Employment Issues in Autism: Trends

There are two conflicting trends at work in the effort by autistic people to enter the workplace: the status quo (which is still ascendant) is what Mark Romoser calls malemployment --- working a job you're both bad at and overqualified for --- while the countertrend is the rising level of general awareness about autism, and a proliferation of support systems geared toward helping autistic people adapt.

I don't think that part of the trend has yet had any significant effect on autistic adults; almost all of the publicity about autism concerns children, and most of the new supports available are educational in nature. Most of the supports available to people with disabilities seeking employment are also ill-suited to the needs of people with a lot of education and technical skills who just can't handle the social aspects of a job. But I think the tide is probably close to turning on this one. My generation of autistic people has grown up with autism being fairly well-known and (in some places more than others) a lot of support programs available. We are going to college in greater numbers than autistic people ever have before. That means more of us than before will try to enter the highly-skilled work force, and since the fields we're likeliest to choose (engineering, math, science, IT) are the same ones that graduate fewer students than the market needs (or so I keep reading), it's quite likely that if we ask for accommodations, potential employers will listen. No, I don't think it will happen by itself, but I do think the times are on our side.

There's also another trend I wonder about: do autistic women have a worse time of it finding skilled employment than autistic men? I found precious little in the literature about this, which doesn't surprise me, as autistic women and autistics with demonstrably high intelligence are both relatively neglected in research. I imagine the set containing both of those qualities is practically invisible in the journals.

There was one small indication of a trend in this direction in Venter et al's 1992 study of fifty-eight "high-functioning" autistic children who were followed up into adulthood: of the fourteen who had managed to secure employment on the regular job market, all were male, and of the three who had absolutely nothing to do with their time (no job, no supported work environment, no school or other training, no organized group activities), two were female. I can't find the full text of that article, so I cannot see how many girls were in the experimental group, but based on what I see in every other study of autism, it was probably a very small number. I do not consider this to be much in the way of empirical validation of my thesis; Venter doesn't report any sex differences in the abstract, and Howlin (in whose review this study is summarized) likewise doesn't infer anything from it. Only one study I encountered was large enough to have anything to say about sex differences, and that was Billstedt, Gillberg and Gillberg's 2005 prospective follow-up study of 120 autistic children diagnosed in the 1960s, '70s or '80s. They were specifically looking for, among other things, evidence to support the hypothesis that female autistics had worse outcomes than male autistics, which they didn't find. The people in their study population had such profound difficulties (only 10% of them had IQs near normal, most had aggressive or self-injurious behaviors and 78% had outcomes dubbed "poor" or "very poor") that the authors caution against applying their results to people with "high-functioning autism" or Asperger syndrome. Skeptical as I am of a meaningful distinction (beyond the definitional ones of IQ and language ability) between low- and high-functioning autism, or between autism and Asperger syndrome, it is mostly the latter two groups who will seek employment in the science and technology fields (at least, as long as working in those fields remains dependent on having the verbal skills necessary to pass an interview. That could change).

I would like to see a study done that compares female and male autistics of similar ability and education in their quest for suitable employment, though. I have a very strong suspicion that the women would fare poorly because the professions autistics tend to enter --- those that are detail-oriented, technical, involve problem-solving and working with things more than people --- are also heavily male-dominated. I would predict autistic women would be doubly shut out by their social ineptitude and by their femaleness, which in an all-male environment is another social disadvantage.

Employment Issues in Autism: A Look at the Literature

The anecdotes I shared in my last post give the impression that unemployment and underemployment are rampant in autism, even affecting autistics at the highest educational and skill levels. But how true is that across the board? My story, and the stories of six autism-conference attendees, can hardly be taken as representative. After all, it might be that our unusually bad experiences led us to become, respectively, an autism blogger and active members of the autism community!

To give my tentative thesis the weight of a generalization, I went digging through the KU Libraries' PsycINFO database for adult-outcome studies of autistics and Aspies. I lucked out in that my first two hits were literature reviews: Gena Barnhill's 2007 "Outcomes in Adults with Asperger Syndrome" and Patricia Howlin's 2000 "Outcome in Adult Life of More Able Individuals with Autism or Asperger Syndrome." Both articles identified trends among autistic adults to be either unemployed or employed far below their expected skill level, and to have difficulty holding onto jobs. Most of the studied autistics who worked, worked in specially supported environments, rather than in the (competitive) job market. Few lived independently, with most living either with parents or in residential care. The studies that tracked variables correlating with greater success in getting and keeping a job tended to agree that higher IQ (one study narrowed that down to verbal IQ) and more extensive social-support networks were the two greatest predictors of such success.

