I’ve been talking about gender for the last few posts and how I don’t get it. Now, I want to get more broad (heh) in general because that’s how I feel about so many things.
A few years ago, I started chatting with someone in a Discord I’m in out of the main forums. In private messages, in other words. She and I have a lot in common, and we clicked once we started DMing each other.
She and I got to talking about neurodivergency because I had struggled with fitting in all my life. After we messaged back and forth for a length of time, she asked if I had ever thought that I might be autistic. That never occurred to me because I had the stereotypical image of autism in my mind. My brother? Yeah, he was on the spectrum. Me? Hell, no!
It was only after talking with her and simultanuously watching a few videos on autism that I slowly realized the stereotypes weren’t right. Or rather, they only depicted a very narrow kind of autism, which, not coincidentally, centered on young white boys.
(Lengthy rant on sexism in health issues inserted here.)
The biggest thing that shocked me to learn was that it’s not true that autistic people are not empathetic/don’t feel emotions. I mean, there are autistic people like this, true (like my brother), but there are also plenty of autistic people who feel too much emotions. Or, they feel other people’s emotions, but don’t know what to do with them or misinterpret what those emotions are.
There’s a saying when it comes to autism–if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. There are throughlines and shared traits, yes, but every autistic person is diferent. In my case, I had to deconstruct the image of a person with autism because it was getting in the way.
There are some common traits, of course, such as hyperfocus on certain interests, stimming, and uncomfortableness in social situations, to name a few. The problem is that for non-male people (women and others), those traits are liable to get overlooked, chalked up to something else like anxiety, or used against said people more harshly than they are against autistic men (which is already harsh).
How often do you now hear about men acting badly, “Oh, maybe he’s on the spectrum” as a way of excusing his appalling behavior? And yet, you don’t hear it about women and other non-male people hardly at all if ever. They don’t get the same grace and/or amused tolerance.
Side note: By the way, you want to know if someone is acting badly on purpose or if he’s ignorant about it? Look to see if he’s acting the same way with people who have power over him or with men in general. If he’s trulyy autistic, then he’ll be awkward around everyone–not just grossly so around the women he wants to fuck.
I did my damn best to unmask, but it was so hard. It’s like second nature to me now. It’s one reason I much prefer being alone. I can let my mask drop and just be me.
Side note II: I really hate that ‘bringing your whole self’ (to work) has been bastardized and mangled beyond recognition. I mean, that’s how everything works on the internet, but it’s not meant to say that you don’t have to be civil in public. It’s meant to be that you shouldn’t have to mask all the time or all the way when you’re at work. It means that maybe just maybe the majority can chill the fuck out a bit about ‘professionalism’ and disregard things that don’t really matter.
I remember that there was a question about wearing bras at work (on the Ask A Manager blog). Now, I have to qualify and clarify that most of the readers would self-identify as Democratic (with a capital D) women. Most are office workers and firmly upper middle class. Probably skews older, too. Like forites and over.
Imagine my surprise when so many of them were vehemently anti-no-bra at work. And they couldn’t really articulate why other than it wasn’t professional. I mentioned that I had stopped wearing a bra on the daily during the pandemic, and I was never going back. I said I worked for myself, but if I were in an office, I would quit if I had to wear a bra.
Someone said that it was a privileged position to take, and I said that if it was, at least I would be using that privilege for good because I could afford to speak up. I considered it my duty for those who weren’t as able to speak up.
I have to say, I hate it when people say check your privilege or just state something is a privilege and drop it there. We all have privilege in some way, and there’s no use in just noting it or letting it drown in guilt. The best thing to do when you realize that you have privilege is to use it for good.
Anyway. My haatred of bras is in a large part a sensory thing. I hate how confining and restrictive they are. I feel like I can’t breathe in them. Once, my mother pushed me to get a professional ftting. The fitter insisted that the bra had to be four sizes smaller than what I usually wore because something something barbaric cruelty, and I literally started crying because it was so uncomfortable.
Once I took that bra off (during the pandemic) and spent weeks without it, yeah, I was done. I did what I normally did–I researched the downsides to not wearing a bra (tangible, concrete downsides, I mean, not amorphous ones like ‘unprofessional’ and ‘doesn’t look right’), and I could not find any. I decided it was a social construct, and I vowed never to wear one again. That was probably two or three years ago, and I have never felt better about my boobs.
I don’t understand why something like that causes such furor amongst some of the commenters. But I’m not going to get into that now. I will write more about it tomorrow.