Woohoo!

So I Google this blog on occasion (read: twice so far --- I may be a shameless, obsessive nerd but I am still very lazy), and what did I find but somebody who's put me on their blogroll!

Q-Sputnik is a British grad student doing a dissertation on UK feminism, particularly as manifested in blogs and other grassroots media and organizations. She must have found my blog when I attempted to join The Nectarine's group blog about feminism and mental illness (which I later found out was meant to be UK-only). But I'm on her blogroll and that's awesome!

w00t!

Bringing the Doctor-Patient Relationship into the Bedroom

In Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English describe the historical gendering of the doctor-patient relationship: the older, wiser, fatherly male doctor ministering gently but firmly to the hysterical female patient. This was not hugely different from the 19th- (and early 20th-) century ideal of marriage, in which the husband takes over for the father as caretaker and chaperone for the eternally childlike, hothouse-flower daughter/wife. Given this role overlap, it's hardly surprising that several works of literature created during this era feature husbands and wives who are also doctors and patients. I'm thinking particularly of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night.

There never fails to be something sinister about such relationships, since the balance of power is so tremendously one-sided. Here's the protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper," introducing herself and her husband at the beginning of the story:

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency-- what is one to do?
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?

You can see the extent to which her sense of herself and her own thoughts and opinions has already atrophied; we get so many words about John, what John thinks, what John says, and only a few slight glimpses of what she (the character is not even named!) thinks. When she does choose to express herself, it is alone, confiding in "dead paper" rather than fight with her husband over how much she should be taxing her poor fevered lady-brain. She's clearly worn down from having everything she says taken as proof of her wrongness and frailty. Paradoxically, she's utterly alone while her husband, sister and maid share a small summer cottage with her, and while her husband hovers over her, watching for signs of recovery.

I worry sometimes that this dynamic might be at work in my own relationship. He's older, more independent, NT (though he suspects himself of being a borderline Aspie), and robustly well-adjusted, while I struggle with severe depression. Because an aspect of my autism is a difficulty voicing my own needs and feelings (or even recognizing them!), it often happens that if I'm upset and don't know why (or can't articulate it), he will step into the gap and try to figure out what I need. By itself, that's fine --- people who love each other comfort each other when they're sad --- but he also tends to disregard what I say I want from him in those moments. It's almost like when I told him I couldn't decode my own emotions, I forfeited the right to have an opinion on them.

I showed him this passage from Tender Is The Night, which I thought illustrated the way that scenario normally plays out for us:

"This letter is deranged," he said. "I had no relations of any kind with that girl. I didn't even like her."
"Yes, I've tried thinking that," said Nicole.
"Surely you don't believe it?"
"I've been sitting here."
He sank his voice to a reproachful note and sat beside her.
"This is absurd. This is a letter from a mental patient."
"I was a mental patient."
He stood up and spoke more authoritatively.
"Suppose we don't have any more nonsense, Nicole."
...
"Listen to me --- this business about a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?"
"It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want me to see."

He talks down to her, dismissing the evidence she presents of his infidelity as "deranged" and "absurd," and brings up her questionable sanity ("do you understand that word?"). My boyfriend recognized this as a more extreme version of a trend that can appear in our own interactions (though he heard my voice in Nicole a lot more than he heard his own in Dr. Diver), but he still tends to pathologize the things I say when upset. If I tell him to leave me alone, it's unhealthy and self-destructive, so he can ignore it and stick around, even if I really do feel smothered.

I wonder how prevalent this problem is among autistic women in relationships with NT men? We have very high rates of emotional problems, like depression and anxiety, which could lead a healthy person to dismiss what we say when sad or stressed-out as merely symptomatic (and thereby ignore the content of our complaints), and our autism puts us at a further disadvantage in trying to communicate with NTs --- both because we're less readily able to verbalize things, and because we know the NT is considered "right" by society. Indeed, autistic women get a double whammy of self-doubt: they're women, which I've indicated above has a long history of being pathologized (and still is, to read about the hormonal ravages of PMS and menopause), and their thoughts, feelings, needs and ways of communicating differ dramatically from what they've been taught is normal and healthy.

Literary Analogues

In all the commentary on the FLDS, several people have made comparisons to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This is apt in a lot of ways: both the FLDS and the Republic of Gilead are polygynous, patriarchal religious communities in which access to women is granted only to the high-ranking men in the society, and in which women's only role is to obey and serve these men in varying capacities. (In the FLDS, the leader of the sect gets to decide who gets to marry whom, and a man's wives and children can be "reassigned" to other men if he gets into trouble with the higher-ups. Likewise, in Handmaid's Tale only high-ranking government and military officials get a Wife and Handmaid; poorer men get a single Econowife, and young men are not allowed contact with any woman). Women are also pitted against one another by the social structure --- Wives do not trust Handmaids, since many of the wives are infertile, and Handmaids are of course very fertile, which makes them valuable to men in ways the Wives can never be. Since both Wives and Handmaids are defined wholly in terms of the men to whom they are bound, and their welfare is entirely dependent on his choosing to support them, this means that the Wives will resent the Handmaids and see them as threats to their positions, and the Handmaids will fear the Wives' resentment because the Wives hold legal and social power over them (the hierarchy is Man > Wife > Handmaid). This mutual mistrust among women, and the intense competition between them to be the most valuable to their husband, is exactly the dynamic Carolyn Jessop describes in the quote I posted yesterday. Also, not only do women mistrust and compete against each other in these polygynous religious communities, they are primarily responsible for ensnaring the next generation of girls in the same toxic milieu.

There are even visual similarities between the dress of women on the FLDS compound and in Atwood's imaginary Republic of Gilead: women's dress is strictly regulated, uniform and color-coded. In Handmaid's Tale, the color coding sorts women according to station, with Handmaids in red, Wives in blue, prepubescent Daughters in white, and servant Marthas in green; this picture taken of women and children exiting the FLDS compound seems to show them color-coded by age.

As pervasive as the similarities between the FLDS way of life and Handmaid's Tale are, though, I think there's a better analogue elsewhere in feminist science fiction. In Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, the main character, Stavia, goes on an exploratory mission to try to find other areas of human settlement, and finds a polygynous enclave whose members forcibly abduct her and make her one of their leader's wives. I think this is a truer analogue structurally, because what makes Gilead oppressive is its omnipresence; each household is just a microcosm of the larger totalitarian state, and any woman who managed to escape her household would have to escape detection by the authorities, who in a police state are ubiquitous and practically omniscient. The FLDS patriarchs do not have the backing of an entire government and military; their power comes from their isolation. Women who have spent their entire lives inside the sect are practically helpless to escape it (of course, some do, but the odds are dramatically against them, which is why those who do escape are so noteworthy). They are uneducated, have no skills or prospects to survive on their own, have no friends or family outside the cult, and are kept ignorant of the resources and programs available to help them (FLDS children are taught to run from child-protective agents and other officials, and to lie whenever a stranger asks about where they live or whose child they are). The enclave in Gate to Women's Country is similarly isolated; the sect's members are a single family that has inbred for generations, taking the occasional captive from Women's Country's exploratory teams, but largely undisturbed by outsiders and unaware of any other human settlements existing. If women there wish to escape, they have nowhere to go.