Two Swedish studies showed higher rates than the other (American and UK) studies of independent living, which the authors of one of the studies (Engstrom et al., 2003) attribute to the greater social supports available in Sweden, where there is generous government-funded healthcare. Even in these studies, though, most of the subjects were unemployed.

Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, the two simultaneous "discoverers" of autism, both tracked the outcomes of their former patients: Kanner found that, of 96 people, 11 were employed and one at college. Seven owned their own homes; all the others lived either with their parents or in institutions. Asperger's patients had a much wider range of outcomes; he remarked that their special interests often drove them to become experts in that field, which "eventually led to [their] social integration," most often in academia.

Barnhill and Howlin both tied the mostly-dismal job prospects (and maddening job-hunting process!) autistic people face to our elevated rates of anxiety and depression.

Barnhill:

Despite the potential to work, few persons with AS are in regular employment, and those who are employed find their employment levels disappointing and their occupational status low. Many times jobs end prematurely, often leading to low self-esteem and depression (Goode, Rutter and Howlin, 1994).

Howlin:

Although high-functioning people with autism or Asperger syndrome may succeed well as adults, such achievements rarely come easily. Few specialist support systems exist and most individuals have to rely heavily on the support of their families in finding jobs or accommodation. ... Above all, there may be constant pressure to 'fit in' with the demands of a society that fails to understand their needs or difficulties. Inability to meet these demands may lead to stress and anxiety and even psychiatric breakdown.

I will point out here that I do not entirely approve of the use of "high-functioning" and "low-functioning" to describe autistic people. I do not think those labels are terribly descriptive, as they refer just to IQ, and autistic people don't get the same kinds of results on IQ tests that NTs do. We do better on some tests than others, and vary wildly within a test (say, the Weschler), having peaks in one domain and valleys in another, when NTs taking the same test will have a constant score across domains. Also, many of us are completely nonverbal, which makes accurate intelligence testing difficult.

That aside, I think Howlin's point about autistics being effectively marooned within our families is a good one. I think it's a particular failing of American culture that we have eradicated all forms of social support except the nuclear family. Widespread mobility, suburbanization and car culture have broken up extended families and neighborhoods, and the fear of creeping communism has kept us from developing any kind of state-run social support systems!

Employment Issues in Autism: Finding and Holding a Job

I was going to do just one post on employment issues, but I found so many articles and so many different themes to explore that I should probably break it up into several posts. In these first two, I'm going to describe what the typical autistic or Aspie experiences when trying to work. This post will be anecdotal, interspersing my own story in with the stories of the six people interviewed in this 2004 article by Karen Hurlbutt and Lynne Chalmers.

Hurlbutt and Chalmers's subjects tended to be very well-educated (four of the six have college degrees, and one of those four has postgraduate degrees) and knowledgeable, but could not find employment at their own skill level. The jobs they could find they were not often able to keep for long, either.

I have a degree in political science and am trying to get a decent job with decent pay and benefits. I have cleaned cat cages, done janitorial work, office work at the VA, [been] a telemarketer, and I worked in a group home on the early morning shift.

I had to take whatever jobs I could get, whatever was offered --- usually menial jobs, like entry-level computer or fast food. I think the longest I ever held a job was 2 years ... I don't think I've worked longer than 3 months at any given place this past year.

I graduated from KU two years ago, with degrees in biochemistry and English lit. After graduating, I tried to find entry-level work in a lab somewhere in the Kansas City area. At first, I applied to an awful lot of places, and used two different job-placement companies, though I did not avail myself of any special services for people with disabilities. (At the time, I did not think I'd have to, since my grades were unusually high and I had a lot of lab classes and a good assortment of skills). In two years, I've had a grand total of four interviews. The vast majority of places won't even bother to call me. Of the four interviews, none has been successful. I consistently get good feedback about my educational background and skill level, and the one potential employer who did give me a reason for not hiring me said that they did not think I had the right kind of personality. I'm therefore convinced that interviews are my Achilles heel, which matches up with the experiences of Hurlbutt and Chalmers's subjects. They don't specifically mention interviews, but they do say it's the social, interactive aspects of jobs that tend to thwart them, and get them fired.

