More About Stigma

Miri at Brute Reason has a very thought-provoking post up about social stigma, and whether anyone deserves to be stigmatized.

She doesn't think so, and she gives lots of very good reasons, including these:

When a group is stigmatized, they are considered less than human in some ways. Whichever aspect of them is stigmatized becomes the whole of their identity in our eyes,  and often this means that even if they change the actions that caused them to fall into that category in the first place, the stigma remains. ...
...
[W]ielding psychological manipulation as punishment really, really rubs me the wrong way. The attitude that if someone does something bad they deserve to be cast out and hated and seen as inhuman scares me. I think it's very normal and understandable to want to punish someone for doing a horrible thing, but, as I wrote after the Steubenville verdict, I'm not sure that's the most useful and skeptical response. I feel that our primary concern should be preventing people from doing bad things (both first-time and repeat offenses) and not satisfying our own need for revenge by punishing them.

But, as good as these arguments are (and I am still turning them over in my head, and will probably keep this idea, that stigma and ostracism are inhumane and that there is nothing anyone can do that is bad enough to make them deserving of such treatment, for a very long time*), I'm not sure I can follow them all the way.

Between the ongoing story I've been following in my local newspaper about a girl in my city --- identified only by the initials LP --- who was found locked in a closet in her mother's apartment and my discovery of the Homeschoolers Anonymous blog, and also Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism blogging somewhat regularly about the disturbingly popular child-rearing philosophy of Michael and Debi Pearl, my mind has been more preoccupied than usual with the vilest, most extreme forms of child abuse.

I commented on Miri's blog that, if anyone does deserve to have a stigma permanently attached to them, it's the perpetrators of those horrors, particularly the Pearls (who were not content merely to abuse their own children, if indeed they followed their own method, but who wrote books proclaiming their combination of hard-core obedience training, enforced by frequent beatings, and withholding food from "defiant" children is the only thing that will guarantee a child will grow up to be a Godly person who is saved from Hell) and the mother in this ten-part personal narrative on Homeschoolers Anonymous.

Doing that to a child, for as long as the anonymous author's mother did --- from the spread in ages of the various children in the family, and the author's Conclusion where she mentions that her two youngest brothers are still with her parents and the abuse is ongoing, it had to have been more than a decade --- is a world away from, say, committing an armed robbery. This wasn't a single act, this was a long-term campaign this woman waged against her children. She stayed at home, ostensibly "homeschooling" her children throughout this period, so it's hard to see a line between these acts and the rest of her life. 

Yet, with the LP story, which is just as horrific, and which makes me feel just as much rage on the victim's behalf, I can see more of Miri's point. LP's mother was very young when she had LP, and at several points in the story you can see hints of someone who was overwhelmed, and who might never have done what she did to her daughter if she had gotten the help she needed but probably never asked for. It's hard to see whom it would help to stigmatize her, when she was already probably stigmatized for other reasons (poverty, blackness, living in a subsidized apartment, being an unmarried mother of three children by two different fathers), which might well have contributed to her feeling that the only thing she could do with her eldest daughter was to keep her out of sight.

But the Pearls, and the parents in the anonymous woman's story? They're not stigmatized at all, except by people like me, who have no power in their lives or social contact with them, or people who have left the conservative evangelical Christian circles those people move in. Within that community, they are revered as leaders and role models. I'm sure that this knowledge is part of the reason I want so badly to rain down opprobrium upon them: because, unlike Jacole Prince, they're getting off scot-free, and they continue to believe that what they are doing is right.

And Miri does grapple with the problem of great evil in her post, too --- where I chose to focus on child abuse, she wrote about rape. And she made another great point in doing so:

Being a convicted rapist is actually a very stigmatized identity -- it's just that rapists rarely become convicted rapists. Rape is known to be a Very Bad Thing, but rapists know that they can get away with it if they commit it in certain ways. Despite the stigma, rape is pervasive and rape culture exists.

