had somewhat of a breakthrough today about autism and gender relations and realized that interactions with men feel lower stakes to me because men and women are so often talked about as being essentially different species that if I do anything weird they’ll just chalk it up to women being incomprehensible or stupid or they didn’t respect me anyways. It’s like going to an interview for a job you won’t get for the practice. Whereas if you do something wrong around women they know immediately and consider you subhuman where they might not have before. So their approval means more and their rejection feels worse
also on a practical level with how gender segregated our society is you can still have an extremely rich life with little to no contact with men but I don’t think it’s possible to live as a woman without social contact with other women. In terms of care and protection and social needs being met. It’s very normal for women to have exclusively female friends and be closer to their mothers than fathers regardless of whether or not they date men at all. Even a lot of straight women have basically no contact with men socially outside of dating. Whereas if you’re a woman who doesn’t have strong ties to other women you’re extremely vulnerable in this world. I think it is genuinely more dangerous to be unpalatable to women than men. But also that’s my perspective as a queer woman whose relationship to gender is fairly normative outside of the gay stuff and can largely go unnoticed in large groups of women. I would be curious what other people’s take on this all is
You’re experience as an autistic woman posts are really grabbing me. I don’t relate to this, but I don’t not relate to them…
Years ago I was at a support group for autistic adults complaining about my job in an office that I would say was hostile, but I’m sure I’d struggle to get anyone else there to say. At some point the moderator of the group made a comment about me being harsher on women than men and I was shocked. Then I realized that it was kind of off base because I minimized interacting with the men in my office. (Specifically, I mostly gave up on them because of their political beliefs. But, in general, some barely conscious part of me has given up on men as a class, for anything.) The moderator, who is man, noticed that I named women frequently, but didn’t notice why I didn’t name men as frequently or ask why. (Later on, after I left this job and the institution that it was part of, he took a job in a different department there. It only lasted a year and part of me wants to be like, “did you think my problems there were just a me thing?”)
I don’t think my dismissal of men is good for me. It probably has cut me off from meeting people whose company I could enjoy. It’s also been really limiting on my networking potential. And it does make me blame women more for things that should be spread around more evenly. In that office it was things the men said that made things hostile, but I was complaining about the people that I interacted with who were mostly women. That’s thorny..,
But being conscious of it and having the motivation to actually change it are two different things.
