Let’s talk more about safer spaces. In yesterday’s post, I talked about reasons why it’s necessary to clearly spell out acceptable behavior in a group situation. I also mused about how people protested about it and about enthusiastic consent because….? Well, with the latter, they said it would take the spontaneity out of sex (ummmmmmm), and in the case of the former, I think it falls under the “people should just know this” umbrella.
Side note: It’s tiring. Being told that this or that is just something people should intuit. And as much as normies like to talk about how anyone can learn soft/social skills, it really isn’t as easy as that. And that’s part of ableism. It doesn’t help that it’s been so indoctrinated in people, many neurodivergent people feel the need to make themselves smaller, mask harder, and apologize for being different.
It’s not uncommon, by the way, for minorities to do this. Or to be one of the good ones. I have seen it time and time again, and I have been one to do this as well. When I was in college, I mostly hung out with guys. It really wasn’t a ‘I want to be the cool chick’ thing, but it ended up being that. In order to hang with the guys, I had to (or at least felt like I had to) rag on the women they did. I was well aware that my status as ‘cool girl’ was hanging by a thread that could be snipped at any time.
It’s hard. The world is made for the normies. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. So while we’re worknig to change that, we also have to teach minorities how to cope and funciton in the real world.
I’ve talked about the double empathy problem, but I want to talk about it again. Before autism was really a thing, anyone who was autistic was pretty much expected to conform to normal society. Parents would basically force their autistic children to behave in a way that was deemed normal. If that wasn’t possible, then it was getting as close as possible.
Oftentimes, this was done through abusve/coercion. Be it emotional or physicar or both. In my case, it was a heavy and constant dose of emotional manipulation–or maybe it’s more accuarate to say I was emotionally beaten down daily until I just crumbled.
I was told I was too sensitive, that I laughed too loudly, that I could not read while waiting for an event to start (Taiwanese event. Always started at least forty-five minutes late),and that I could not show any emotions other than happiness and gratitude. I know the latter is not an emotion, but it’s close enough.