I absolutely see a dynamic like this playing out in mainstream society's attitudes about child abuse; child abuse is so heinous, so evil, so stigmatized that we can't ever believe anyone we know is abusing their child. So we second-guess ourselves when we start to wonder about a child's suspicious bruises, unexplained absences, dirty clothes, poor hygiene etc. The stigma attached to child abuse is terrible, so we are reluctant to call it down on our neighbors' heads, even if we suspect they are abusing their children. What if we're wrong? We'll have ruined an innocent person's life! 

(This will sound painfully familiar to anyone who has been raped, or who has spent any time reading about rape culture.)

Another thing worth pondering about this problem as it pertains to child abuse is that, when the child who is being abused, neglected, or even murdered has a disability, the abusive, neglectful or murderous parent is not stigmatized so much as they are pitied. The poor dear, she was carrying an impossible burden. 

A mother can appear in a film in which she tells the camera she has thought about putting her autistic daughter in the car and driving off a bridge with her, and the main reaction to this film will be sympathy, not shock or horror. 

I point this out not to argue that parents of disabled children don't deserve sympathy, or much better support than they're currently getting from society at large, but to argue that this reaction leaves no room for the child. They're a person too, and they have the right to food, shelter, medical care, education, love, and as much freedom and autonomy as is developmentally appropriate**. Focusing on how hard it is to care for a disabled child, even if you're only trying to explain the parent's actions, works to excuse the parent and put some of the blame for their fate onto the child. It also works to make life harder for all disabled people, because it makes it sound like we're being unreasonable just by existing, and that attitude is exactly the kind of attitude that resists making accommodations for us, even when those accommodations are not particularly expensive, awkward or difficult.

Particularly when we're talking about children whose disabilities are behavioral, this idea that it's just too hard works to excuse awful things like restraint and seclusion, at home and in school. At its extreme, it can lead to parents keeping their disabled children in dog cages; they see no other way to treat them because it's too hard and it's not like the children are normal children, for whom such treatment would be abusive, no, they're abnormal children for whom it is necessary.

So even while I see that a heavy stigma attached to child abuse can be counterproductive, in that it might discourage people from reporting their suspicions, I also think there are some kinds of abuse that are not heavily stigmatized, that are even excused (i.e., abuse of children with disabilities, which is often framed as a tragic consequence of disability) or met with approval (i.e., abuse within insular communities that don't share the wider culture's norms).

And it makes me furious that there isn't a heavy stigma, that people like, say, Michael and Debi Pearl don't even think they've done anything wrong, and sleep the untroubled sleep of the just.

*"Keeping an idea" is what I do when I read or hear something that blows my mind, but that I do not immediately know whether to accept it as truth. I kept a lot of ideas related to feminism in the (long) time before I decided I was a feminist, and I kept an idea of Richard Dawkins's that I now think I do believe is true, that raising a child to believe in Hell (at least, a Hell that they could go to --- I'm not sure it's true if Hell is only for big evildoers like Hitler and Stalin) is an abusive practice. I'm also keeping the idea that veganism is a moral imperative for those who are able to adopt it. A lot of the ideas that I keep are of the form "actually, this thing that we do all the time is bad, and you should stop doing it/get other people to stop doing it.")

**This notion --- that freedom and autonomy can't be absolute when you're talking about children --- is actually more complicated than it sounds, especially when we're talking about children with disabilities, or dependent adults with disabilities. How can you define what is "developmentally appropriate" for a child whose development has been atypical? Especially if said child is ahead of his age in some ways while also being delayed in others? (This was me, and I suspect it is most autistic people!) I know only this much: the way these decisions are currently made gives too little freedom to developmentally disabled adults.

"I Don't Care If They Hit You; You're Not Supposed to Hit Back!"

(Photo by Allison Long, for the Kansas City Star)

A recent article in the Kansas City Star covered a group with a different sort of anti-bullying campaign: it's a boxing-based fitness class just for teenagers who've been bullied or whose friends have been bullied.

It's called Fight Club, and in general I think it's awesome. It sounds, in a lot of ways, like exactly what I needed in middle school.