A Few Words on the FLDS

Lots of other bloggers have already posted in depth on this, and have subjected it to far more penetrating analysis than I could. So I'm just going to focus on making one point: that polygynous enclaves like the FLDS are about male ownership of women. They're not about free, equal adults choosing to enter into unconventional lifestyles (generations of girls have been born into it now; they're never taught anything else), and they're not about the free exercise of religion (again, it's only free exercise for the patriarchs. The women and girls are essentially free to do whatever the man of the house says, or be beaten or get kicked out and starve).

You don't have to take my word for it: here's FLDS escapee Carolyn Jessop on the conditions under which she lived as church elder Merril Jessop's fourth wife:

To protect myself, I had to remain of value. Sex is the only currency – every polygamist wife knows that. A woman who possesses high sexual status with her husband has more power than his other wives. (emphasis mine)

She also has more children, and children are an insurance policy. Even if her husband takes a new and younger wife, a woman who produces a bevy of beautiful babies will earn respect.

She had to remain "of value," or else, presumably, her husband would tire of her and neglect her and her children. That's not the dynamic of a loving and mutual relationship that happens to include more than two people, that's the dynamic of master and slave.

Can a Woman Experience Male Privilege? and other questions on "Growing Up Genderless"

Although I managed to find something familiar in almost every one of the pieces anthologized in Women from Another Planet?, the one that resonated the most with me was Jane Meyerding's essay "Growing Up Genderless." Even the title grabbed me, because I felt I had grown up genderless, too, and wanted to see if she described the same sorts of things that I would.

Meyerding seems to have been gifted with greater social awareness at younger ages than I ever was, and it shows in her recollections of childhood. Her memories of grade school primarily involve bafflement at the mysterious doings of her classmates, whereas mine tend to be montages of sensory impressions, mostly color and shapes, and a few flashes of imaginary adventures, whether of my own invention or from books I was reading. Indeed, it's to this profound solipsism that I ascribe my general sense of having been a happy child.

One thing Meyerding describes that I also experienced is a sense of disconnection from her own body, to the extent of not really knowing what she looked like:

I can give you statistics --- height, approximate weight, hair length and color --- but I do not have the kind of relationship with my physical self that would allow me to participate in the female commitment to "doing the best with what you've got."
...
I never learned to see my body as a woman's body in the sense that a woman's body is an actor in socio-sexual relations. My body is the support structure for me ... (if) it has a gender, that gender lives on the outside, not in here where it would make a difference to how I feel or see the world.

In my own childhood, I experienced much the same kind of nebulous self-image. For me, that meant I was whatever I decided to imagine myself as, whether that was a dinosaur or a horse or a fox or a boy or whatever.

Meyerding also describes seeing "Woman" as a group to which she couldn't belong, a separate species she could study from afar. (Boys baffled her too, but since she was theoretically a girl, she devoted more mental energy to understanding girls). I have to say, I identify with this too. I went further than she did --- she thought of herself as neither female nor male, while I adopted masculinity as my own. My friends have historically been mostly male, largely because boys were more likely to share my interests, and more likely to socialize on terms that I could understand. Girls' discourse always seemed shallow and content-free to me, which I now recognize is because it was so rich in the nonverbal cues and vocal intonations that I can't perceive. I became a hard-core weightlifter in high school and college to masculinize my body, the achievement of which goal had the paradoxical effect of making me more open to femininity. I grew my hair out long, made jewelry and wore long skirts. Much later, I came to identify as a feminist. I'm still not sure whether I can say I experienced male privilege, although I was certainly blind to the social expectations of women, did not meet them, and arrogated numerous male prerogatives to myself (which I continue to do, as long as I step on no one's rights in so doing).

I question whether I (a woman) can have experienced male privilege for the same reason I question whether Meyerding or I really did "grow up genderless." Gender is not just lived reality, it's also a category other people sort you into. On some level, you can't escape awareness of gender. I may have believed myself to be all manner of things, even to the point that, drawing pictures of myself with my family, I'd draw a dinosaur, but somehow I always knew I was also a girl. However much I questioned the extent to which "girl" described me, there was no question that it was the label that would be applied to me. Similarly, as a child Meyerding somehow knows that it is girls, and not boys, that she must study and emulate. We were privileged by our limited awareness of gender, but some level of gender-consciousness infiltrated even our highly resistant minds. And both of us, as adult women, can describe in great detail the ideal "feminine" role that society expects us to play. So I would amend the phrase to say we didn't grow up genderless so much as we grew up weakly gendered, in contrast to the very strongly gendered society around us.

Is Bullying a Feature of Our Culture, or a Bug?

This started as a comment near the end of this thread at Pandagon (which was itself a reaction to this article from the New York Times):

I wonder if the work of Alice Miller might not be relevant here, especially WRT the tendency of those in power to side with the bullies, and also WRT the endemic nature of bullying in our culture. The truisms about cycles of violence and people learning abusive behavior from their abusive home lives don’t go far enough. Like ginmar says, there’s no epidemic of abused women taking out their frustrations on weaker targets. (I imagine that if there were, we’d be hearing all about it, what with the international repository for hypocritical misogyny that is the mass media). But I think that, for people to change from being the victims of abuse to being its perpetrators, some additional steps need to be taken. Somehow, you have to distance yourself from victimhood, whether by identifying with your abuser ("It made me stronger/taught me to be a man," that sort of thing), forgetting what it was really like ("Just ignore it and it will go away") or blaming the victim ("You must have done something to provoke them/Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?").

Some commenters tried to anchor bullying (and the encouragement of bullying by the adults who are supposed to be stopping it) in humanity's primate roots. While there is probably something to that (primates are highly social animals, with complex dominance hierarchies), I also think much of it is cultural. Humans differ from chimpanzees in the extent to which we learn by imitation, which may explain the greater degree of cultural sophistication we have attained. But this very faculty for imitation and social learning probably also contributes to our brutal treatment of nonconformists.

No, I think the motivations we are looking for aren't primarily evolutionary at all, but cultural. We live in a profoundly unequal society, with clear "winners" and "losers," and in which the governing philosophy of one of the two major parties is that merely being a "winner" is a sign of moral and social worth, and serves as its own justification for everything you do to become one. Furthermore, because we are apes, and are therefore more tribal than rational, our workplaces and political power structures are often organized around social ties rather than objective merit. Few people actively stand against bullies because so many of us identify with them. Either we are them in different contexts, or we wish we could be them.

By contrast, very few people want to identify with the victim. Adults might minimize the damage of what they're experiencing (claiming everyone is bullied, it's no big deal, and "When I was your age, I learned to fight back!"-style victim-blaming), or deliver a patently insincere speech on the virtues of nonviolently ignoring the bully (which serves to isolate the victim by portraying the speechifying adult as somehow above the entire question of bullying). In the first instance, the adult is identifying with the bully by claiming that bullying is either a good thing or unavoidable, and the victim is wrong for failing to deal with it. Even in the second instance, where bullying is at least assumed to be a bad thing, the adult distances himself or herself from the victim by erecting a sort of wall of sanctimony between them. The adult who clings to such obvious platitudes is clearly one who has never had to deal with these issues in his or her own life! I think a great deal of our society's refusal to deal with the problem of bullying on a large scale derives from our collective unwillingness to acknowledge our own (or our children's) victimhood. In an unequal society, one of the most demoralizing thoughts that can strike a person is the thought that they might not be one of the "winners."

