. But there’s also the fact that Pete knows firsthand that it is hard to get anything if you’re the kind of person that other people just don’t like. Peggy works so hard; she is always changing, always moving forward. She takes Joan’s advice about changing the way she dresses and she lets Kurt cut her hair. When she feels her coworkers are leaving her out of things, she tries to figure out how to fix the problem, unlike Pete, who just complains and bullies women when he feels left out. Whether or not she has said it in words, Peggy knows she has trouble (and this isn’t just about being a woman in a man’s world, because she had trouble even when she was a secretary) and she tries to improve herself. Pete isn’t self-aware enough to try to fix his impairments, except very occasionally, like when he goes to Don after his father dies.

The thing is, Peggy is a person to root for but I’m not sure I want to be her. Her accomplishments are always about winning, getting some particular thing. I think an ASD person who is incredibly focused on looking normal as a means to an end sometimes ends up with a life that is fairly empty. Of course I love the two recent episodes that involve Peggy learning a social script, experimenting with it, and getting what she aims for--first a one-night stand, and then a roommate. When Peggy dourly intoned, “I’m...fun...and I like to have...fun,” and Libby Dreifuss actually bought that Peggy was a normal girl, I felt the same rush I have felt in real life, when I’m incredibly conscious that I’m faking, but I somehow slide under the radar and am not perceived as odd. But the rush of putting one over on people can’t be your whole life. And Peggy ends up not really being friends with the guys at work, sleeping with a guy she can’t face the next morning, and living with someone she has nothing in common with. This is success?

More and more, I’m finding I want to be Pete. Not early Pete, of course; he’s horrible. But at some point between seasons two and three, Pete realized how incredibly smart and cool Trudy is and started opening up to her the way he’d previously only opened up to Peggy and sometimes Don. When Pete talks to Peggy after they have sex, in 1x08, he says “Trudy and I are supposed to be one person, but she’s just another stranger,” and when he’s confessing his love to Peggy, in 2x13, he says that Trudy would care if he died, but it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t know him. But it’s Pete’s fault that Trudy doesn’t know him, of course, and after Peggy lets him down, he must grow up a little, because in season three the Campbells are more and more partners in crime.

Pete presumably reeled Trudy in with his smarmy anachronistic scripting (and what better evidence do you need of ASD than Pete’s endless supply of exclamations and terms of endearment that are just slightly off for a person of his time, age, and gender?). Then, he exploded a bunch of times, with the turkey, and the trying to whore her out to publish his bear story (oh Pete how I love you), and “WHY ARE YOU COMING TO MY OFFICE? WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK??” so Trudy figured out pretty early on that Pete was a really strange and really immature person--but okay, I’ll allow that this doesn’t mean she knows him. Usually the worst part of someone is the part you find out last, but it doesn’t have to be that way, and Trudy obviously doesn’t understand in season one and two the relationship that Pete has with his parents, and she hasn’t really connected with the good parts of his immaturity, the sometimes uncontainable energy and excitement. But in the first episode of season three, we get “Oh Peter, don’t go to the well; there’s no water there,” when Pete wants to call his mother, and a few episodes later we see the two of them pooling their manic energy into the BEST DANCING EVER.

I think it would be disingenuous to say that Pete didn’t rape Gudrun midway through season three. I mean, he does have trouble reading people, but I think his issue is sometimes that he knows people don’t like him and want him to go away, and he doesn’t want to think about it, so he doesn’t put in the effort to read them better; so maybe he didn’t want to think about what he was doing, but the fact that he didn’t think about it is not an excuse. I think it’s important to acknowledge what he did. But what’s notable for my purposes is what he does afterward, when he tells Trudy he doesn’t want her to go away without him anymore. Some feminist bloggers read that as Pete blaming Trudy for what he did, but I think that’s an overly harsh characterization of a really important and positive decision. Throughout this essay, I have emphasized how Pete isn’t aware of his impairments like Peggy is and how this both gets in his way professionally and leads to him hurting other people. When Pete said that Trudy shouldn’t go away from him anymore, I think he was saying that he knows he isn’t capable of making good decisions at this point, and he wants her to be his moral compass, at least for a while. And it is doing a disservice to Trudy to say that her pleased reaction was delusional, like she thought Pete was declaring his undying need to be around her at all times. Trudy is a practical person and, because she does know Pete much better than she used to, she understood why it was a big step forward for him to a)feel guilty, b)want to be better, and c)ask for her help.

Throughout season three we see Trudy giving Pete advice and talking about his decisions with him. This is one of the few really equal and honest relationships we see on the show and it makes me happy that Pete, despite all the issues he still has, has grown enough that he can have this relationship. Because of his relationship with Trudy, I’ve started to see Pete as more successful than Peggy, even though Peggy tries to be normal a lot more. The thing about Pete is that, now that he has finally started to change, he’s not changing in the direction of being normal, but of being good.