There's only one thing that bothers me about the program: it's not an actual self-defense class. The article stresses that the kids taking the class are encouraged not to fight back against their abusers, and that the boxing serves more as an outlet for emotions than as practical training:

It's not a self-defense class. Holly Reynolds, the woman who started the program, can't call it that for legal reasons. It's not about fighting, either, though Reynolds gave it the same name as the 1999 Brad Pitt movie about underground fight clubs.

This Fight Club is about getting fit, feeling strong and fighting the good fight, she said.

These teens don't spar with each other. They spar with their feelings.

It's not that the things the classes do offer --- improved physical fitness, confidence, an emotional outlet, a roomful of other people who are having the same experiences as you, along with adult trainers and mentors who are clearly on your side --- aren't also hugely important; I just worry that explicitly discouraging these kids from fighting back if they're assaulted undermines what the program is supposed to do. It's supposed to give you confidence and enable you to stand up for yourself or your friends; how can you do that if you freeze up once the confrontation escalates?

We have a serious problem in mainstream American culture, in that we tend to put all the blame on victims of violence --- especially certain kinds of violence. If you were raped, you must've done something to draw attention to yourself, or gone somewhere you shouldn't have, or trusted someone you shouldn't have trusted. To use some philosophical terminology, the rapist may have been the immediate or proximate cause, but you were the ultimate cause of your own rape.

It's the same with bullying, whether of children in school or of adults in the workplace or in their communities. If one or more people decide to harass you, stalk you, follow you around in groups yelling things at you, try to scare you, subject you to unwanted, gross and insulting sexual advances, physically attack you or vandalize your property, it's bad, but you must've done something to make them choose you as their target.

And with school bullying, adults tend to tell children very stupid, unhelpful things when those children ask for help, like, "Just ignore them; they'll go away if you don't respond." (More victim-blaming: you're only being bullied because you let them get a rise out of you!) They also hold victims of bullying to a much higher moral standard than the bullies themselves: no matter how in-your-face, menacing or even violent they get, if you hit them back, you're just as bad as they are. They ignore bullying until it does turn into a physical fight, and when that happens, they act as if all combatants are equally at fault*.

So, against that kind of cultural backdrop, I don't think it's doing the kids any favors to try and convince them they don't want to hit the people who are abusing them. Of course they do. Telling them they don't, when they know perfectly well that they do, would (I think) just work to undermine any impression you've made of being the rare adult who understands what they're going through.

Don't get the wrong idea; I know teaching kids self-defense won't magically enable every one of them to win a fight with a bully (especially those who are bullied by a whole pack of people), and I know it's not fair to expect victims of bullying to solve the problem on their own. In my ideal school environment, teachers and bystanders would play a much more active role in defusing incidents of bullying; I just think physical self-defense is also a tool kids need to be given, without shaming or second-guessing them when they use it.

*That happens to grown women, too, when they try to defend themselves against rape or domestic abuse.

Autistic Woman Writes Terrible Column; Speculation About Her Capacity for Empathy Ensues

There's this woman, Penelope Trunk, who writes about climbing the corporate ladder on her blog, and in her book Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. She's founded several startup companies, has worked in marketing and is now a full-time writer, focusing on career advice for young people.

She also has Asperger syndrome.

A few days ago, she wrote a column about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who is accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. In her column, Trunk advances the bizarre hypothesis that women who occupy the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, who work low-paying, menial jobs with no possibility of advancement, have greater freedom than higher-paid, professional women do to report sexual abuse by bosses, co-workers or clients.

Her notion is that someone working a low-paying job will not have the same incentive to hold onto that job that someone with a better job would have:

It has been clear for at least a decade that women who want to have a high-flying career should not report sexual harassment. I have written about this a zillion times, and before you argue with me, read the quotes from all the labor lawyers (representing plaintiffs) who agree.