Active But Odd: Imagination in AS Girls

Throughout my life, and especially in childhood, I've been an almost exact match for the typical Aspie. I was a "little professor," given to collecting huge amounts of information on obscure subjects, more comfortable conversing with adults than with other children, learning to speak earlier and more formally than other kids, even if I also reversed pronouns and made up words. But there was also one area in which I was emphatically not the typical autistic child, which I begin to suspect is shared by a lot of women and girls: I had a wildly overactive imagination.

I loved to pretend. I kept dozens of stuffed animals and Barbie dolls, naming them, imbuing them with unique personalities and making up convoluted life histories for each of them. I wrote and illustrated stories with recurring characters, making little booklets out of construction paper. I hand-sewed dresses for all my dolls, and also cut their hair. My bedroom had a monster for every shadowy place, but I never feared them because the biggest and baddest monster (a blue allosaurus named Alomar, who lived under the bed) was my friend. Over the course of my childhood, I believed myself to be, among other things, a horse, a triceratops, Woody from "Toy Story," and Tigger from "Winnie the Pooh."

This kind of imaginative richness is also evident in this New York Times Magazine piece on autistic girls, and in Women from Another Planet?. From the Times piece, quotes from autism researchers Catherine Lord, David Skuse and Simon Baron-Cohen on how autistic girls' interests differ from boys':

Contrary to the Asperger’s stereotype, Caitlyn struggles in math but tests in the highly gifted range in reading and writing. This is another sex difference that Lord sees among her patients. "I don’t have any real data, but a lot of high-functioning girls are real readers ... they like fantasies and the 'Baby-Sitters' series," she says.
...
"Girls with autism are rarely fascinated with numbers and rarely have stores of arcane knowledge, and this is reflected in the interests of females in the general population," Skuse explains.
...
A psychology professor and director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, Baron-Cohen has characterized autism as a condition of the "extreme male brain." His research shows that in the general population men are more likely than women to score low on a test of empathy and high on a test of recognizing rules and patterns, or "systemizing." ... Baron-Cohen says that he believes that autistic girls are strong systemizers. That quality may manifest itself in letters rather than numbers.

The girls profiled in that piece show the same kind of intricate fantasy life and artistic creativity that I have: Caitlyn writes Harry Potter fan fiction and is planning an eight-part series about a werewolf, and Ash makes dolls and scupltures out of whatever materials she can find. Similarly, the authors of Women from Another Planet? tell of childhoods largely spent in vivid inner worlds, which they often brought into adulthood as intensely felt spirituality or a passion for art or writing. Indeed, many of them chose to write poetry for their contribution. That was probably the biggest thing that surprised me about the book: the wide range of styles and genres represented. There were poems (of which some rhymed and some were free verse), essays on a topic, personal recollections, dialogues and even an explication of a poem the author had written years earlier.

A theme that keeps coming up in Women from Another Planet? is the more diffuse notion of "aliveness" that the autistic women have. Because they never learned to zero in on human voices and faces, they hypothesize, they never learned to confine their attention to humans and thus, they experience the whole world as joyously, busily alive where most people see an inanimate backdrop for human lives. I have strong memories of doing this myself: when I was little I had no conception of "man-made" things. I thought roads grew along the ground like the runners of crabgrass or strawberry plants, and I thought houses grew up from the ground like trees, sending down roots in the form of basements.

Daina Krumins's essay "Coming Alive in a World of Texture" touches on a lot of this:

It seems that when most people think of something being alive they really mean, kind of human. Almost as if the thing would express human thoughts if it could. This is a mistake scientists seem to be making when studying dolphins. They show the dolphin an object --- a box, for example --- and the dolphin makes a sound, and they assume that the sound means box. But maybe not. Maybe it means the way the water swirls around the box, or how the box changes the color of the light, or ... anything.

There's also a snippet of dialogue from the chapter "Differences" that deals with this heightened sense of aliveness:

MM: I think that some of us not only have our five senses on high, but also our sixth sense: that we do not draw a line between animate and inanimate beings, that they all have soul to us.
Daina: As a child, everything was somewhat alive to me. Perhaps the face-processing tendency that most NTs have enables them early on to distinguish what is alive and what isn't, and what is human and what isn't.
Ava: Or maybe what is and isn't alive, is just another assumption that NTs make. So for the NT child, either because of the strength of those attachments to faces and the accompanying social world, or through some coincidental developmental process, the aliveness of the sensory world fades.

This has expanded somewhat beyond what I'd intended to talk about, but given the prominence of imaginative play and experience in my life, in the lives of the girls in the Times article (and all of Catherine Lord's young female patients, apparently) and in the lives and beliefs of the women in Women from Another Planet?, it would seem advisable to qualify the "impaired imaginative play" diagnostic criterion as one that may only be applicable to boys.

Two Venn Diagrams

This article appeared on the editorial page of today's Kansas City Star. I don't have much to say about it, frankly --- I don't know or care about David Mamet and the article itself is kind of insipid. There is one (small) passage that I saw fit to respond to, though:

"Yes," we might say to ourselves, "it certainly does seem that history has vindicated those warmongering right-wingers who opposed the Soviet Union. And really, in secret, one must admit that women and men are pretty fundamentally different. It does seem true, as well, that government programs manifestly worsen the problems they're designed to solve, whereas freedom in markets and ideas always seems strangely to improve things. ... But that doesn't mean I'm a conservative! Conservatives are mean, racist, sexist, greedy -- and they hate gay people, who are an artist's colleagues and friends! I'm nothing like that." (Emphasis mine).

I've come across this particular conservative retort to feminism in a lot of other places: they're fine with equality in theory, but those crazy feminists keep insisting that women and men are exactly the same, which is clearly absurd!

To whomever might be tempted to use that line of argument, I present these two Venn diagrams. The first one represents the typical conservative view of the relation between men and women:

Separate spheres, separate realms of experience, with only a small token region in the middle where the two can come together and understand each other. This is in keeping with the Hobbesian underpinnings of conservatism, where people are generally looking out for #1 and are prepared to screw anyone over to further their own ends. In this universe, marriage isn't a lifelong friendship and shared commitment as much as it is a contract that binds two otherwise antagonistic parties together and keeps them honest. Women use marriage to barter sex to men in exchange for fidelity and security. The unspoken assumption is, if women and men didn't need each other (for completely separate, nonoverlapping reasons, naturally), they'd either shun each other or be eternally at war.

Now, contrast that gloomy picture with the liberal, feminist view of men and women:

See? It's hardly necessary to hold that women and men are absolutely interchangeable to be a feminist; you just accept that women and men are both human, and as such share basic human needs and human rights. That's all we're saying.

The One Right Way to Be, and other lies my culture told me

I'm most of the way through Bob Minor's Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human, and it's a lot more densely packed with ideas than I had been expecting. It's also one of those books that interacts in unexpected ways with everything else you're reading at the time, making you revisit the things you noticed in those books in greater detail and with more of an eye to social context. (Yay helical thinking!)

