Smol Improved Megalodon

Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth (Andrew Loomis, 1943)

Drawing Nature (Stanley Maltzman, 1995)

The Animator’s Survival Kit (Richard Williams, 2001)

Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers (Marcos Mateu-Mestre, 2010)

Since I started to talk about this I’ve gotten literally dozens and dozens of messages and asks from autistic girls and women who feel alienated from feminism due to things related to their autism. So I’m gathering this message into a call to action:

Conversations about makeup culture and about performing femininity need to take into account that autistic women often can’t fully “present” in a feminine manner due to sensory issues and the difficulty of understanding social rules about these things. We don’t make an active choice to present “GNC,” people will often read our femininity as wrong or off no matter what we do. We often have experienced a lot of coercion and social pressure related to makeup and feminine dress and behavior, and it’s frustrating to hear it discussed as if this doesn’t happen.

Many, many autistic women feel more comfortable in male-dominated social groups, and there are real reasons for this. It’s been extensively discussed how women are socialized to be more sensitive to others and less direct in expressing disagreement and dislike. This makes being autistic among women often very difficult. The social rules of interacting tend to be more subtle and complex among women, and interaction between women tends to have more social ritual, in my experience.

Virtually every autistic women has been hurt by other women because of things related to her autism!!! Many of us have had traumatic experiences being bullied as children or teenagers by other girls. Discussing the “sisterhood” we supposedly have while basically saying that female bullies are a made up patriarchal trope and that oppressive and harmful standards for women are only enforced by men comes off as REALLY tone deaf to us because many of us are messed up well into adulthood from the things other women did to us.

Making an active choice not to perform femininity for Feminism reasons and being chronically unable to demonstrate that you can are wildly different things in how other women respond. No matter how supportive female social groups are of people rejecting “femininity,” acceptance among them (read: being thought of as Normal) often involves showing that you can perform femininity. Some level of gender conformity is a part of being read as “normal.”

Please stop talking about those annoying men who are obsessed with some war in history or with their music or something and how cringy they are. All we can see in it is how similar we are. I’ve had similar super niche special interests. (One was Lewis and Clark.) In general stop making nasty jokes about men who are weird or socially awkward. They really, really don’t come off like they’re truly about them being men.

if you make fun of men for autistic traits, you’re showing you don’t support autistics, the end.

Stop having the face of internalized misogyny be a girl with few or no female friends, who isn’t overtly feminine, and who thinks she’s “not like other girls.” This stereotype is so obviously autistic/neurodivergent-coded it makes my eyes bleed, and it makes me so uncomfortable when “not like other girls” girl is openly portrayed as wrong or irrational for not embracing the friendship of other girls, when 99% of the time in real life she was abused, mistreated and rendered a social outcast by them in the first place. Portraying her as the enemy and full of superiority and hatred feels so insidious when many of us were that girl and would have burned our eyeballs out to have female friendships. That comic going around where “Not Like Other Girls” girl falls in among a group of girls she used to disdain and finds friendship there makes my heart hurt and I hate that what we’re supposed to get out of it is that she was wrong about the “other girls.” I can’t describe how wonderful it would have been to be accepted like the girl in the comic is.

You’ve got to understand the amount of anger a lot of us still have over this stuff. It wasn’t a choice! A lot of our anger comes from how desperately we wanted those female relationships when we were younger!

For every post you make urging girls to overcome their “internalized misogyny,” and surround themselves with other women, you have to make a post about how girls bullying other girls is real, is abuse, and should not be tolerated. that’s the rule now.

The ableism of women hurts other women. Get rid of the ableism first, and THEN talk about “sisterhood.”

Supporting autistic girls isn’t just reblogging a post that says “support autistic girls,” it’s also learning about autism and being accepting of autistic qualities

Btw, saying autistic trans people only think they’re trans because they’re autistic is messed up. We’re not incapable of understanding our own identity and existence due to being autistic. Your take on how autistic girls are made to think they’re trans because of being gender nonconforming isn’t as helpful as you think it is, you’re just making your transphobia ableist. Trans autistic women are women and trans autistic men are men.

@autistic girls: your abuse was real and it shouldn’t have happened, and you didn’t deserve it. You’re not alone in feeling alienated and rejected by feminism. I’ve gotten more messages about my posts on this subject than about ANYTHING else I’ve ever posted. I hope we can make feminism better for autistic women. I love y’all and things will get better.

I didn’t have many female friends growing up because not many girls were willing to be friendly with me.  Because I was “weird”.  Because I “didn’t act right”.  Because I was “interested in weird things”.  Because I made social mistakes on a regular basis, put my foot in my mouth, and didn’t know what to do in unexpected social situations.  Or in other words, because I was autistic.  I wasn’t actually diagnosed until last year, at the age of fifty.  But I’ve been autistic all my life, and I’ve been judged negatively for being autistic all my life.

It’s not that “I think I’m not like the other girls”.  It’s that I KNOW I’m not like the other girls; the other girls told me so.  And the connotations of “not being like the other girls” have nothing to do with superiority and exclusiveness there.  Instead, they’re about being broken, damaged, incorrect, inferior.  Not worthy of being around the other girls, in fact.