10:30pm May 31, 2014

alliecat-person-ashkenazi-autie-i-really

ashkenazi-autie:

I really think we need to have a discussion on how male privilege exists within the autism community and how autistic men absorb the misogynistic values of society at the expense of women – especially autistic women – but I am not sure how to go about…

Being autistic is no excuse at all, but I’ve noticed for years now something about how being autistic can make misogyny more obvious. My autistic brother had (and taught me, and made me absorb into myself) a lot of misogynistic ideas, and later when I came into the autistic community I met a lot of autistic men who were like clones of him. A lot of the in-person support groups had trouble keeping women (used as a shorthand here for anyone presumed female) around because the men treated the women like sex objects more often than not. It was very stressful to be there, and the guys couldn’t even see the problem. I’ve been followed around autism conferences by guys who’d say things like “I wish you weren’t gay” over and over and over as if that would change things. And I definitely have been harassed more by autistic men than by nonautistic men.

I don’t think autistic men are more misogynistic. I think their misogyny is just more out in the open for the world to see, just like other things about autistic people. Nonautistic men know how to hide it better. But it remains that autistic men can really turn misogyny up to eleven at times.

My brother was a really good example. He basically hunted women. Like he’d just go out looking for women. He did a lot of personals ads and things like that, he didn’t drink so the bar scene didn’t work. And when he couldn’t have the women he wanted, he took out all his anger at the world by molesting me (I was 14 years younger than him, at 11 years old when the molestation started). But the frotteurism was the least of the damage he did. The most damage he did, was by forcibly trying to convince me that (a) I was female and (b) being female meant a whole lot of ugly messed-up things that he’d learned from other guys and his dates and porn movies and etc. Being genderless did not protect me at all from absorbing his misogyny wholesale.

I’ve been hesitant to talk about that, because that treads on another stereotype, that developmentally disabled men should be locked up so they don’t sexually abuse their sisters. The stereotype runs that DD men have adult sexual urges in a child’s body and don’t know where to turn, so they turn to their sisters, and this is why you should lock up your DD boy before he hits puberty. I’ve also been hesitant to talk about it because my family has at times made it clear to me that I should be protecting his reputation even though I’m the victim in this story. (I’ve made it clear that this is a part of my life, that this is something that happened to me, and that if he didn’t want me to talk about it, he shouldn’t have spent five years molesting me. I have no particular desire for him to be punished, because he has reformed, but I’m not going to live like this is some shameful secret that I’m not allowed to discuss.)

Anyway I see what happened to me in the context of misogyny, and in the context of the way autistic men sometimes absorb misogyny in a very direct way, that gets expressed more directly than it does in nonautistic men. My brother, at the times, was fiercely misogynistic, his hatred of women shone through in every single action he did, and he clearly resented all women, and included me in the category of women regardless of my actual gender. His hatred of women hurt me worse than the frotteurism. His indoctrination of me into his hatred of women hurt me worse than anything else he did. And it was, basically, an indoctrination, taking place over the five years he was molesting me. Telling me stories, telling me what women were, telling me who women were, telling me what being a woman meant, telling me how to act as a (presumed) woman. It’s taken ages to even begin to detangle the mess he started there.

And I do see something important there: What happens when misogyny combines with a specific male autistic mindset. I hate to say it, because I know that people will twist it into autistic men being a threat. I know it will affect autistic men of color, because men of color are already considered a threat. And yet autistic men in general do seem to sometimes absorb misogyny in a very particular, peculiar way that I can’t explain or describe but is very real. Ask any woman, or anyone presumed to be a woman, or nonbinary person, who has dealt with autistic men on the subject of women for a long time, and there will be a blatantness to the misogyny that isn’t always so blatant when it’s nonautistic men. It’s like it’s closer to the surface, and may go down deeper, I don’t know. And it ties into “I am a social failure and I can blame women for this fact” somehow. It’s usually tied in with a mindset that is very angry, hateful, and resentful about social stuff, and also insecure.

And it makes me very uneasy. It’s made me uneasy for years. I think murder is not going to be the outcome pretty much ever, and that’s a dangerous line of thinking to go down. But other things? Absolutely. I wish there was a way to talk about this, in-community, where it wasn’t going to turn into some horrible stereotype in people’s minds. Because it’s real, and it needs to be talked about. I know I’ve paid the price for a kind of misogyny that is not uncommon.