From the title, I thought this book would be mostly about overcoming homophobia, but that's only a small part of it. Much of the book is dedicated to explaining and critiquing gender roles, and looking at homophobia as one of many pressures on people to stay inside those roles. He also argues that these roles serve to cut people off from each other, and from their own full humanity. Some examples:

• strict controls on which emotions are acceptable for each gender to express (e.g., men don't express fear or uncertainty, women don't express anger)
• male peer pressure to maintain masculinity (which no man can embody perfectly all the time)
• pressure on women to be attractive to men, and to prioritize pleasing men above fulfilling their own dreams or ambitions
• fear of being thought gay discourages deep same-sex friendships
• construction of "opposite" genders (e.g., Men from Mars and Women from Venus, or pop evolutionary psychology) discourages authentic male-female communication
• ritualized His and Hers dating scripts ("getting laid," "scoring" vs. finding potential husbands, avoiding slut, prude labels) that are inherently conflicting
• equating intimacy with sexual intercourse ("sex" = PIV, nothing else counts)

All of these work to cut off most of the available channels for human connection, giving everyone a certain basal level of desperation they bring to dating. The latter three bullet points also work to put an inordinate amount of pressure on sex and romance to fill all of men's and women's emotional and social needs, which they can't do. Too often, people blame their partners, themselves or the opposite (or same) sex in general for their failure to find a truly fulfilling relationship, without questioning why it is that one relationship is supposed to meet all their needs anyway. (I also think this goes a long way toward explaining our culture's schizophrenic, love/hate attitude toward sex --- whether we're using it to sell widgets or denouncing it from pulpits and presidential podia, we still see it as this idealized thing, endowed with emotional power and resonance far out of proportion to what it is). Minor's analogy is that these unspoken cultural assumptions are like water, through which we swim like fish. We might differ among ourselves over the best way to swim, or have different arrangments of fins, but few of us point out that the water isn't the only place to live.

Minor's detailed explication of all these cultural prejudices brought to mind my earlier impressions of The Speed of Dark, where I remarked on the rigid, constraining definition of "normal" that pervaded Moon's fictional future society. Her protagonist, Lou, is hyper-aware of all the ways in which he falls short of that normalcy, and this awareness leads him to be somewhat stingy with his confidence. (He keeps it hidden from most people that he listens to classical music, he won't tell his therapist that he fences, he's afraid of his police-officer neighbor). He is also aware of the double standard to which he is subject: as an autistic person in a time when autism has been practically abolished by genetic engineering (he and his coworkers represent the last generation to have autistic members), he knows his behaviors attract scrutiny that "normal" people's don't, even when they are largely the same behaviors. (Is pacing the floor or twiddling a pen called "stimming" if your boss is doing it?) In much the same vein, the authors of Women from Another Planet? describe spending years of their lives and untold amounts of mental energy trying to mimic "normal" interaction. One woman describes hoping that if she could learn the "mechanics" of socialization, other people would open up to her, and her disappointment and puzzlement when that never happened. Another describes the "moral judgment" heaped upon people who just don't conform:

It's like very social people are viewed as being better potential students, better potential employees, and better people in general. Even though it's not true. The worst part for me was when I bought into this nonsense. I thought I must be some kind of terrible person to be this way, and I was always looking for a way to get better.

It seems to me like what Minor describes with respect to gender and what Moon and Kearns et al. describe with respect to social skills and odd behavior are all part of the same thing: the idea that, of all the vast, mind-blowing diversity of human behavior, only a narrow slice is "normal," "healthy" and "natural." All deviations are to be considered suspect, if not downright pathological. Daniel Quinn anchors this attitude in the mythology of Western culture, this idea of "One Right Way to Live," in his Ishmael trilogy. It has played a role throughout the history of our culture, in the spread of missionary religions like Christianity and Islam, and the rise of global empires and, later, the expansion of capitalism. Writ small or large, this intolerance of more than one way to live impoverishes us all.

On Patriarchal Medicine: The Intersection of Feminist Critique and Anti-Vaccine Crackpottery

While browsing through the archives at Women's Space (a wonderful radical feminist blog, you should definitely check it out) I came across this post, which seems to give credence to the idea that vaccines cause autism. The first comment, from Ballastexistenz, does a great job of showing the inadequacy of that hypothesis (and the long history of bogus explanations being concocted to account for autistic regression), so I won't spend much time on that here.

No, what I'd like to comment on is the idea of "patriarchal medicine," and what is or is not opposed to it. In the comments at Women's Space, patriarchal medicine is equated with all of modern medicine as we know it. I don't think this is quite right. While there are aspects of modern, Western medicine that are patriarchal (the hierarchical, impersonal nature of the doctor-patient relationship; the historical exclusion of women from the medical profession; the overreliance of modern medicine on expensive, high-tech medications produced by pharmaceutical corporations; unneccessary surgical and pharmacological intervention in normal childbirth --- those are right off the top of my head, I'm sure the list can be extended), the central principle by which modern medicine operates (empiricism) is the same principle that guided the wise-women healers who preceded it. Indeed, in For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English make the case that the university-educated doctors who started (forcibly) horning in on the wise women's territory in the Middle Ages did a much poorer job of treating patients because their educations were based on ancient Greek and Roman texts, while the wise women had generations of empirical data on which remedies worked and which didn't to draw from.

An argument can be made that the empiricism the wise women practiced was of a different type than the kind valued by modern medicine: the wise women would have ministered to a small local community of a few families, and would have known each person intimately, while modern medicine relies on large-scale epidemiological studies and clinical trials. With the former method, you come to know a lot about the people within your small sample; their tolerances, their reactions, their baseline. You might not know as much about the range of possible effects a given remedy might have, since you have only your small group of people on whom to test it. But with your intimate knowledge of these people and their history (going back generations), you probably won't have as much need to test things on them. Though, with the changing nature of society (mobile populations, world travel etc.), more and more local populations are getting exposed to new kinds of sicknesses, which makes the larger scale of modern medicine more practical within our large-scale society. The fact remains, though, that these two approaches are more related than you might think. They're both based on evidence and experimentation; they differ mainly in the scale on which they are practiced and the attitude of the doctor toward the patient. To my mind, what makes medicine patriarchal is not the reliance on fancy equipment or expensive medications so much as it is the gulf between doctor and patient. If you believe your eight-year university education makes you infallible, and you think there's little of value your patients can tell you about their own experiences or histories, then even if you prescribe only herbal teas and massage you're still practicing Patriarchal Medicine.

Implicit Association Test: Presidential Edition

There's a new version of the Implicit Association Test up at Pandagon: it's supposed to tell you which presidential candidates you're unconsciously biased towards. I took it, in the interests of science, and found it almost exactly mirrored my conscious thoughts about the candidates. Other test-takers there were divided; some of them found their results matched their conscious preferences, others found some disconnect, like their IAT results had them hating McCain or Huckabee far less than they consciously did, or their IAT showed them more favorable to Hillary Clinton than they had thought they'd be. One commenter, who had taken the test at different points in the campaign, ascribed her increased favorability toward Clinton to empathy for her acquired from the horrible sexist coverage of her campaign.