The bottom line is that just about every woman who has entered the workplace has experienced sexual harassment, but the women who report it face retribution. ... [W]omen who complain about harassment generally lose their jobs in some convoluted but ultimately predictable way.
...
But, what about women who don't care if they get fired? Those women hold a lot of power in this equation.

It used to be that women with low-level jobs did not have the socioeconomic backing to stand up for themselves in the face of harassment. Today, women feel more empowered - even women in a low pay grade. And women across the economic spectrum can identify what crosses the line.

These women have nothing to lose when they report men who cross the line sexually. So the maid reported. And then, it turns out, all sorts of women in higher-up positions spoke up against Strauss-Kahn. The women wouldn't report the harassment on their own. They don't want to suffer retribution. But now there will be no retribution, so it's safe to come forward.

This is why men are going to focus harassment at the higher ranks of the corporate ladder. These are the women who have to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep climbing the ladder.

But God help the guy who harasses a woman with nothing to lose.

It's a great moment in history. Poor women are empowered to fight against lecherous men, and rich women can finally come out of the sexual-harassment closet because of it.

Matt Yglesias at Think Progress and Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon have both covered why this is astonishingly, massively wrong --- not just off, but actually the opposite of what's really true, which is that poorer women working menial jobs are more, not less, vulnerable to exploitation and abuse at work, and have fewer options for escaping or combating it. In believing otherwise, Trunk seems to have forgotten that, for some people, losing a job means not being able to pay rent, not having enough money to buy enough food, having to put off needed medical treatments or go without needed medications because they can't pay for them.

She also assumes that, if one quits a menial job, one can quickly and easily find another. This is just not true in an economy where almost one-tenth of all people in the U.S. are officially unemployed, and many more are working fewer hours than they'd like to. These low-wage service jobs are actually really competitive right now, since there are relatively few of them (since companies have mostly been weathering the Great Recession by laying off all the employees they could conceivably do without) and lots of people needing work.

There's a lot of other important stuff she leaves out, but I think the most important failing in her article is her assumption that women working low-paying jobs don't need those jobs. As a commenter on Pandagon noted, it's as if she's assuming that everyone has well-off relatives who can support them for a time, or has a trust fund or significant savings to fall back on. She doesn't seem to understand what poverty is.

Anyway, enough about Trunk. She's ignorant, naive and starry-eyed, and her good fortune and financial security have given her the (mistaken) impression that life is as easy for everyone as it has been for her.

Now, I want to talk about her critics.

It shouldn't surprise anyone reading this blog that commenters on both Pandagon and Yglesias's site have brought up her autism as a possible explanation for her failure to grasp basic economic and social realities.

From Pandagon:

Penelope Trunk's deal is that she has Asperger's and spends a great deal of time and energy figuring out the "rules" for social interaction. (Note: she is open about this and has written a great deal about it.) I got reading her because her perspective can bring some real insight into human interactions. But she can also get things dead, dead wrong.

If Ms. Trunk actually suffers from an illness which damages her ability to feel empathy, that both absolves her (partially) and leads to the next question --- why is she indistinguishable from the average conservative/libertarian?

My understanding is that while the inability to read nonverbal cues is quite acute, the practical effect of Asperger's also includes a lesser capacity for empathy, especially in relatively swift interactions.

From Yglesias's:

Trunk is wrong, obviously. But Asperger's Syndrome makes what she's trying to do here --- put herself in both DSK's and the maid's position and see who's right --- incredibly difficult. This isn't Tom Friedman telling us we gotta say "suck on that" to Iraq b/c he's a dick, this is someone with a legitimate medical condition exercising poor judgment by choosing to comment on something it's very hard for her to understand given that condition.

These comments are actually not representative of the threads in which they appear; these four comments are the only comments on both websites to blame Trunk's classism on her Asperger's diagnosis, and both threads also include other comments telling the quoted commenters that they are wrong to do so.