When you are ASD it’s all very nice to say that you just want to understand people and be more sensitive to them, but when you really start trying to manage your ASD, it usually just becomes about not wanting people to bully you, and being able to have a normal time making friends, and just fit in. But Pete’s recent spate of self-correcting (apologizing to Hildy about the hot cocoa, keeping himself under control when Kenny and his haircut triumphed once again, and of course the thing with Trudy) has been more about being kind, not yelling at people or exploiting the fact that they’re weaker than he is. That means that, while Pete’s self-awareness has been a long time coming, it looks to be an awareness that will make him more whole. While Peggy’s self-awareness, the awareness of a person who is trying to pass at all costs, is tearing her apart.

I'm a fake person.

Niyatee asked me another question. I like how I'm setting her up as this strawnormalperson, who exists to ask me questions so I can shed light on things in an interesting manner, like I'm a classical philosopher. For the record, she is much smarter than I am. And the reason she was asking me questions is that she's a neurology student and she works with people who have PTSD, and I think she was thinking about whether stimming is similar to the thought processes of non-stimmers who are under stress, whether it's a physical manifestation of something other people do invisibly. But for some reason, we/I got off track enough that I ended up telling her about this time when my friend told me about something really awful that had happened to her.

My immediate reaction was of a piece with my standard social interaction persona, which is, as I might have mentioned, a poor imitation of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. My voice is kind of soft and little-girl-ish, I am solicitous to the point of sometimes going too far, I interject, I tease. Not that I teased my friend when she told me what had happened, but I reacted the way my MPDG persona would react. I said, "Oh no! That's terrible! I'm so sorry!" in this breathy little voice. But then I thought: what the fuck am I doing? What she just told me is heartbreaking and infuriating; she deserves more than a shitty, cutesy performance of sympathy. So as she continued to tell me about her experience, I went and sat next to her at the table where she was sitting, and I looked at my hands, and I spoke the way God intended--in soft gray lines.

When I said this, Niyatee said some disclaimers about this being a personal question and she wouldn't be judgmental--but how do I actually feel when a person's in pain? Really. Because I had been saying, I guess normal people sense what other people are feeling, and feel what they feel, right? Is that how it is? Implying that I don't sense what other people are feeling. But when she asked me how I feel when someone's in pain, I felt myself starting to respond, "Oh no! That's terrible!"

Which isn't a feeling. And I just said it's an act.

What do I feel, actually? Maybe I feel interested. When I was a kid, I got bullied a lot and other kids didn't seem to respond to my expressions of pain, and they didn't seem to respond to logic. So I kind of believed other people didn't have an inner life. Even now, before I get to know people I tend to have a sense that they're different from me, inside. I can only be attracted to girls after I've seen them in a visible bad mood; I need physical evidence that they have feelings too. My immediate reaction to someone telling me that they're depressed or upset is that I feel closer to them, and more interested in them, maybe. Does that make me a bad person? I'm not really sure.

But I'm a behaviorist, maybe, when it comes to myself--I tend to think it doesn't matter what I feel. I might as well feel "Oh no! That's terrible!" Does it matter how I feel if I respond correctly? Not that I respond that well. My MPDG persona is a mess, I know I act like a silly little kid, but I couldn't talk in class or make friends without it. I need someone to be. "Be yourself" is the stupidest thing you could say to me, because I don't really remember who I am, and if I do find out, it won't matter, because who I am is not someone who can function in the outside world.

Something I know is that I'm not really a girl. I'm not saying I'm repressing transgenderism, because I don't think I really have a gender identity on a deep level like most people do. But when I was a kid, I definitely remember that my brain felt like a boy's brain. There was just something about it. When I read about how men and women don't get along with each other, I always thought the man's point of view made sense. I remember being scared someone would find out--that when I woke up in the morning, when I thought the word "me," when I wrote, the first image that came was always, I'm a man. There was something wrong with me.

But when I grew up in my mid-to-late teens, and started trying to work out ways to be functional, the idea of being male (and the fact that I thought of myself as maybe trans, and read about transmen, and wanted to look like a boy) was something I just didn't have room for anymore. I didn't have the spoons to transition, that was for sure. And besides, the MPDG box was the only one I could even halfway fit, and like the name says, it's a girl's box. And I wouldn't pass, anyway. I'm sure not tough enough. So now I'm a girl. Okay. Who the hell cares what I feel?

See, I am definitely not a classical philosopher because I'm not shedding very much light. I'm out to prove I've got nothing to prove, like Napoleon Dynamite. And what can I demand from the world that would make this stuff any different? What would the world have had to be like for me to not have had to learn all these fake reactions? And besides, it really is an innate good for me to notice when someone burns their hand on the stove and how to help them. Can I separate that from the emotional performance that I learned as part of that reaction? Also, I know that I have to batter my way discreetly through tiredness and executive dysfunction and shoes that are too tight and questions I don't understand, and can I really separate that from the injuries and illnesses that have either gone untreated or been diagnosed quite a while after they first appeared, because I didn't make enough of a fuss?

I feel really fucking sorry for myself, I know. But I just feel like I'm not really anyone, and that gets to me from time to time.