Having taken some other IATs before, I was actually pretty surprised that the presidential one matched so well. (I've taken the race IAT and the sexuality IAT, thereby discovering that I apparently favor gay white people). I had been (and continue to be) really skeptical that the IAT actually measures internal biases at all, rather than being an indicator of reaction time, mental flexibility or some other trait more closely related to punching keys in response to visual stimuli.

This time, rather than sit around and grumble, I actually hunted around for articles on the IAT, to see if any psych researchers had leveled the same criticisms at it that I did. Sure enough, I found such an article, courtesy of Mixing Memory, who has this to say about IATs in general (italics mine):

In my mind, giving the IAT so much publicity is the most irresponsible thing I've seen in psychology since I began studying it, short of testifying in court that there is scientific verification of the existence of recovered memories (the IAT, at least, has not ruined anyone's life). While the IAT has been publicized (by its authors!) as a measure of implicit attitudes, and even more, as a measure of implicit prejudice, there is no real evidence that it measures attitudes, much less prejudices. In fact, it's not at all clear what it measures, though the fact that its psychometric properties are pretty well defined at least implies that it measures something.

It isn't just guys on the Internet saying this, either. This presentation was given to a 2001 meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology in Spokane, Washington by Dr. Anthony Greenwald, who has published many articles about IATs. The presentation lists the ten biggest problems with the IAT, split into six "measurement" problems and four "conceptual" problems, which are presumably more fundamental. Sure enough, what should #10 be but "Order of combined tasks influences the measure"? (I definitely noticed, while taking the race IAT, and to a lesser extent the presidential one, that my fingers had greater difficulty hitting the right buttons early in the test; by the end, I was pretty decent at it. So if I had been randomly assigned, say, black faces and "good" words, white faces and "bad" words, black faces and "bad" words and then white faces and "good" words, in that order, my results would show up as being strongly white-supremacist, when really I had just taken longer than average to accustom myself to the tasks.)

Other effects I wondered about that were addressed in this presentation were #8, "IAT effects are reduced with repeated administrations" (see my progression from IAT results that surprised me, in the race IAT, to ones congruent with my conscious preferences, in the presidential IAT), #5, "IAT measures are influenced by measurement context variables", #4, "IAT appears to be slightly fakeable" (Neurocritic claims on his blog to have faked the outcome of at least one IAT, and links this 2007 study that finds IAT takers are able to skew their own results when bidden to do so by experimenters) and #1, "How the IAT measures association strengths is not yet well understood."

The American Psychologist article I linked above makes a point strikingly similar to the one Stephen Jay Gould makes about IQ in The Mismeasure of Man, when he accuses IQ-test proponents of "reifying" the average score on a battery of cognitive tests as "intelligence," when it has never been demonstrated that this average (g) actually describes or predicts anything beyond performance on IQ tests. The article finds a similar reification going on with the scale of implicit bias used in IAT results. What the IAT actually measures are response times for various pairs of words or images, and calculates bias by subtracting average response time for pairings that would conflict with the bias being tested (say, "black" and "good" in the race IAT) from those for pairings that would confirm the bias ("white" and "good" or "black" and "bad"), with a nonzero result indicating bias in either direction. The problem, the article's authors say, is that no one has tried to control for the emotional strength of the words or images. (Indeed, Greenwald's presentation admits that IAT effects are smaller for images than for words, indicating some difference in how the stimuli are processed). A zero IAT score might therefore not actually mean no biases exist, if some of the stimuli are stronger than others and the distribution of more emotionally affecting images favors one side or another. A person might go in with a bias in one direction, but if the images he's confronted with push his emotions the opposite way, he might come out entirely neutral, when really that's the one thing he's never been.

On the presidential-IAT discussion at Pandagon, some of the commenters wondered if the pictures of the candidates were chosen with equal attention to how flattering they were. Each candidate had four photos that flashed onscreen, taken over what seemed to be a broad span of time. Some of them also looked more flattering and polished than others, but it seemed to me at least that each candidate had one good picture, one bad one and two middling ones. But how good someone looks in a photograph is a highly subjective quality; some commenters felt that all of the pictures of some candidates (Clinton and Obama were mention, although McCain was also singled out for having the single ugliest picture) were given unflattering photos.

It's almost as though the IAT were created in a drunken game of "Let's throw as many confounding variables in here as we possibly can"!

Under- and Misdiagnosis of Autism in Women and Girls

In the Introduction to Women From Another Planet?, Jean Kearns Miller et al. point out that the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome has skewed male since its conception:

[Hans Asperger] was aware of the existence of AS girls but explained them away as having a post-puberty syndrome resulting from childhood encephalitis --- as opposed to boys, who are born autistic and therefore have the more "essential" condition. In any case, his subjects were boys; girls were simply beyond his scope. Many years later, Uta Frith attributed the vast disproportion of AS boys over AS girls to genetic transmission that is sex-linked, making AS females sort of an anomaly or fluke. But are we really such an anomaly? Perhaps our invisibility skews the data.

They go on to describe two hypothetical schoolchildren, an autistic boy and girl. Both kids have the same tendency to take things literally and both frequently fail to understand their teachers' and peers' meaning, but the boy is more likely to act on his (mistaken) ideas and get noticed and corrected, and possibly referred to a professional for diagnosis and special help. The girl is more likely to sit in her seat and do nothing, paralyzed by fear that she'll do something wrong and the other children will laugh at her. Because she doesn't say anything, or act out like the boy does, she won't be identified as having problems. Her grades will probably suffer, but nothing will flag her as clearly needing any particular kind of help. She will probably just be considered slow, or lazy.

A real-life counterpart of this hypothetical story can be found here in this ABC News report (via Autism Vox): in a family with two autistic sons, the mother found it exceptionally hard to get her young autistic daughter diagnosed because she exhibited fewer of the classical symptoms. The girl was less unruly and tantrum-prone than her brothers, which autism researcher Brenda Myles ascribes to girls being given much more intensive training in social skills, particularly related to pleasing other people and not being difficult, than boys are. The difference in social training is steep enough, she argues, to mask many of the symptoms in girls, such that the few girls who are diagnosed tend to be more severely affected. (This would fit with earlier observations that diagnosed autistic girls tended to have lower IQs and more associated problems than their male counterparts).

The flip side of this cultural expectation, though, is that those autistic girls who can't mask their strangeness are likelier to be seen as troublemakers or problem children. This "Autobiography of Anonymous" from autistics.org's Autism Information Library details a woman's life bouncing between different diagnoses, with many of the professionals who see her simply blaming her for being difficult or overdramatic. Because boys are given so much more overall latitude in how they behave, they are both more likely to be correctly identified as autistic and more likely to have their difference tolerated, regardless of diagnosis.

Have a Scienterrific V-Day!

Check out these scientist-themed valentines!

Via Pharyngula.

An example:

I Love Finding Words For Things I Already Do

Having just started the anthology Women from Another Planet?, I can tell that it's going to be full of topics I'm going to want to blog about, so instead of my ususal one or two long posts addressing everything I think is noteworthy about a book, for this book I will do a series of shorter posts about whatever aspects of the book I find resonant. That approach will also be more faithful to the spirit of the book in question, which is written by many women and ranges all over the map in terms of style and content.

