6:20am February 3, 2015

Autism and sex drive

ACW: Sex, masturbation, ableism around disability and sexuality, disability and sexuality, developmental disability and sexuality, sex drive, autism, autism and sexuality. Contains some discussion of sex ed for DD people that clearly doesn’t include trans and intersex people (but the materials are still among the best out there :-/ ).

A lot has been written about this. I just want to tell a story.

Several times, I (along with others) stayed with a mother and her autisic teenage child.

Eventually, you’d hear exuberant squealing noises. coming from the direction of the shower.

At which point, someone would always ask, “What is that?”

The mother would roll her eyes – I think she got that question a lot from houseguests.

And she’d say, “He’s a teenage boy. He’s in the shower. What do you think is going on?”

And there’d be a few moments of silence, and then an “Ohhhhhhh,” and a fair bit of embarrassment and blushing.

The fact is that most autistic people over a certain age have a sex drive. And many autistic people who either struggle to form certain concepts, or who have severe movement disorders, end up masturbating in public and other situations that are truly inappropriate, even dangerous, in this culture.

This particular boy was lucky enough to have parents to teach him about privacy, the cognitive skills to understand it, and (just barely, I suspect) the motor skills.

Many other autistic and DD people, especially boys, and somehow I’m willing to be autistic boys of color even more especially, get in trouble with the law for masturbating in public. Meanwhile many group homes and other developmental disability institutions refuse to allow any masturbation or sex, or indeed any privacy at all. Which leads to even more problems, because eventually the sex drive becomes so overpowering that even people who know about privacy and modesty are going to whip it out in public, for lack of anywhere else to safely whip it out, by their reasoning.

By the way, speaking of masturbation and developmental disabilities, if you’re teaching sex ed to DD people, you could do worse than to order some of Dave Hingsburger videos on the topic of safe sex and masturbation. I took a sex and relationships class for DD people and they showed us Finger Tips: A Guide for Teaching About Female Masturbation and Hand Made Love: A Guide for Teaching about Male Masturbation. These videos include tasteful but definitely NSFW (unless your work is teaching special ed) images of people masturbating while explaining what they are doing physically, what they are thinking, and what they’re feeling. They make sure to emphasize the need for privacy before you masturbate. As you can see from the titles, by “female” and “male” they’re referring to sex, not gender, and they don’t get at all into trans or intersex issues. (Although I did get referred to an LGBT group for DD people, I was too sick at the time to attend regularly.) The same company has a video out called Under Cover Dick: A Guide to Teaching about Condom Use Through Video and Understanding.

(And yes. Prety much everything Diverse City Press puts out, book or DVD, has a terrible pun in its title. The DVDs are super-expensive (by my standards anyway) because it’s presumed that organizations, rather than individual people, will buy them. I really want a copy of The Whole Truth: An Abuse Prevention Programme for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities, but at $180 it ain’t happening.

Meanwhile, among books about autism and sexuality… one of them I once found unreadable (I used to have huge trouble reading Wendy Lawson’s writing style) but it was probably by far the better of the two books I knew about at the time. The other one, the less said, the better. The author devotes one chapter to “The Road Less Traveled”, which includes homosexuality, drug abuse, and cults, and strongly discourages people from being gay, even saying they’d hate it their child turned out to be gay. They also said that making gayness into “a crusade” is wrong, and when I wrote a review to the effect of “WTF people, being gay isn’t like drug abuse or joining a cult,” the author replied to my review saying that i was clearly one of those people who made gayness into a crusade and therefore shouldn’t be listened to. Which sucked, because a lot of the rest ofthe book was easy to read and had a lot of useful information. (Although it also had a lot of gender stereotyping going on.)

The first book is called sex, sexuaity & the Autism Spectrum. I want to try reading it again now that I have an easier time reading her work. (Could it be that at long last, my receptive language processing is making progress again? I’ve noticed changes in expressive ability too, namely that – posts like this excepted – I’m getting better at being concise.

I put some of the blame on my recent attempts to get into short, restricted poetry such as haiku, tanka, and sonnet, because I feel like the restrictions force me to choose words more carefully. It also forces me to be concise. My writing used to be so concise that writing teachers would try and force me to “pad out” my writing even if I had nothing to add. This was also quite a while before I had the capacity to Nowadays, I’m long-winded and have as much trouble changing that as I do changing the other way round. But I think the poetry is helping. Even when my posts aren’t concise I’ve been able to do more TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) summaries at the ends of posts, and also to put extra or tangential information in footnotes under a cut where people don’t have to see it if they don’t want to.

I really am committed to making my writing more accessible – at this stage I can write things I’m incapable of reading – proofreading can take weeks where every time I see an error I fix it. The joys of having better expressive than receptive language. But I’m working on it. Because being concise means a lot to me right now. Especially after reading my father’s memoirs – he had no editor, no previous writing experience, and in his seventies he just up and wrote a memoir with not a single word too many or too few, complete with photographic and comical hand-drawn illustrations. One day I want to write as well as my father does.

Anyway, Wendy Lawson is a lesbian, so there’s no homophobic crap in her book. It’s just hard to read. At least for me. I’ll try again now that my reading comprehension is increasing. Since I couldn’t read it well, I don’t know everything that’s in it, I just remembered feeling far safer reading it as a gay person even though I didn’t understand even half of it.

The second book I mentioned was Autism-Asperger’s and Sexuality: Puberty and Beyond by Jerry and Mary Newport. This is a book with some very good points and very bad points. So be aware there’s more than just homophobia to watch out for, but also be aware they did say a lot of things that made sense, and were far easier for me to read. I actually think their book Mozart and the Whale did a much better job at portraying sexual relationships between autistic people than their book deliberately written on sexuality does. But it may be comparing apples and oranges (which are both fruit, so I never understood that saying). Because Mozart and the Whale is a joint-written autobiography by the two of them, starting in childhood before they met and continuing through their marriage, divorce, and remarriage. And Autism-Asperger’s and Sexuality is a more general book that deals with things beyond their direct experience. (I should note that the “Road Less Traveled” chapter is something where one or both of them has experience of everything they discuss and condemn… except that Jerry, who seems to be the one who wrote the bits about homosexuality, has never experienced being gay. I can’t remember if Mary was bi or straight, or whether she’d had gay sexual or romantic experiences before (she had in the movie, but the movie was far from true to real life and I remember Jerry expressing concern that more literal-minded autistic peole would assume that everything in the movie wss taken directly from real life.

But… yeah.

I wish there was a book with the strengths of both:

Several co-authors, including LGBT people and straight people and asexual (aromantic or otherwise) or demisexual people.
Easy-to-read format, well-edited so that autistic people with reading comprehension problems stand more than a snowball’s chance in hell of reading it. (I don’t know if I’m alone in finding some authors really hard to read – Wendy Lawson and Liane Holliday Willey have historically been that way for me.
Respectful treatment of LGBT issues
Not forcing gender roles on people .
Etc.

Both books have their good and bad points, though. I think there are more books out on the topic now too, but not sure how many were written by disabled people, let alone autistic or otherwise DD. Let me know if you hear of any.good books by and for autistic people on sexuality and romance and relationships.