But it still depresses me that her diagnosis comes up at all in a discussion of why her article is wrong. One of the reasons it depresses me is because --- as the last comment I quote indicates --- it effectively bars all autistic people from participating* in discussions about workplace harassment. "Oh, you're autistic, you don't understand how normal people act." Because our "condition" prevents us from understanding other people, nothing we say about anything other people do --- even things they do to us --- has to be taken seriously. This is especially troubling when it's workplace (or school) harassment we're talking about, since autistic people are especially likely to be targeted for such harassment. (Indeed, we are often blamed for being bullied --- it's our own fault for being so weird, we're told as children.)

It also depresses me somewhat to see Trunk's excessive optimism about most people's ability to quit jobs at will, and find new jobs quickly and easily, attributed to her Asperger's rather than to her having a lot of resources at her disposal that she takes for granted, when most people with autism, when they can work, have terrible trouble finding jobs, and then holding on to those jobs for longer than a few weeks. If anything, we probably have a keener grasp than most people do of the risks inherent in quitting a job, because those risks are heightened for us.

I'd also like to point out, in two of those comments --- both written by the same person --- the use of autism as a metaphor for a self-serving political philosophy.

I've seen this once before, in an article on CommonDreams.org:

The language used in this passage --- citing "self-centered" behavior as the characteristic feature of autism, for example, or saying autistic people lack "linguistic, social, cultural or logical constraints to manage [our] lives" --- draws strong, if implicit, parallels between autism (a neurological condition) and selfishness (a moral quality).

These comments do a similar thing, with the "lack of empathy" that is so often cited as the core deficit of Asperger's syndrome. In the psychological literature on autism, the "empathy" being spoken of is usually cognitive --- we are unable to understand non-autistic people's behavior, feelings or states of mind, even though we are perfectly capable of caring about them. Yet, in the comment quoted above, the implication is that this lack of understanding also entails a lack of feeling for these incomprehensible others.

Autism is not a moral failing. Autistic people have moral failings, but they have them because they are people, not because they are autistic.

*Not in the literal sense of "You are not allowed to speak," but in the more nebulous sense of "You can speak, but if I know that you're autistic, I will attribute everything you say to your being autistic, and if any of it conflicts with what I think is true, or right, I will disregard whatever you say because your mind is diseased and mine is not."

What Would You Tell a Teenage Girl with Autism?

Sharon daVanport's blog, Spectrumy, has this guest post from Shana Nichols, a psychologist who specializes in helping girls with autism cope with the social and emotional challenges of adolescence:

I am currently writing a companion book [to her earlier work, Girls Growing Up on
the Autism Spectrum] for pre-teen and teen girls themselves to read titled A Girl's Guide to Growing Up on the Autism Spectrum. My co-author, Brigid Rankowski, is a college student with AS. This book is under contract with Jessica Kingsley Publishers, and at this time we are looking for short contributions from girls and women.

If you (as an adult on the spectrum) or your daughter would be interested in sharing an experience, or advice related to growing up as a female with an ASD, I would love to hear from you. We are looking for 50-200 word narratives about any topic related to growing up. Some examples include:

• What it's like being a girl/woman with an ASD
• Puberty
• Having your period; gynecological exams
• Getting a first bra
• Friendships and mean girls; bullying; fitting in
• Eating issues
• Self-esteem and feeling good about yourself
• Being true to who you are
• Mood and anxiety
• Sexuality
• Relationships and dating
• Media, popularity
• Life goals and pursuing your dreams
• Special interests

We are also interested in poetry and possibly art work.

I like this project --- especially when we're that young, there's so much we know but can't articulate about how we're different, particularly the growing suspicion that certain things that are very, very hard for us are as simple as breathing to most people, and thus that most people can't even tell we're struggling, because what could we possibly be struggling with? It might be helpful to have stuff written down by adults who've already figured out ways to cope with some of the really thorny, hard-to-name problems like inertia, executive dysfunction, sensory hypersensitivities, etc. Even if the solutions they describe aren't practical for the young person reading the book, they can at least show the essay to their parents and say, "See this? The problem she talks about? I have it, too."

I know I had to wait a very long time before I could describe most of the things that now seem to matter a great deal to me, and greatly affect my day-to-day welfare.