The second chapter, "Differences," deals (obviously) with the ways in which autistic women differ from NT women and NTs in general. I will come back to that chapter in a later post, but right now I want to concentrate on one topic in particular, that of nonlinear thinking. All of the women participating in that discussion ("Differences" is written as a dialogue between several participants, moderated and commented on by the chapter's author, Ava Ruth Baker) describe their thinking in spatial terms, and differentiate it from the linear mode of thinking preferred by most NTs. Of particular interest to me is the women's taxonomy of nonlinear thinking, in which they describe two types of thought processes, branched thinking and helical thinking, and the ways in which these differ from linear thinking. It was eye-opening for me to read these descriptions, because I use both of these processes (one more than the other, and sometimes a tweaked version of the other) often.

Sola: Branched thinking occurs when an idea bears several possibilities for development. It is hard for me to choose one and discard the others, till I have examined all of them. So, after dwelling some on one possibility, I have to go back to the original idea and do the same with the other possibilities. This way of thinking, known in computer science as visiting a tree, may be a disadvantage, as it is slower than purely linear thinking. ... But branched thinking makes me a very good programmer and is conducive to science. I use it for problem solving in my own life, as a scientific approach is my preferred way of making sense of my life.

I also used branched thinking a lot, though sometimes rather than follow all the possibilities in sequence I will try to see them all unfolding. It's a thought process similar to the one described in Dune when Muad'Dib first discovers his prescient abilities: time is like a landscape, with hills and valleys, and in his visions he's standing on a hill watching different paths unfold from the particular historical nexus he's standing on at the moment. I can see a particular train of thought in a lot more detail if I look at it individually, as Sola is describing here, but sometimes I also pull back and locate one in context.

Ava: In helical thinking, just as a helix comes back to the same place over and over again but at a different level, so we experience or learn something different, something more refined, each time round. To an observer, the topic or behavior may seem repetitive or monotonous, but inside, our thoughts are evolving.

This is probably the thought process I use more often. I love helical thinking. I love learning something new about a favorite topic that leads me to reexamine the whole thing in a new light; it's what makes it fun to reread books, particularly when you've read more books by the same author and can now recontextualize the first one you read within that author's canon. Indeed, it's this kind of helical thinking that I hope will play more of a role on this blog once I've read and given initial comments on all these books dealing with autism --- I can group them, compare and contrast, follow a theme or metaphor through multiple authors' interpretations of it.

If branched thinking is the science and computer-programming geek's preferred thought process, helical thinking is definitely for lit geeks.

Autism in the Not-Too-Distant Future: Thoughts on Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark

Honestly, The Speed of Dark turned out to be a very different book than I expected it to be. It was shelved as science fiction, and Elizabeth Moon is a fairly well-known writer of sci-fi, so I expected The Speed of Dark to be jammed with all sorts of fantastic technologies, spacegoing explorations and vastly different kinds of societies than exist now. Instead, I got a story set in a society nearly identical to ours, with only a few subtle differences.

That unexpected resemblance to today's society made me pay unusual attention to those few things she did choose to change in her story, though. There were obvious, necessary-for-the-story changes like greater societal awareness of autism and advances in treatment and integration of autistic people into society (the protagonist, Lou, works as an encryption specialist at a large pharmaceutical company, where his autistic skills enable him to decode and create complex patterns), but some changes were more counterintuitive. Specifically, in the near-future society Moon has created for this work, there's a very narrow, rigid definition of normal. Lou keeps it a secret from his therapist, for example, that he enjoys fencing, for fear that the therapist will deem such a pastime antisocial. Similarly, Lou's love of classical music is presented by Moon as something deeply unusual; everyone else is depicted listening to homogenized radio pop music, and Lou's listening to classical music is always an intensely private activity. There are shades of Bradbury's The Pedestrian (nifty animated short film here) in this slightly sinister, overbearing mass culture, but she never brings it to the foreground. At most, it provides context for the central drama, which is Lou's internal conflict over whether to take the experimental cure for autism that his employer is pushing on him.

Apart from the thought-provoking tweaks in the setting, I'd say this book's strengths are the true-to-life descriptions of what it's like to be autistic (Moon really emphasizes the sensory hypersensitivities) and its humane treatment of the problem of a cure. The choice to take or to refuse the experimental treatment their employer offers is not easy for any character, and their final decisions range from a resounding "Yes" to an equally definitive "No," with all the flavors of ambivalence in between. For his part, Lou equates getting cured to being given a chance to live his life over again, to pursue the career in space exploration he'd always dreamed of. That's the understanding all of the autistic characters have of the cure: it would make them new people, cause them to start their lives all over. This has a powerful allure to those characters, like Lou, who have missed certain opportunities and are always asking "What if?"

An idea that I'm currently incubating, and will probably post more on later, is the question of whether autism has a special place in the thematic canon of science fiction. Much of science fiction, particularly cyberpunk, deals with cognitive frontiers the way earlier science fiction dealt with space. Cyberpunk especially mines the brain-computer interface for its stories, and autistic brains are sometimes compared to computers by NT writers and journalists seeking to describe our (sometimes) more logical, rules-oriented way of interpreting the world. Also, cyberpunk deals with testing the limits of human potential, often by artificial means. Autistic savants, with their astonishing ability in isolated areas, seem a natural kind of character with which to explore those narratives.

I also think an autistic character can stand in metaphorically for the inhuman, or the posthuman. That is certainly the role that the Asperger-syndrome biotechnologist Crake plays in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which I will write on as soon as I get my copy of Oryx and Crake back; I'm lending it out at the moment.

Scooped!

While Googling around for other writings on changelings and autism, I found quite a few old posts from other bloggers who've picked up on the changeling rhetoric marshaled by those who see autism as an epidemic to be cured, rather than as an example of astonishing human diversity. The difference is, they managed to find explicit invocations of the changeling myth, while I've just been glimpsing it between the lines.

Here are the posts:

Two from Kristina Chew of Autism Vox, dealing with Cure Autism Now founder Portia Iverson's book Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and a Quest to Unlock the Hidden World of Autism.

There's also this post from Ballastexistenz, with links to three posts on an older blog of hers, all dealing with rhetoric used by non-autistic autism advocates, including Cure Autism Now. Unfortunately, those links appear to be dead. The posts can be found here, here and here, though.

She also has an entire category for examples of changeling stereotypes on her old blog; she cites The Siege, which my mom actually used to own, but which I never read, and Let Me Hear Your Voice as employing changeling rhetoric. So now I guess I need to track those books down.

Fever Dreams: Autism Research and the Changeling Myth

The first thing that this study (full text here) made me think of was the dubious old-time medical practice of infecting people with malaria to cure them of syphilis. Yes, the fever often brought their body temperature up so high that the syphilis bacteria would all be cooked, but they'd still have malaria, which is no picnic and can kill you as surely as syphilis can.

The study compared 30 children on the autism spectrum (12 with autism, 11 with PDD-NOS, two with Asperger syndromeand five with some other ASD) with 30 other autistic children who matched them in age, gender, and language skills. When one member of the pair got sick (with any illness that caused a fever of at least 100.4 degrees), the parents of both children would answer the questions on the Aberrant Behavior Checklist, which asks about five categories of odd behavior: irritability, lethargy, hyperactivity, stereotypy (repetitive movements, rituals ... common autistic ones are hand-flapping or rocking; a common neurotypical one is pacing the floor), and inappropriate speech. There were three points in time when these data were collected: during the fever, while the fever was going down, and when the child had gotten well again.