I have no trouble doing the work. I am always professional, correct, kind, etc. It doesn't help. They notice that I don't have the same emotions they do.

I think that jobs usually are 80% social (conversations, lunch, breaks, chit-chat) and 20% work. People with autism are the other way around!

A big problem I have with interviews (I have not yet had coworkers to interact with, so interviews are going to be the main windmill at which I tilt) is being able to answer the questions they ask me quickly. I often have to think long and hard about my answer, and some types of questions I never can answer at all. They often ask me to tell a story about a time I solved a problem or displayed initiative or something, and I always come up short. My memory isn't, as most people's is, I guess, The Continuing Story of Me so much as it is a disjointed collection of vivid snapshots, mostly of sensory impressions, like shapes and colors. I can have prodigious recall for details, but don't ask me to produce a narrative. This makes it hard, as you can probably imagine, to create any kind of "sell" for myself when I don't walk around with a self-concept stored in my head at all times. At any given moment, probably 90% of my processing power is devoted to noticing and remembering visual (and auditory) details; attempting to do something unrelated at the same time takes a lot of time and a huge effort. But because no job interviewer ever asks you to name, say, ten things in the room that tell you what time of day it is, or to dead-reckon how far it is in a straight line from where you're sitting to the door, no job interviewer ever sees how much my brain is able to do! They probably think I'm stoned, because all they see is my passive face as I'm trying to push back the tidal wave of irrelevant mental activity and answer their question.

"What's It Like to Be You?"

This blog kind of ranges all over the place in terms of topic --- it's a feminist blog one day, a book blog another day and an autism blog yet another day. Sometimes the different areas of emphasis are able to intersect, like when I focus on the portrayal of autism in literature, or on literary or folkloric tropes that characterize the media coverage of autism, or on the female experience of autism and media and professional neglect thereof. I think it's less successful when, as has happened recently, a single topic (say, feminism) starts to overshadow the others in terms of how often I post on it. So here's an attempt to steer the blog back toward a balance between its several themes.

I think one of the most important things to happen to the public discourse on autism has been the emergence of adult autistics who tell their own stories. When we come forward with our own experiences, it overrides the old conception of autism as the absence of meaningful experience. Ideas of "empty fortresses" or "children under glass" have less power when brought into competition with our own memories of the thoughts and feelings we had but failed to communicate to anyone else. Making our stories public humanizes us by replacing the old views of autism that denied our humanity.

I've been leaking small details of my personal life here and there on this blog, because that's how this stuff comes to me: in little epiphanies and fragments of memory. Today I'm not so much going to try to tell The Story of Me so much as just give a general impression of what it's like to walk around inside this skin, and to perceive with these senses. So, here goes:

Temple Grandin famously described her experiences navigating the NT social world as being like those of "an anthropologist on Mars." That rings true to me, as far as it goes, but there's another dimension that I don't think it touches. I think of myself more as being like Isaac Newton trapped in Faerie --- it captures the same sense of bewilderment and out-of-placeness as Grandin's anthropologist, but putting him in Faerie conveys better the vividness of sense-impressions that pervades my life. It's like the world is at once hyper-real and unreal, because while my heightened senses throw the immediate physical enviroment into sharp relief, I also feel like I never get past the surfaces of things. There are shapes, and colors, and sounds, but too often they come at me too fast for me to assign them any meaning. It's kind of like living in an Impressionist painting that way. Both of these analogies --- Faerie Land and Impressionist artwork --- connote great beauty as well as unreality, and that's deliberate. I don't know if Grandin meant to signify by her choice of Mars as the locale for her displaced anthropologist that her world is barren (I doubt she did, based on what she wrote in Animals in Translation), but that is one of the connotations Mars has, which is another reason her analogy isn't quite right for me. My world has always been full of life, and full of beauty, not so much inscrutable or inaccessible as much as just too plentiful for me ever to take it all in.