I'm not sure to what extent a guidebook written by autistic adults/other adolescents would've helped me, though, because many of my biggest problems either had little or nothing to do with autism (example: chronic, recurring nausea and other gastrointestinal issues) or my solutions to the problem required a freedom to arrange my life around my body's own needs and rhythms that most teenagers don't have (example: if I can wait a few hours before eating anything, I'll have a lot fewer problems than if I have to wake up, eat, and rush out the door). (As you can see from my choice of examples, sometimes both of those things are true at the same time).

I would also not have much, if anything, to say about many of the topics on their sample list, as many of them did not apply to me. I don't remember puberty --- at least, I don't remember menarche, and the other changes were gradual (and slight!) enough to be non-issues.

Similarly, getting a bra was not a memorable occasion for me; I wore training bras, and only ever "graduated" to sports bras.

Mean girls? What mean girls? The bullies I worried about were all boys, and I wasn't worried about being ostracized or gossiped about so much as I was worried about physical violence. (That never actually happened, but it's always a possibility when you are one gawky social outcast and your harassers are many teenage boys. I feared it, at any rate).

I was also so socially obtuse at that point in my life that many characteristic "mean girl" tactics would probably have been wasted on me.

However. There is one thing that could have made a world of difference if I'd been explicitly told this sometime during middle school, or at the beginning of freshman year of high school: that it's okay to say no to any form of sexual contact just because you don't want to do it. In other words, I wish I'd been given a Talk about consent. I wish it very much, because my not-rape in high school happened because I didn't know I could say no, so I allowed all sorts of stuff I didn't enjoy to be done to me by a boy I didn't even like.

I might write something about that, if I can get it short enough, coherent enough, and I don't think I'd be being too much of a Debbie Downer sending it in.

But What About the (Aspie) Men??!

There's a phenomenon I've been noticing off and on for a long time in online discussions of rape culture (most recently, here), and the snap decisions women have to make all the time about how much to trust each random man* they encounter: when women start talking about what sorts of cues and impressions tell them to avoid a particular man, other people pipe up to tell them they're being unfair.

Most often, the appeal takes this form: What if he's just got Asperger's? Those Asperger people, they can't tell what kind of signals they're sending, or that they might be creeping you out! Give creepy-looking dudes a chance!

This derailing tactic also commonly appears in discussions of consent, where it usually plays out like this: Feminist blogger writes about the myriad social pressures on women to say yes (or at least not say no) to sex they don't want; feminist blogger suggests that our understanding of what rape and consent are should reflect this, and proposes a model of consent resembling this one, or this one, or this one; whatever model the feminist blogger espouses, it's going to put more responsibility on men to make sure their female partners really want to do X sexual activity; male commenters pop up complaining that women's body language is just too danged hard to read, and if the feminist blogger's plan were adopted, hardly anybody would ever have heterosexual sex ever again!

The man with Asperger's usually makes his entrance here, as an extreme example of Everyman's dilemma.

Of course, this is all perfectly true --- autistic people do often fail to understand nonverbal cues, social context, or how other people are likely to interpret their actions, which does mean that straight autistic men will probably creep out a lot of strange women as they try to teach themselves to flirt (or not; I don't know how to flirt and have no desire ever to learn) --- and sometimes this fact can be brought up and discussed in a non-derailing manner**.

Far more often, though, it's brought up not to add anything to the discussion at all, but to end it. Straight men's oft-proclaimed incapacity to decipher the subtle ambiguities of straight women's facial expressions and body language places all the onus for creating a safer, more egalitarian heterosexuality back onto women's shoulders.

An example, from this comment thread at Hugo Schwyzer's blog, is this response to this earlier comment:

You [referring to previous commenter] have already said that some of the men in your experience can't read the non-verbal clues. That wasn't me. That was you.
So that's the way it is.
In other words, that's the world now.
It makes no difference if men are hardwired or if men are clueless. Your experience has told us that some aren't picking up your nonverbal clues. So what are you going to do about it in the immediate future?