The study found that on four of the five subscales (irritability, hyperactivity, stereotypy, and inappropriate language), the feverish children scored significantly lower (i.e., more normal) than the nonfeverish ones. They scored higher on the lethargy subscale (which, along with the lower levels of hyperactivity, should surprise no one; they're sick!). The researchers did some fairly exhaustive statistical analysis to determine the extent to which the lessening of "aberrant" behaviors could be ascribed to the children's lower overall level of activity due to the sickness, and finding that lower scores on the four subscales were unrelated to either the severity of the fever or higher scores on the lethargy subscale. So, while general tiredness and malaise probably accounts for some of the change, it can't be the only factor at work, or else the kids with the highest fevers, or highest lethargy scores, would consistently be the ones to show the most improvement, which they're not.

There are a lot of limitations on this study, though: for one, the study population is really small (only 30 kids, plus the 30 controls) and represents a mind-boggling variety of ages, abilities, medications and other confoundings factors; second, the kids did not all have the same sickness. The only criterion for inclusion in the experimental group was that they have a fever. That could be any number of different infectious agents.

The researchers themselves have a list of methodological weaknesses, too:

Although subgroup comparisons suggest some specificity of the fever effect, the study did not include a comparison group of children with nonfebrile illnesses. Our measures of behavior were based solely on parent reports; these data are subject to information biases. Because symptom data were collected prospectively, however, recall bias, a major source of information bias, was likely limited. Future studies may benefit from including independent raters (eg, teachers) or using videos to limit subjective misclassification of changes in behavior. Selection bias is also possible because a small fraction of eligible families from recruitment sources participated. Just more than half of families in the final analysis sample reported a priori that they thought that fever affected their children's behaviors, and this proportion may be higher than that of the general population of parents of children with ASDs...

So, in the final reckoning, what we have here is a slightly more systematic recording of what had previously existed only as anecdote. The sample size is too small and the number of confounding variables is too large to say they've definitively isolated a trend. If anything, the study points as much to our ignorance of fever, and what happens to the body during a fever, as it does to our ignorance of autism. Both topics certainly merit further study.

It wasn't really my intention to be so long about the technical aspects of this article; I'll try to be brief and just mention in passing its metaphorical subtext. The old wives' tale the researchers were investigating has it that during a fever, autistic symptoms will diminish, sometimes dramatically. It's as if a veil has been lifted, goes the metaphor, and parents can see their *real* child before he slips behind the haze of autism once more.

This kind of revelatory moment exists also in the changeling myth, which I attempted in the last post to argue is the lens through which most people still see autism. If you have a changeling, legends say (as per Wikipedia) that you can cause it to reveal its true nature, usually by doing something odd like brewing beer in an acorn shell. The changeling will then say something highly ritualized that no human child would say, like "I've seen (a lot of things, indicative of the fairy child's great age), but I've never seen beer brewed in an acorn shell," and then either disappear, leaving the human child, or stay there, revealed, and the parent would have to think of a way to drive it away and regain his or her actual offspring. I think the belief that autism will abate during a fever calls back to this scenario: a specific set of circumstances reveals the enigmatic, frustrating child as he really is, and gives the parent hope that he or she won't always be stuck with a cipher. It externalizes the child's autism, makes it something that has happened to the child rather than part of who the child happens to be. And it might well give the parents hope to think of their child this way, but I think it's a false hope, or at least a severely conditional one. It predicates happiness on the child's finding its way to socially acceptable normalcy, whereas when one accepts autism as not being inherently bad, just different, one is able to love and take joy in the child regardless of outcome.

Another Nonliterary Post

From Feministe, a link to this post by Shark-Fu:

A bitch was pleased to read that Senator Clinton would increase funding into autism research and education…

…but I’d like to see some of that money go to adult autistics too.

Oh, I know that the press is in love with autism right now because the revised spectrum has resulted in a better understanding of just how common an autism diagnosis is.

But the press has failed…horribly…to point out that autism is not a childhood illness just because symptoms appear when a person is a child.

Autistics grow up.

I left a comment at Feministe that tried to express what I think underlies this failure of the news media, or public policy, to acknowledge the existence of autistic adults and the fact that children with autism do develop, even if it is at a different rate and in a different way. I'm not sure it comes across in the comment, but I think the popular image of autism has a lot in common with the old story of the changeling --- a human child stolen by fairies and replaced with a strange, inhuman substitute. A lot of the terminology people use when they're describing autistic children --- in their own world, cut off from other people, walled off behind the autism --- has an undertone of otherworldliness or abduction. My child doesn't live in the world, or alternately, my child used to be fine and healthy, but now he's different and I don't understand it at all.

I have a vague idea that there might be a book written on this subject, but darned if I can remember the title, or find it on Amazon.

Is It Enough Just to Say a Character Is Autistic? More Thoughts on Soon I Will Be Invincible

One thing I never got to in my last post, but which I wanted to write about, is the character of Blackwolf. He's the Champions' Batman analogue: a brilliant detective and elite-level athlete whose traumatic past led him to become a costumed crime-fighter. He's also supposedly autistic, although the story doesn't really develop this. The label gets dropped onto him a couple times, and it never seems to fit. He has no identifiably "autistic" traits, and the label gives the reader no insight into anything he says or does. Yet Grossman obviously thought it important to give him that label, since he repeats it.

On one level, I'm intrigued by this decision, since Blackwolf counters a lot of the most common sterotypes about autistic people. He's described as attractive, physically graceful, and charismatic, and he functions as a love interest for both Fatale and Damsel (his ex-wife). He's also not shown as having any particular difficulty understanding social dynamics; indeed, in one scene where Damsel's parents are taking her to task for her handling of the Doctor Impossible situation, Blackwolf rises spontaneously to her defense. Without even being prompted, he knows that she's feeling distressed and needs him to stand up for her. It may just be that he'd had enough practice mediating between her and her parents in their marriage, but even that sounds like an improbably diplomatic role for an autistic person to take. While it's awesome to have a character clearly labeled "autistic" who does all these things we don't often see autistic characters doing, problems arise when the character has so little in common with the category "autistic" that, rather than broaden the category, we question his inclusion in it.

There are a couple passages where we see hints of his autistic nature. The first describes a fight between Doctor Impossible and the Champions, in which Doctor Impossible (he of the "Malign Hypercognition Disorder") expresses a sort of mystified admiration of Blackwolf's unusual thought processes:

He's got that twitchy autistic look he gets in a fight, his odd neurology hyperaccelerating, problem solving in real time.

Bearing in mind how "hyperaccelerated" Impossible's own cognition is supposed to be, this is high praise indeed, possibly indicating a tactical savantism on Blackwolf's part. Later in the fight, Blackwolf slips away and surprises Impossible, indicating that he did plan out his actions ahead of time, while the evil genius was busy holding off the other Champions. And since everywhere else in the book, it is Blackwolf who is in awe of Impossible's intelligence and who despairs of ever anticipating his plan, his ability to outthink Impossible must apply only in very narrow circumstances, i.e. during a physical fight. Having narrow, hyper-specific areas of genius that rise far above one's general intelligence level is the defining characteristic of savantism, and autistic cognition in general, even among non-savants, is very uneven. It would make perfect sense from that standpoint for Blackwolf to be smarter than Doctor Impossible in some contexts and hopelessly outclassed by him in others.