I don't mean to imply that I live in some kind of sensory Eden, though. There's a lot I can't tolerate --- a lot of sounds are too jarring or sharp, and for most of my life you could just forget about touching me. The slightest contact would burn my skin like acid. So I guess the concept of beauty I'm aiming for isn't so much the Hallmark, rose-garden kind of tame beauty but the wild, terrible beauty that gives you a sense of the otherworldly. (This is how I imagine Faerie to look; I think Susanna Clarke describes it well in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell).

On Joss Whedon's Feminist (and Not-So-Feminist) Discourse

I am a serious Joss Whedon fan. Just about anything that man does ("Buffy", "Angel", "Firefly", Serenity, Astonishing X-Men) ends up being something I watch (or read) over and over again. His characters continually amaze me with their depth, and the unpredictable turns their development takes. So when I came across these three posts by Allecto, I read them with great interest. I decided to list all the things I could think of in all of Whedon's oeuvre that stuck out as particularly feminist or antifeminist.

So, here goes:

The Good

• 
  a plethora of strong, distinctive female characters evenly distributed along the moral spectrum (Lilah, Faith, Buffy, Willow, Cordelia, Fred, Dawn, Zoe, Inara, Nandi, Patience, River, Kaylee, Tara, Gwen, Justine, Saffron, Agent Brand...)
  
• the ending of "Buffy," when the Potential Slayers are all made into Slayers and brought together. Sisterhood is powerful!
• Buffy confronting the three old men who created the First Slayer
• the existence of female Watchers
• the Faith/Angel mentoring relationship
• Xander: supportive (male) lieutenant/best friend of (female) Hero. How often does that happen?
• the mature Kitty Pryde

The Bad

• the tendency of characters in "Buffy" and "Angel" to suffer Horrible Consequences for having sex/falling in love (Angel becoming evil, Cordelia getting impaled after discovering Willow and Xander together, Tara getting killed, Willow turning into Warren)
• in both love triangles in "Angel" --- Connor/Cordelia/Angel and Gunn/Fred/Wesley --- the female is more of a love object/catalyst for dramatic male-male feuding than an agent in her own right; woman-as-prize seems to be rearing its ugly head here
• too many female characters in comas!
• Willow using mind-controlling magic on Tara
• glorification of prostitution in "Firefly"
• Cordelia is excessively punished in Season 1 of "Angel" for having been a bitch in "Buffy." Truly evil (male) characters were allowed to find redemption with a lot less Character-Building Hard Luck than she was put through just for being mildly irritating.
• Zoe doesn't seem to have a lot of solidarity for other women, with the exception of Kaylee. She's a strong woman, but entirely male-identified.
• Mal seems to have zero respect for Inara's boundaries, and he insults her all the time. He only comes to her defense when other men impinge on his sole right to insult her (see "Shindig")!
• whose idea was it for Cordelia to be mystically impregnated with some horrible demonspawn twice in the same series? Isn't once enough?
  

The Ugly

• 
  Darla.
• Spike's attempted rape of Buffy
• Saffron and Eve --- both strike me as archetypal woman-hating images. Woman the Deceiver, who uses her wiles to charm the men she's simultaneously trying to ruin. (Props to Allecto for helping me realize this about Saffron!)
• Angel's harrassment of Lilah in Season 1. Yeah, she's evil, she works for Wolfram & Hart, but his treatment of her is extremely creepy and reminiscent of the way male stalkers and abusers treat non-evil women all the time: choking her, lying in wait for her in parking lots, "visiting" her uninvited at work...
• Wesley keeping Justine in his closet. Yuck!
  

So, given this cursory roundup, we can see that Joss has a very divided record in terms of creating truly feminist works of art. I do not believe, as Allecto does, that Joss is a misogynist --- I think he is definitely not one, and I think he does try to be feminist. He could probably stand to do quite a bit more reading of feminist literature, as he seems genuinely not to get a bunch of stuff. And, ultimately, he has done the young feminists of the world a great service by giving them this wealth of female characters, even if many of them are subjected to some seriously retrograde bullshit from both the plot and the male characters around them. I'm not just saying that because I'm a fan. It's hugely important to have a wide range of available female characters so that (ideally) every girl can point to one like herself. Boys have always had a veritable smorgasbord of heroes to choose from; I'd like to see as vast an array of heroines as well.

(Also, for whatever reason I can't bullet the first bullet point on any of these lists. The gods of Blogger really don't want me to write this post, evidently ...)

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.