Wishing won't make it change.

That's the way it is, and wishing won't make it change. So either do something about it (all by yourself, naturally, since we men are clearly unwilling or unable to help you) or shut up and quit bothering us!

"saying many men currently DO NOT correctly interpret nonverbal signals (or notice them at all) is not the same thing as saying that men CAN'T. do you seriously not get the difference between those two statements?"

I think this is unfortunately both true to some extent: a) men (on average) don't learn to be as good as they can be in interpreting non-verbal communication. This is something that can be dealt with if there was a real recognition that they needed help in this area, that not everything is "naturally" given or not, and b) men (people with a male brain structure) will on average ceteris paribus never be as good as women (people with a female brain structure) are on average when it comes to interpreting non-verbal communication. There are researchers who suspect that "autism is an extreme version of the male condition." (Simon Baron-Cohen)

"Many of these sex differences [in empathizing and systematizing] are seen in adults, which might lead to the conclusion that all they reflect are differences in socialization and experience. But some differences are also seen extremely early in development, which may suggest that biology also plays a role. For example, girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate. One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.

In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the
laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those emotions with an appropriate emotion of one's own.

...

We know that culture plays a role in the divergence of the sexes, but so does biology. For example, on the first day of life, male and female newborns pay attention to different things. On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, while more female infants will look at a human face."
[link]

There are several rhetorical sleights of hand at work in the invoke-the-Aspie gambit. First, there's the handy conflation of autistic men (who, if we use the current thinking that about 1% of people are autistic, and that the ratio of autistic men to women is 4:1, should represent about 0.8% of people, or 1.6% of men --- a tiny minority, even if not as tiny as it used to be reckoned) with all men. In the first comment I quote, the argument is that because some men really can't read nonverbal signals, no man should be expected to***.

This line of argumentation also completely erases autistic women from the discussion, by making "autism" synonymous with "clueless, socially awkward man who can't understand his mysterious female partner." Autistic women might have that kind of problem (or we might not, since I think we might be likelier than autistic men to be partnered with other autistics****, with whom there isn't quite so much of a body-language barrier), or our difficulties with nonverbal cues, social context and other stuff falling under the umbrella of "intuition" or "common sense" might take a more sinister form. Earlier in this post, I mentioned the snap decisions most women make every day to try to minimize their chances of being raped by a stranger. Such snap decisions are often going to rest on evidence of the type that's completely invisible to many autistic women.

This tactic is also a way to use intersectionality against feminists: a feminist who confesses hirself unsympathetic to the hypothetical Aspie bachelor's plight opens hirself up to accusations of ableism. (Or, in the weaker version of this appeal, where the hypothetical man is not an actual autistic but just a well-meaning, socially awkward, geeky guy, the feminist becomes the stuck-up Mean Girl who won't give the sweet but wallflowerish Nice Guy the time of day. Since most women have been socialized to be nice, and polite, and not selfish or superficial, this high-schoolish taunt can have surprising power even over grown women).

*The Shapely Prose guest post I linked to uses a wonderful phrase to describe this: "Schrodinger's Rapist." Every man hovers in a sort of quantum superposition between Rapist and Not-Rapist in the eyes of the women who have to interact with him, and often women will err on the side of caution --- assume every man you meet is a rapist --- because the alternative --- trusting a man who later rapes you --- is horrible. More horrible than having to live as if half the people you run into on a daily basis are violent criminals who will hurt you if they're given the chance.

**I think the commenter at Shapely Prose who first brought up autism accomplished this. She might've been the first person I've ever seen raise that issue in good faith, though.

***I do hate that the discussion of consent always goes there, just because there are people who can't read those signals, and such people do sometimes have sex. Where I part ways with the "What about the Aspie men?!" crowd is that I insist that, if a man can't get a reasonably clear idea of whether his partner is enjoying herself just by looking at her, he should stop and ask her. Is that really so hard?

****If you're wondering how that can possibly be true, remember there are a lot more diagnosed male autistics than female ones.