In the other passage, Fatale tries to act on her feelings for Blackwolf, only to have him push her away:

Our lips touch, and for a second it's everything I thought it would be. The metal in my jaw is awkward but somehow exciting, and he kisses back. ... Then I make a mistake. I reach for the mask, and he catches my arm, ready to break it. His jaw sets, and I'm dealing with Blackwolf again. It's like watching a different personality take hold, and I get a glimpse of what he's been holding back, a terrible, unappeasable mourning. Something really god-awful must have happened to him at some point.

Blackwolf's obsession with avenging his lost siblings rules his life. Obsessions and compulsions are indeed a part of autism, but I see a more powerful authorial motive than mere verisimilitude at work here, one that explains the overall lack of depth to Blackwolf's exposition. The two things I've singled out as most autistic in Blackwolf, his inscrutable mind and his rigid obsession with vengeance, are also the things that alienate him most from the other characters, that make him most clearly "Other." Doctor Impossible and Fatale both marvel at him, wondering what could possibly lurk in that brain of his:

I wonder what makes him this way, what primal, originary scene branded him with an obsession that makes him dress like an animal, and helps him fight. Who does he see when he looks at me?

...I get a glimpse of what he's been holding back, a terrible, unappeasable mourning.

The other members of the Champions, as I detailed in the last post, are all isolated by their powers. Their powers, and whatever price their bodies pay for those powers, dictate every aspect of their lives. They are utterly alone, Grossman tries to emphasize. Because Blackwolf lacks a power, he had to be given something that would make him as alone as Fatale, with her amnesia and her metal body, or Damsel, with her alien parentage and force field. His autism, therefore, is a metaphor for what Grossman feels the real price of superhuman ability would be. As such, it is not and probably was never meant to be accurately portrayed, which is lame insofar as it fails to invest a character with sufficient depth to be truly alive to the reader. Ideally, a metaphor should succeed both on the literal level, as an accurate depiction of the object or idea being used in the metaphor, and on the allegorical level in which it stands in for something else. Blackwolf never rises above the level of a cipher, which not only fails to endear him to us but also leaves us with a superficial idea of autism. Autism, as embodied in Blackwolf, is just isolation, just a state of arrested development. We get no insight as to what it's like to inhabit his strange, unevenly brilliant mind, no concept of him as an individual. So, as much as I love Soon I Will Be Invincible for its clever plays on the comic-book idiom, I'm disappointed by its lazy use of its one autistic character.

Superheroes and Disability in Soon I Will Be Invincible

While there are a lot of potential topics for an essay on Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible, the one that fits the best with the theme of this blog is the novel's extended analogy between superpowers and disability. It sounds contradictory, but very few of Grossman's characters are simply superhuman. Their powers camouflage the extent to which they can't function in the everyday world. We get the impression that many of them fight crime (or mastermind it) because the wider world has no other use for them.

An ongoing theme of the novel, voiced at different times by its heroine, Fatale, and its villain, Doctor Impossible, is that superheroes (and -villains) pay a physical price for their power:

[Doctor Impossible] learned ... to spot the telltales of power: the stutter-step of a bad nerve operation, and the alien hybrids, Altairian eyes and Enderri hands. How to look at the way superheroes walk ... and see what happened to their bodies, once upon a time. Most of them had paid a price for their power, and for most of them it was too high.

That holds true not only for the bottom-tier freaks and strongmen that Doctor Impossible meets during his early career, but also for elite superheroes like Fatale's group, the Champions. Fatale herself is a cyborg, having had her body rebuilt after a car accident that destroyed half of her real body. She has no memory of her former life, she needs to be constantly on immune-suppressing drugs to tolerate her implanted circuitry, her added height and weight make her somewhat awkward and graceless, and she is infertile. The leader of the Champions, Damsel, is an invulnerable flying powerhouse whose bizarre alien-hybrid metabolism has her constantly throwing up (Fatale initially believes she has bulimia), and a teenage sidekick, Rainbow Triumph, is on an extensive drug regimen, both to keep her, too, from rejecting her cyborg implants and to hold off the degenerative bone disease that's slowly killing her. The level of sheer physical dysfunction that the Champions have to deal with every day is brought home when Fatale describes her teammates' nightly routines, spying on them with her x-ray vision:

[Rainbow Triumph] opens a metal briefcase and begins opening pill bottles and boxes, until fourteen pills, capsules, and dietary chews are lined up on the edge of the marble sink in front of her. She does it every twelve hours. She's probably been doing it since she was seven; maybe it's to fix whatever was wrong with her in the first place. ...

Underneath my feet, Blackwolf [a Batmanlike martial artist/detective]washes his hands for a full five minutes before popping three or four painkillers, which explains a lot. Then he pushes the little room's furniture to the side and puts himself through a series of calisthenic exercises ...

Feral [a huge cat-person, super-strong and a fierce fighter] drops to all fours when he's alone, and sleeps curled in a ball. I think he has back problems from trying to stand on two legs all the time.

Besides the physical (and, often, psychological) complications of the kind of altered physiology a superhero would have, Grossman's characters also have to deal with a larger society that marginalizes them. The personality quirks that lead characters to choose heroism or villainy over civilian existence are labeled disordered on both sides: Doctor Impossible is said to have "Malign Hypercognition Disorder," literally evil genius syndrome, while Fatale, quitting her job as a mercenary to fight crime, is accused of having "an adjustment disorder." Fatale is regarded with extreme suspicion by her landlord, who requires her to put in a thick carpet at her own expense, and to sign a series of waivers before he will rent to her. Doctor Impossible and another villain, Laserator, are both brilliant scientists who nevertheless are unable to succeed in academia; Laserator languishes in an obscure professorship while Doctor Impossible quits "legitimate" science as a postdoc, after watching himself grow older and older than his classmates while failing to do any serious work.

In the passage containing the description of the Champions' pill-popping bedtime rituals, Fatale articulates what might well be the novel's guiding thesis on what it's like to live as a superhero:

For everyone else, it's a momentary fantasy. They don't have to take them into the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. Or wake up in the night in flames, or sweep up shattered glass in their apartment, or show up late for work with a black eye. No one else knows where they itch or bruise you, or has tried the things you've tried with them when you were bored or desperate. No one else falls asleep with them and finds them still there in the morning, a dream that won't disperse upon waking.

This litany of domestic details strikes me as particularly relevant from a disability-rights perspective: no one but us knows what it's really like to live with whatever it is we live with. No one but us knows our real "quality of life," the constellation of small, intimate details that define our condition. The passage was meant to de-romanticize the superpowered life, as experienced by our ambivalent and somewhat cynical narrator, but just as she wants to dispel the "momentary fantasy" of how wonderful it is to be a superpowered crimefighter, a similar passage would also work to dispel the equally one-dimensional vision of horror most nondisabled people imagine when contemplating disability.