Geekazoid

I'm working on a post looking at Mad Men through the lens of ASD--specifically, difficulty reading people, and pulling off social interactions in a convincing manner. I read a really good post talking about Pete and Peggy's relationship as it relates to BDSM, and that just made me want to write this post more--I mean, there's so much in this show, and especially in Peggy and Pete, that it doesn't make sense to just avoid topics that aren't "period" or are related to "special interests." I was trying to convince my friend to watch Mad Men and I made her watch the hunting scene, because I feel like it's a perfect example of how the show is not period. Pete is a person of his time, but he's also way too weird to be summed up by his time.

And Peggy...oh, man. I consider myself a feminist, but every time I hear something about "women" a part of me shuts down. People use the word "women" as a code for all these things--attracted to men, mostly spends time with other women, socially sensitive, emotional in a particular way. None of these things apply to me. People use the word "women" as a code word when they are talking about abortion and birth control, which are things I support, but which are not things that personally affect me. I'm not against the people the word "women" stands for, but I don't feel particularly attached to them either.

What I'm trying to say is that I would never expect the character I identify with most to be a female character, especially if she's a character who is seen as representing something about feminism or "women's issues." But I love Peggy, so much. She doesn't do any of the things "convincing female characters" are supposed to do. She doesn't have a sense of fashion; she wears awful cardigans. She likes whiny, scrawny Pete, who is the textbook example of what guys are told not to look and act like if they want women to be into them. She is really socially awkward and always brings things up at the worst possible time. She doesn't get along with other women very well; frequently they're baffled by her, and make up dumb excuses for why she acts the way she does, so they can try to force her into their idea of what women are like.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, except that I love Peggy, and that I will be expressing my love for her more in the future.

Symptoms, privilege, Mad Men, and my dad

It is hard to plan a post about this because I keep wanting to tie it in with how much I love Mad Men. But I feel like that would cause a messy, incoherent piece of writing. To keep it simple, in this post I attempt to explain why Asperger's is diagnosed so much less in women, and why many AS-identified people don't display AS symptoms that much.

The diagnostic criteria for Asperger's assumes that the person being assessed feels entitled. Just because you like monologuing, and have trouble understanding the difference between monologuing and a conversation, doesn't mean that you will monologue if something painful happens every time you try to do it. Just because you love flapping your hands and jumping up and down doesn't mean you will do it, if every time you do it your parents scream at you to stop. The diagnostic criteria for Asperger's assumes that you are seeing a person who has not received a punishment for ASD behaviors. Because when people are punished for things, they stop doing them.

Oh, but people with Asperger's are so dense, and they can't tell that other people don't like their stimming and monologuing, so they wouldn't actually stop doing it! Yeah, okay--dense doesn't mean impenetrable. If other people just looked away and stopped talking to you after a while, maybe you wouldn't catch on. If people started crying, or yelling things at you out their car windows, then maybe you would.

I am very very concerned, all the time, with figuring out what people are feeling and what they will feel in the future. If I appear perceptive, it's not because I get the kind of immediate feedback that normal people get; it's because I'm working hard. I am very concerned, all the time, with what I am saying, and although I don't monologue, I often state things very briefly, or don't explain them enough, specifically because I am trying not to monologue.

This is partly because I'm a girl and I can't just run off at the mouth all the time like I could if I was a guy. If I was a guy, there would be a little more space for someone like me. Maybe too much space. What I was going to say about Mad Men is that Pete Campbell is Asperger's plus way too much space, so much space that he can do something evil and not even notice. Because he doesn't sense people's feelings, he assumes they don't exist, or he projects onto them what he wants them to feel.

This post is already a mess. The subject upsets me, because it reminds me of why I don't get along with my dad. My mom and I both think my dad has AS. My dad says he isn't sure he has it because he always gets an NT score on Internet Asperger's quizzes--yeah, well, those are based on self-reporting and my dad is completely unaware of the way he acts. He monologues all over people! If you interrupt him when he's monologuing, he just keeps on talking straight through you, even if you interrupted him to tell him you already know the end. If you tell my dad you don't like something he does, for example that you don't like for him to tell other people you're gay, he just tells you why he thinks you're wrong to feel like that.

And he doesn't care. He doesn't have to feel bad all the time about the stuff he does wrong, because people let him do it. And he didn't grow up his whole life being told that he was--well, wrong; with all this crying and all these books about different conditions left lying around the house, and all these doctors. I was a kid who always felt like a burden, and now I try really hard not to be one. And my dad doesn't notice or care if he's a burden or not.

The way I feel about my dad is ridiculous, because he's such a great person. I know that if I look at him out of context, he is one of the kindest and most interesting people I know, and he was a wonderful father to me when I was a kid. He wasn't the person who was doing all the crying; whenever my mom says how difficult I was to raise, and how much better I am now, he always disagrees and says how fun and interesting I was as a kid. I know that he feels like I'm worse now, that he thinks I'm mean to him, that I pick at him for no reason. And I do pick at him a lot. It's just hard to be around him because I feel like he's had it so easy.